 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Hey, Dave. Hey, Lisa. Good to work with you. Good to work with you too. Day two of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technology World 2019 from Las Vegas. And as John Ferrier said yesterday with you guys that you're open, this is a cube canon of content. We've got two sets, three days of coverage. Excited to welcome Deloitte back to the program. But a couple of new guys from Deloitte joining us. We have Bob Black, Dell Technologies Global Alliance Lead and Principal from Deloitte. Bob, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having us. Both of you. And Louise Benveninas, VP of Cloud Business Development at Deloitte. Thanks so much for joining us, Louise. Welcome. Thank you both. So guys, yesterday's keynote was fantastic. It really started with this electric. And I think that started with the fact that Michael Dell came out to Queen Music, which I loved. But also today, Jeff Clark shot out of a cannon as well. One of the things that he talked about was the Dell Technologies five key imperatives for IT modernization. One of them being hybrid cloud strategy for multi-cloud journey. We've been talking about multi-cloud for a long time. It's a big theme here. We're going to get into that with you guys and specifically get the rise of hybrid cloud. But before we get into that, Bob, let's start with you. Kind of set the stage about your tenure at Deloitte. You are an industry veteran. So tell us a little bit about your expertise and kind of some of your thoughts on some of the things you've heard the last two days. Sure. Well, thanks a lot for having us. So again, my name is Bob Black. I'm the Global Lead Alliance Partner for Dell Tech for Deloitte. I've been with the firm for about a little less than three years now. I actually came to the firm because my former employee really neglected to focus a lot on infrastructure and hybrid cloud. So when I saw this as an opportunity to come to Deloitte and really fashion what that should look like at the marketplace. And so I think as serving in this role, we've been able to really drive a lot of what that hybrid cloud messaging throughout Deloitte and for a lot of our customers. And Luis, tell us a little bit about your background. Well, thank you. I've been with the firm now for about two years. I actually came in via an acquisition of a company called Day One Solutions where we helped kind of provide a shot in the arm into our overall cloud go to market. But my experience is I've worked at cloud providers like AWS. I've worked with the technology OEMs as well. So I've seen this space change for quite some time. So this is the second Dell Technologies world. Lots of news yesterday, this whole journey, a lot of collaboration yesterday as well between really kind of VMware as a linchpin of driving a lot of what Dell Technologies is doing. We saw Microsoft on stage. Everything is about collaborating, listening to the customer and enabling customers to be successful in this challenging but very true multi-cloud world. Talk about some of the announcements Bob will start with you and some of the things that you're hearing and how Deloitte can help Dell Technologies customers with a successful hybrid cloud strategy. What are some of the trends you're seeing and hearing? Well, yeah, so thank you. So I mean, some of the announcements yesterday were very fascinating. And one of the things that we have been seeing in the marketplace is a lot of our clients are restarting to repatriate their applications back from public cloud, back to on-premises. And that's not to say anything bad about public cloud, but what we're seeing is a lot of our clients have thousands or if not tens of thousands of applications in a legacy portfolio that simply are not conducive for public cloud. And when there was a shift out to public cloud, I think that a lot of our clients adopted this lift and shift or re-hosting type of methodology. And most of our clients really didn't find the value in there that they thought they were going to get. They weren't able to modernize the application. They weren't saving any money. They had dual IT, fractured operations. And so because of that reason, we're starting to see a lot of that repatriation back on-premises. And I think a lot of our clients see that as somewhat of a failure, but I think what we see this is an opportunity. Public cloud is a great tool in the toolbox. And when it's incorporated with, as you heard here up on the stage yesterday, the data center, other areas on-premises and the edge, you can really put together a cohesive hybrid cloud strategy and that's what's really going to drive value for our clients. So we've worked successfully with a number of clients on things like VMC and AWS and yesterday's announcement on VMware and Microsoft and now, of course, Dell Cloud. I think it's only going to accelerate the adoption of those technologies and solutions to help our clients adopt a hybrid multi-cloud strategy. Yeah, I'll add to that. I think it's kind of an evolution really of our industry. If you go back to the 10 years of history of theCUBE, look at how much has changed and software-defined OEMs, abstracting the OS or application away from the hard work component, that's been happening for some time. And you're now starting to see the other side of that from the public cloud moving to on-premises as well. So really the hybrid definition, if it's seamless data and applications across environments, we're just continuing to move to that model. And there's some ironies that I want to come back to, but I want to ask you, Bob, you said some of your clients feel like it was a failure. Do you feel like it was an edict from up on high, go to the cloud, and they really didn't have a clear strategy to affect the operating model and that's why they ended up where they are or were there other factors? I think so. We kind of dub it as someone times as a management by InFlight Magazine, if you will, right? You know, I remember talking to a client and she told me that she had to move all her storage out to cloud. And when we asked her why, she said, well, that's what everybody else is doing. I assume I have to do the same thing, right? So I look, you know, we're not here to disparage anything in the public cloud. It is a great, you know, tool for a lot of our clients. It's just making sure that we have that integration, that seamless integration of applications and data between, you know, both on-premises and cloud. And that really starts with a really well thought out strategy. It actually starts out even before that with trying to understand your applications. Many of our clients, I mean, the application, and this is hard for me saying this as an infrastructure guy, right? But the application should drive the placement, right? And I think a lot of our clients struggle with what makes up their application portfolio, right? What are the attributes that make up the application that will help determine the placement of those applications themselves? Well, that's why, Luis, I mean, I'm interested in how Deloitte looks at infrastructure. It goes, Bob, you were saying your previous firm really wasn't all in on infrastructure, kind of infrastructure, no matter. But when you think about a firm like Deloitte, global capabilities, deep industry expertise, application, you know, capabilities, infrastructure is more horizontal. How do you guys look at the opportunity? Why does infrastructure so important to you? Well, it's really just for the next generation applications, right? Again, going back to, if you think of hybrid as an approach of seamless integration across environments, and you start developing these new applications towards, you know, different operating models or service-oriented models, the underlying infrastructure is not really built for that. So you're going to need to go through IT modernization, refreshes with a new type of technologies and maybe what you were doing before. So these applications as they move away from kind of legacy environments to more modernized type environments, cloud or on-premises, ultimately you're going to have to address that IT on-premise need. So what is that path for a customer who, like you were saying, Bob, who thought, wow, we've really failed at this. They went to public cloud because everybody else was. Suddenly, I mean, we all know time is a major issue that with any every business transforming because for survival and for competitive advantage, how do you help a customer take that, what they perceive as a failure? And a lot of times that can be a positive effort, right? Because there's a lot of opportunity that- Absolutely, you learn a lot. Exactly. Give us an example of maybe a favorite customer by name or industry where you said, all right, let's step back. We have to have a strategy here, evaluating all of these applications, letting them, as you said, Bob, drive where they should be run, how they should be deployed, how they should be secured. How do you kind of help that repatriation from a speed perspective so they can get to market faster? And turn that failure into a success? Yeah, I'll give you one example. I mean, we're working with a retail client not too long ago, and they drank the Kool-Aid and decided they wanted everything out to public cloud, right? But again, what they found was, unless you're willing to refactor an application, to take advantage of cloud-based services and more agile nature of application development, what they found was that it wasn't really providing the value that they were hoping for, right? And so, again, when you're left with that lift and shift or that re-hosting strategy, it just didn't really provide anything. So what we wanted to do was work with them to kind of put together a business case, a more well-defined strategy, to say, hey, look, let's accept the fact that these applications are not conducive to the cloud, and how do we drive value across the entire application portfolio across both on-premises and in the public cloud, right? And then I think the other thing that we need to talk about too is, I think a lot of times, and it's been brought up here several times, is I think a lot of clients out there, they talk about public cloud and the data center, but that's it, right? We're going to start to see distributed computing in the edge, right? I think a lot of clients forget that people need to get to the cloud. There's going to be this edge computing, right? So the journey starts there, but it certainly doesn't end there either. Yeah, it kind of comes to mind another insurance client that we have, a large insurance company. And they're a major cloud adopter, but overall it represents still a small portion of their overall IT, but they need that speed to market. So leveraging technologies like Pivotal to be able to quickly obtain that, and then, but as far as their overall application strategy, every net new generation app, they're going to try to, they're a cloud-first mandate as well, and we're seeing that a lot more prevalent from those clients. I want to explore this a little bit because I saw a stat, some IDC surveys said that 80% of companies say that half their workloads are going to come back on-prem but I don't know when, but anyway, that repatriation conversation. So okay, so the insurance company, their claims app, they're going into the cloud. But if I'm the CIO and you're going to bring back workloads, I want that experience to be very cloud-like, I want the tool chains to be similar. So obviously some of the announcements here today, but that's non-trivial. So I presume that's where you guys come in. You guys do well with complex. So how do you help customers create that cloud experience that can substantially mimic the public cloud on-prem? Yeah, so very much we first take a look at the operating model, right? If the, in the way that they've adopted cloud, most of the clients have been kind of a workload by workload and you start having these siloed environments of operations, but what they want is the premise of how you operate cloud for the way that you do the rest of your legacy applications for IT. So the evolution has been, they want to take a look at this holistically across all of their enterprise portfolio, but not just from a technology enablement, organization change, you know, can you bring in the right talent? Can you retain the right talent? You know, and is this that kind of environment where you can enable them to go create, you know, those things that might provide a bigger ROI to market, as well as automate relentlessly where you can in how you approach services. So I have a thesis I want to test with you guys. So, and I've been saying a few times this week, that multi-cloud is all the hype, but I think it's been a symptom of multi-vendor, shadow IT, line of business initiatives, and now we sort of have this, you know, airline magazine mess, and the executives are realizing, wow, we have to get control of this, provide the agility of the cloud, the cost structure potentially, but also the corporate edicts of security and compliance. Is that a valid premise? Is that how we got here? Has it been more deliberate than that? And, you know, where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, we've seen some of it even from just M&A, right? Well, you might be all in with one cloud provider predominantly, and you're continuing to move in that direction so you can gain some maturity before you introduce a multi-cloud model, but what happens when you just made an acquisition of something very strategic to your company? Oh crap, there was some other completely different kind of provider, and then, but you still have to roll that in to how your overall IT governance. So, again, these are just areas of the conversation where it's at a completely different level than, you know, which console are you going to use to try to manage all of this? And that's, it depends whether or not you sort of migrate into the acquirers cloud or you leave it alone, right? But how do you help customers make those decisions? I mean, you're at the board level, you're dealing with CIOs, application heads, line of business heads. I mean, you're Deloitte, you get some full visibility in the organization. I think what is going to go back to what I was saying earlier, right? I think having a better view of the application portfolio is what's going to start that process, right? You know, again, going back to what I said earlier, we have clients that have thousands and thousands of applications and they don't have to slit its clue of what's in that portfolio, let alone the attributes that make up those applications. Right, so really starting there to understand, you know, what's important to them, what are their requirements, understanding that application portfolio a little bit more, right, and marrying those with those requirements, that's what's really going to drive a lot of these decision-making points. One of our methods of engagement is something we start off in a kind of a shorter sprint model or a cloud value calculator and really trying to quantify what's that investment really worth, what do we expect back? You know, are you moving it for TCO reasons or is there something more profound that can happen back to the bottom line of the business and really trying to put it in those type of terms than, you know, just the technology move? Yeah, because I was thinking, you know, the cost of repatriation has got to be pretty significant. So in terms of looking at and working with, say, the retail customer that you mentioned or the insurance example, Luis, that you mentioned, when you're helping them identify the right strategy and really looking at the business imperatives for doing this quickly, this repatriation, what are some of the business outcomes that say this retailer is achieving that makes this repatriation cost-expense very much worth it? Yeah, I think it's speed, right? You know, I mean, we talked about cost a lot, but I mean, cost has become less of a factor in decision making. I mean, our clients, regardless of the industry, they're looking for speed to market, right? You know, how do I deliver services? How do I change faster than my competitors, right? So it's really, right now, it's all about speed. How do I do things faster? You know, obviously cost is a factor of that, right? But, you know, beating your competitor out to the market, I mean, we always talk about, you know, regardless of what the company is, everybody's a technology company, all right? And I actually believe that, right? You know, so the faster that you can do things, the faster you can get your products and services to market, that's what's really driving our business. Does this customer, this retail customer have, hey, we are 2X faster to market now that we've gone through this? Yeah, as a matter of fact, you know, we can't talk about some of those specifics, but yeah, they have definitely seen an uptick in the speed to market to be able to deliver new types of services to help drive business. With this strategic foundation that they never have with you guys. Correct, yes. I'll add, you know, the other thing is, regulations are changing worldwide, right? Every day with, you know, data sovereignty laws, whatever it may be, and if your cloud provider is not in that region or doesn't have the same level of services that you have, say in the U.S., what do you do? So again, other reasons for kind of having those, that repatriated model so that you can kind of go wherever you need to go as far as your business expansion. Excellent guys, I wish we had more time, there's so much to talk about here, but Louise, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. Thanks for having us. And chatting with Dave and me, we appreciate it, have a great rest of your show. Thanks, you too. Thank you, Dave, thank you, Lisa. All right, our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live from Las Vegas. If you thought you heard dogs barking, by the way, you weren't imagining that. We are right next to Michael's angel paws. One of my favorite parts of this entire event, with about 15,000 people or so. You're watching theCUBE live from day two of our coverage of Dell Technology World 2019. Thanks for watching.