 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. Leveron, welcome to the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas, the Wynn Hotel for Dell Boomi World 18. It's exclusive coverage. We're here all day, wall-to-wall coverage, covering the impact of cloud native to application developers and owners and for businesses. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin here. We're here with Michael Dell, 13th time on theCUBE. He's the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, continuing to defy logic, growing leaps and bounds, continuing to do more in the new era of IT and computing. Michael, great to see you. Thanks for coming. Great to be with you, Lisa, John. Always fun and here at Boomi World, it's really exciting to see the ecosystem continue to grow and as people try to kind of connect everything together, Boomi is right there and incredible business, last quarter, booking growth, 80%, 7,500 customers and I still can't find a customer that doesn't need Boomi and the team continues to evolve the capabilities and we've just had a great show here. A thousand customers showed up, lots of great customer stories about how they're integrating all their apps and data together and with the tsunami of data that is coming, it just gets more and more important and interesting and fun. You mentioned on the keynote stage with CEO Boomi talking about some performance numbers you always throw out, the server growth, continuing to grow and the pundits were saying, oh, servers, that's cloud serverless. You still need compute networking and storage but they do change with the cloud and SaaS has proven that that business model of as a service is key. Boomi's got this little secret weapon around the unified platform that integrates a lot of these traditional components that are still going to be foundational but yet set up the next wave around AI, edge, data, tsunami that you mentioned. This is a key variable in the architectural shift. Could you talk about how you see that playing out because you got a couple of big pieces on the chessboard, VMware. The continuous Dell Technologies portfolio kind of as the table stakes. This is kind of interesting new architectures. Explain how you see that. Pivotal Dell EMC, VMware, that's right. So a lot of pieces, how does Boomi play into that because if it does be a glue layer, if you will, for lack of a better word, it can be very powerful. Yeah, so the challenge is when you go to software as a service, how do you connect the things together? Now, connecting one or two together, it's pretty straightforward. But when you start having 50 or 100 of these things and then you've got on-premise systems and now you want to have actions like an employee does something and based on their role, then something else happens. You have workflow. And then you get this, you go from a couple of billion PCs to five billion smartphones to hundreds of billions of connected things out there with this explosion in the edge, how you integrate and connect everything together with workflow and do it securely is super, super important. So we're seeing just an explosion in use cases. There were some great examples from a city digitizing and being able to detect leaks and when traffic lights aren't working and the use cases are pretty unlimited and boomy and pivotal play sort of at the top layer for us of the applications and integrating all the data and allowing customers to express their competitive advantage with software data and AI and machine learning. And then of course we've got VMware to virtualize everything from the data center to the network and beyond with NSX and what we're doing with NFV and software to find when and then of course we're the essential infrastructure company. Absolute number one in all aspects of the data center and growing much faster than any of the competitors. So I want to also get your thoughts on VMware announced to this morning actually Barcelona time for VMworld Europe, the acquisition of Heptio. Absolutely. Pat Kelsey said in VMworld, we're going in going to make Kubernetes the dial tone. This is a key architectural component around orchestration. Containers certainly everyone knows that's been standardized. People love containers are using them as applications need to be more efficiently built out out of a boomers value proposition. Kubernetes and these cloud native things are super important. What's your view on that? I'll see a great acquisition, very young company, not $34 billion for Red Hat, but like IBM bought but a small tuck in. How important is that trend for you? Well, you know, think about what we've done with Pivotal and VMware together with the Pivotal Container Service and now adding Heptio with two of the three founders of the whole Kubernetes movement and we're going to be making Kubernetes just part of the dial tone of vSphere. So for virtually all the customers out there 600,000 of them that use vSphere, it'll just be super easy to now have Kubernetes containers built into their vSphere environment. And so that's the vision. We've got a great team working on it across VMware and Pivotal and now the Heptio team adding to it. You know, we're super pumped about all this. It's your friend to ask you at a party this weekend, hey, Michael, why is Kubernetes important? What do you say to that? I guess it would depend on, you know, how much they know about this stuff. They're a business owner responsible for application development. Yeah. They are owning to transform their organization. They realize cloud's going to be a part of it. They hear Kubernetes, surely it's popular as trending but it's a technology. A lot of people are now getting this for the first time and seeing it as the early adopters have shown it. They try to want to know the impact and why it's important, why is Kubernetes important as you start to get into this orchestration of apps and workloads across clouds? Why is it important? I think people don't want to get locked in to a particular place when it comes to their infrastructure and Kubernetes has clearly won the battle in terms of being able to beat that abstraction layer. And, you know, that's the simple thing that is super exciting. And, you know, when it sort of went from cloud to hybrid cloud to multi-cloud, people realized they wanted a two-way street where they could move things back and forth. And now with the edge, you know, they want to move it to the edge and, you know, with a distributed core. And so this explosion in data, this data tsunami, you know, really requires a whole new set of tools in terms of the, you know, the software infrastructure to be able to make it all work. So, transformation is, you're talking about Dell Technologies, you know, 34 years later, have seven corporations under that done a lot to keep those brands as their very valuable Dell Boomi as a business unit. Transformation is essential and Dell Boomi wants to be the transformation partner. It's also incredibly difficult. IT transformation, digital, security, workforce. Dell Boomi works and Dell Technologies with a lot of large enterprise organizations that are still probably fairly, not as well connected as they should be to find new value, new business dreams. How do you talk with customers, large enterprises that need to transform to stay competitive? Where do they start? And how does the Dell transformation story in and of itself help those customers feel confident in what Dell Technologies can deliver? Right, well, first thing I'd say is we actually work with customers of all sizes. So, you know, we have an enormous business with small and medium and large customers were number one across the whole spectrum. We serve 99% of the Fortune 500. So, since your question is about those types, you know, they're looking at the digital transformation and figuring out this is really not an IT project. It's about technology becoming pervasive in everything that they're doing from sales to marketing to product creation to, you know, their whole fundamental strategy. So then it shows up, you know, in the office of the CEO and business line executives and they're having to reimagine. And so they look for a partner and Dell Technologies is very unique. You know, two years and two months ago we put together, you know, all these companies and it's been fabulous. I mean, we've been growing double digits consistently and the response has been great because we can deliver a complete set of capabilities. Now, you're right, the change management and how do I do it in my company, that's a big deal. And so they're pulling on us to bring them more of a, you know, they don't want us to show up with a bunch of parts and drop them off, right? They want us to actually build them a solution that is specific to their needs, help them implement it, in many cases, run it for them. So we do much of that ourselves with our, you know, own services organization, 60,000 plus people in our services organization. And of course we have the best, all the great SIs out there, you know, that are helping customers implement and run and manage, you know, like I said, 99% of the Fortune 500. So we're right there with them in this digital transformation. Of course we do the IT, the workforce, the PCs, and of course security, unbelievably important, right? Your whole brand trust is all based on that. And so we wrap the whole thing with security and no company has the breadth that we have. And so I think we've kind of won the hearts and minds of the decision makers because of the capabilities we have. Not that we take it for granted, we have to go earn that trust every single day, but we have unbelievably talented people in our company and over 20,000 engineers, scientists, PhDs, about 90% of them are software engineers. So this is a very different company than it was five or 10 years ago. And it's, you know, we're having a blast. I mean, it's a rocket ship, so. I had a chance to interview a IT leader. His name is Alan Bean. He's the global CTO and head of IT innovation at Parkland Gamble. He brought the cloud to Coca-Cola. He's had a career, all in IT going back to DHL in the 90s and 80s, which we're talking about. And I asked him, does IT matter? And Dave Vellante always brings up the book by Nick Carr. So, and we always talk about it. Love it, such a fun topic. And so he says, quote, yeah, at that time some people thought it didn't matter. Everyone was kind of complaining, but he said it does matter. It's a competitive advantage. And over the decades, IT was outsourced. And now people are trying to bring that back in and make it a competitive advantage. This is a, this is now, it's a mandate basically. So as people who have been kind of anemic with IT, they got people running stuff but eventually outsource all the value. They got to bring that value in. Cloud is that opportunity. How do you respond to the leaders out there trying to figure this out? What are the key to success around bringing back the competitive advantage and using the cloud for things that aren't core to the core competency but getting that core confidence in the LDAN. What's your vision? Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's all about understanding what is your competitive differentiation and advantage as a business. And if you give that away to somebody else, you're going to be out of business in not too much time. So package applications are great for things that aren't differentiated. But if you actually do something that's unique and valuable and special and you can't express that in software with your own data, you're going to have a problem, right? And so this is what companies are figuring out. This is what we're doing with Pivotal and Bumi allowing companies to build all this together. And look, I think as it relates to cloud, customers have figured out it's multi-cloud, right? And it's a workload-dependent discussion and some workloads are great in the public cloud, but in many cases, not so much, right? And as we've modernized and automated the infrastructure, we have customers that tell us, hey, our private cloud for our predictable workload, which is 90%, is five, six times less expensive than AWS. So we're building these, our converge, hyper-converge, like the fast track to the automated modernized infrastructure. And look, it's, you can decide. But we're seeing customers that want to move things back and forth and we're seeing a bit of a boomerang, right? Where customers that said, oh, everything to the public cloud and no, not everything. And the digital transformation really is making IT competitive advantage. So I had a long-ranging interview, it's up on YouTube, but I asked them a final question and I always said, okay, so, you know, he's transforming Procter and Gamble. I said, okay, as you look at Edge, you know, look at all those things. What's the next mountain that you're going to climb? You're an IT pro, you said in the agenda. And I'll read you the quote, I want to get your reaction. He said, I think we're looking forward. Latency is still an issue. We have to find ways to defeat latency and we're not going to do it through basic physics. We're going to have to change our business models, change our technology, distribution, change everything that we're doing. Consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and machine learning right at the point when they want it. So this is his next mountain. This is kind of what we were talking about on stage here at the Del Boomi event around the impact of AI and data. What's your reaction to that quote? Well, to me, this is all about the Edge and 5G coming around the corner. And you look at all the big telcos, they're all, you know, piling in on 5G because it's a thousand times faster and a thousand times less latency. So that's going to be a big, you know, turbo charge, you know, the rocket ship and it will just create an explosion in data, you know, and compute on the Edge. And a lot of it's going to stay on the Edge because you'll have these Edge devices talking to each other, a whole new class of applications and capabilities because of that. And, you know, that's super exciting. So I, we're already seeing it with this build out of the distributed core. And that's why we see, you know, so much growth in the data center business. So Michael, Del Boomi, if you look at Boomi for a second, was named by the Gartner Magic Squadron of 2018 as a leader in iPads. Today they talked about iPads. Again, I think six or seventh year in a row. So it's been there for quite some time. An established leader in an established market. But today they were talking about, hey, we want to change the eye. We want to redefine the eye and iPast intelligence. How is Dell technologies, and Boomi particularly, starting to leverage terabytes and terabytes of customer metadata to make your systems smarter, to enable businesses to truly connect, prem Edge devices as things continue to get more distributed and data becomes more critical. Yeah, so the key to AI and all of its variants and machine learning, deep learning, neural network is the data. The data is the fuel for the rocket ship of AI. And the challenge is that if you have your data spread out in 100 softwares of service providers and three public clouds and here and there and where's all your data, we don't really know. How do you fuel the rocket? It becomes a very difficult problem. So this is the problem that we're beginning to address for our customers. We're going to have an event all about AI coming up in I think next week. We're going to be talking much more about this. We've got a number of offerings that we're rolling out. We've been helping customers for years, build their data lakes and curate the data. And of course, Pivotal and Boomi are essential to how you bring all this together and make sense of it because if you just have all the data but you can't actually use it. And if you're not already using AI and its variants to improve your products and services, you're doing it wrong. We've identified over 450 projects just within Dell Technologies internally. So as I mentioned on stage, we've sold about 700 million computers since I started them into my dorm room. And so we have enormous telemetry data and so imagine if you will that something doesn't work exactly the way it's supposed to, okay? What's the chances that that has never happened before? Zero. The answer is almost zero, right? And so our job is to take all this data that we have, use all this intelligence and actually prevent it from happening. So we're building all kinds of intelligence and AI and preventive technology into all of our solutions from the data center, to the desktop, to the edge, to the multi-cloud so that all these systems are just self-healing and automagically way more reliable. Automagically, I like that. It just sounds like what you're saying is Dell Technologies articulating its value and its differentiation because you're using that data. You have to. To take, to identify the insights to take action immediately. And to your point about the big companies, they have an advantage but it's a bit of a time value expiring advantage. They have the data that the new entrants don't have. Right. Okay, but they have to activate it quickly with this new computer science or else there'll be dinosaurs, right? And nobody wants to be dinosaur. Michael, what's the business drivers that you talk to customers all the time that they're seeing in front that matter most of them? Is it agility? Is it transform the customer employee experience, compliance, security? How would you view the pattern around the most important business driver for your customers that are trying to put the business transformation together with digital? Could you comment just anecdotally what you see? I think every customer is a little bit different in their journey. Some customers security is number one because of the kind of business that they're in and it just has to be that way. For other customers, it's how do I increase my speed to the solution? It used to be, oh, we need a new feature. We'll get it in a year or two. How about never? Does never work for you? That's kind of the old IT. Now with Agile Development, you've got, with what we're doing with the Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you've got companies implementing, these are giant companies, biggest companies in the world, they're implementing new things like in two, three weeks. It's amazing how fast, so speed and as a chief executive, that's what you crave. How can I take this new requirement that I heard from the customer and turn it into a feature that I can go offer very, very quickly? That's what you want to be able to do. Right, it's what we used to be able to do when we were a little tiny company. How do you do it with 200,000 people? I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you popularized early on in your career, the direct business model. You also had the just-in-time manufacturing kind of ethos of build it, build to order. Really streamlined efficiencies. So I want to kind of take the leap to now a new generation with Cloud Native where you have workflows and efficiencies, you have integration. So in a way, the customers are now going direct to their customers and wanting to compose and build solutions. As you said on stage, these are going to be new problems that have been identified, new solutions. So the customers have to be what you did. They got to build their own. So they got to build their own. They got to have the suppliers. They got to have the code. How do you see customers being successful if they want to take that efficiency approach, kind of be five nines if you will in this new modern era? Because this is the challenge that they have. They have to build their own. They need suppliers, they need you guys. How do you see the customers being successful in that scenario? Yeah, I think what they're trying to do is shrink the time from when, at that point of customer interaction, they can use the data to make the service and the product better. And if it's like this lengthy value chain with all these different intermediaries and it takes weeks or months or never, that's just way too slow. So they wanted to be like instantaneous. And how do they create that direct relationship with their customers? It is, I only had $1,000 when I started. So we couldn't really afford much. So each dollar you invest very carefully. So we just kind of out of necessity came up with some ideas that- You were fishing because you had to be. We didn't have any choice, right? So when we talk about integration, we talk about, oh, it's the foundation of digital transformation. We've talked about IET, security, workforce. One of the things that you mentioned earlier that I'd like to get your perspective on, a different view of transformation is cultural. An enterprise organization, as you mentioned, has a huge advantage of a tremendous wealth of data. But with that amount of data and the need for speed, as you just talked about, where in your opinion and your experience is cultural transformation as an enabler of an enterprise to really be able to react that quickly to develop new products, new revenue streams. Yeah, I think it's a big challenge and a lot of customers struggle with change management. And you never want to let a good crisis go to waste. And we sort of grew up in the business where it was change or die, quicker dead. If you don't do it, you're gone, right? And this was just the way our business, just how we had to compete. It's what we grew up in. And I think what's happened is more and more businesses are that way now. And so it requires the business leaders to say, hey, friends, we've got a real challenge here and we've got to move faster. And it is change or die, it's quicker dead, I think for all businesses because this is the fastest time ever, right? But it's the slowest time relative to the future. It's just going to get faster and faster. So if companies, the only way to get good at change is to do it more frequently, right? And so if you've never changed anything for 80 years in your company and all of a sudden you start trying to change, it's really hard. So you just have to start. How do you inspire, say employees of Dell Technologies who've been with you for a very long time to be able to be open and agile themselves to help facilitate this transformation? Well, I believe we've built it into our culture that they understand that change is good as opposed to change is bad. And if you fear something, well then it's bad, right? And so we precondition people to say, okay, we're going to change something. Not to say every time we change something it works perfectly, we make mistakes, we learn, trial and error, that's all fine, fail fast. But you need a culture where you can embrace change. No question about it. And I think a lot of companies that didn't really have that are figuring that out. And either by crisis or by leadership or some combination, they're then forced into it. For me, it's what we grew up in because hey, it's a tough war law there, you know? Like I want to ask you a final question. Thanks for coming on, spending the time with us. Great interview here, good length. Recently in the news we had a lot of commentary from us as well, the industry around IBM buying Red Hat. And I made a comment around the innovation piece of this and I want to get your thoughts on it because when you bought EMC, it was a merger of equals, you integrated that and the growth that you've been successful since then. I want to get your perspective, I want you to take a minute to explain what's watching. When you did the merger of equals with EMC, what happened? You've been successful integrating the organization. What innovative things have you done since the EMC merger of equals? Take a minute to explain. Again, there's a lot of moving pieces on the table. You got VM where you got pivotal, you got boom. A lot of moving parts in your plan. You've been successful with the numbers, financial performance shows it. Take a minute to explain what happened. Where's the innovation coming out of gel technologies? So in hindsight, it looks pretty obvious, right? You take the leader in servers and the leader in storage and you say, hey, infrastructure, hardware goes together. And by the way, if you have the leader in infrastructure software, VMware, you put that all together, wow, that'd be really great. And it turns out it was, right? It was actually much better than we thought. And so customers have really bought into that. And then with Pivotal and Bumi and RSA, Virtustream, SecureWorks, et cetera, we have such a complete set of capabilities that customers have said, hey, why do I want to buy from 20 smaller, less capable companies and integrate it myself versus you guys will just do all this for me? So if they were buying from two or three or four parts of Dell technologies, they'll say, well, why don't we just take the others? And so we've been picking up huge amounts of share across the whole business. I'm talking about like tens of billions of dollars of growth here. And there's clearly a consolidation going on in the kind of existing parts of the industry. But we've also got massive investments in the new cloud native parts and software defined and security. And so it's been a real blessing to be able to pull all these teams together. You know, we had this relationship with EMC going back from 2001. You know, we were very early supporters of VMware. And so we had a theory of victory and it's played out very well. The teams have really gelled enormously well and the customers have continued to give us their trust. Well, I think, I mean, first of all, server storage networking is never going away. It's the holy trinity of anything and computing just looks different and consumes differently. But I think people underestimate the execution innovation that you guys have done. You didn't skip a beat. VMware didn't skip a beat. So things have happened. So that was the challenge of the integration. Not everybody predicted that that was going to go that way, but it's actually gone much better than even we had planned. The revenue synergies have been much larger. Well, congratulations and thanks for taking the time on theCUBE. Michael Dell's here inside theCUBE here. Boomi World 18, Dell Boomi World. It's the part of Dell Technologies. We think it's going to be a power engine for data processing, data growth, powering AI, integrating all the applications and workloads. I'm John Furrier, Lisa Martin. Stay tuned for more coverage after this short break. Since the dawn of the cloud, theCUBE has been there. Connecting.