 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 Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. We have been talking with lots of great folks the last couple of days and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, Erin Banks, director of product marketing for Dell EMC. Erin, it's great to have you on theCUBE. It's great to be here, thank you so much. So this is the second branded Dell Technologies World, the first one since Dell became a public-attracted company once again. But you have a storied past of all this experience at the lot of these brands. Give us a little bit of your background as you've made your way through all these companies and left your mark. Yeah, I feel like I've hit just about every corporate conference that we have under Dell Technologies because I came in originally through RSA around 2006 and then that acquisition happened and then I transitioned over to EMC so then we started the whole EMC world before RSA conference, EMC world, always continuing to support security, always continuing to do that, went to VMware, continuing to support security, obviously focused, we had a V-specials program so we wanted to sell EMC products for VMware products. So we continued to do that, so I think it was VMware and then I came back, I left for a little bit and then I came back, so it was a joke that I have like four companies I think left and I would have had like, I think I'd get an award for having worked at every seven of the companies. At least a mug, right? Yeah, I should get something, I think. You should, yeah, I think so. A jacket? All right, so what's your current role now? So you're working what, in what group? Where are you now? Yeah, so right now I'm focused on unstructured storage divisions, so that's going to be ISLON, ECS, Clarity Now and the Project Nautilus and we're focused from a marketing perspective and the director of product marketing for that group. You know, storage didn't get a lot of keynote coverage, normally they do get a lot with DMC because obviously there's a lot of things going on around Dell technology world, but you know, Michael Dell said storage isn't stopping because you got more data coming in, so unstructured is a big part of it, whether it's social data, gestured, any kind of data exhaust IoT, data is data, right? So, and the unstructured is a large growing percentage of the overall data population. Yeah, I think somebody gave me a statistic that 80% of the data that's generated is unstructured data, right, and people need to keep it and they need to, in some situations, like autonomous driving systems, they need to keep it for very, very long time. So, you know, there's always that debate of all these years that I've been at these conferences about how long you keep the data and obviously archiving them, where are you moving them, giving the customers the options. We're still obviously talking about that, which is great, but now we just have more and more data and now it's really, from an ISLON perspective, we're focused on, you know, the management and also the real estate, right, because there isn't just every amount of space that every data center can have. Customers are running out of data center space and they're running out of people, right, and they're like, listen, I can't hire any more people. I want to focus on the business and that's what we support from an ISLON perspective is focusing on the business. I mean, we obviously focus from all of UDS, but our announcements today were a focus around ISLON. So, large growth, okay, but the habit of, okay, just store it, we'll get to it later. It's been a nice luxury with unstructured because some of the technology allows you to store it. We call it a data lake or data swath, depending on how you look at it. Now, the focus is getting more out of the data while still storing it, right? You're just throwing it over into the pile or into the corpus or into the data lake or whatever storage it is. Getting the mechanism to get the data out and making it relevant and valuable is a focus. What's going on there? What are some key trends that are happening that you guys are riding? Yeah, well, we're talking a lot, you know, we have a campaign around data capital, right, and obviously, as we all know, data has a lot of value within organizations. I'd like to tell customers that data has more value than we do as employees. Companies will get bought and they'll fire the people because they just want the data. And we can't ignore that fact, right? What does it say about the business's customers? What does it say about their likes or dislikes? What does it say about where the company needs to go? The only way you know to be successful, I think in the next three to five years, is to understand your customers and what they need, right? We had a bank the other day that was like, well, all of our customers are 50 years old, so we're not going to do applications and we don't really care about our data and you're like, but you have people that are coming up behind that are using applications, right? That want more of a service. It's no longer, you know, I say to banks, you don't need to buy another bank, right? You need to provide a service to me. How do you get that value out of that data? Understand who I am as a customer? Where, what I like, where I travel, what do I do in my day-to-day life and give me that service so I continue to be a customer for you. That's essential. It is essential. But we talk about customer experience a lot. It's absolutely essential because as whether we're consumers of banking services or retail or whatever it is, we have so much choice. And especially with social media, I talk about unstructured data. We have a voice and the opportunity to get that out there and go and churn. So really evaluating that data and understanding and making decisions on that data to deliver a personalized experience is table stakes. I mean, we talk about this all the time about the markets that are not doing it, like retail, right? They always talk about everyone wants to go to Amazon and buy their clothes or now there's boxes that are coming to your door with all the clothes. So how does the real estate business stay essential to me as a buyer? We all need to close. But what gets me back into the store, right? And we talk about the sensors, right? We talk about the data that has generated just me walking around the stores. How long do I spend in front of an item? Can I have a coupon that's popped up on my phone? How do you, how do I get more from an experience? And I think these are the struggles that organizations are having. We were talking to a customer that's managing a sports arena and the biggest thing is, how do you get them back into the arena? How do you change their experience? Because they're a Canadian company. They don't want to be standing outside in the cold because it's hockey season, everyone loves it. How do you get them in earlier because now there's more security, right? We have this, I always call it the physics effect, right? You have one change that ripples into everything else. So it's cold, the security lines are long. I'd rather be at home watching this. How do I get that experience? And these are the partnerships that are being created with companies like athletic companies and sports arenas and sports teams and things like that to really change in the experience that we have. And the only way you can do that is with data, right? The enormous amount of data that we have, we couldn't do that if we didn't have the data. It would just be- So what if they come up with a better solution not standing outside and getting in quickly? Yes, so yeah, we talked about this, right? We did a great podcast about this because they're now doing these programs where they'll bring you in earlier, right? So maybe they'll have dinner and a couple of beers, right? And you can come in and kind of enjoy the arena when no game is going on, but you get in earlier out of the cold. They talked about buying retail from your seats, right? And they tested out, that wasn't successful. So it's a really good kind of option along those lines. People like to walk around and look at the touch and feel the items and look at all their options. So these are great things that they were able to test that the digital signage has been a huge impact from an analytics perspective. Really being able to change it, that is the amount of growth that organizations have achieved from just digital signage has been enormous. So they're really transforming their businesses in different aspects and it's all really driven from the data. So what's going on with the products that you guys are doing? What's the value proposition for Icelon? Where's the focus for you now? Yeah, so we're always continuing to just answer the questions that our customers are having, which always comes down to the amount of data that we have, how to continue to manage that and then how to manage it in this data center. So we had a release today where we're to focus both from a software aspect as well as a hardware aspect and our now our software of 1FS with still the single file system is now being able to scale out to 252 nodes. It was 144 before. Now it's 58 petabytes. And I love what I love most about that is how you manage 58 petabytes is exactly how you manage a terabyte. I mean, that's important to a customer where they're saying, I can easily add storage within a minute. I don't have to worry about it and I have the same amount of people managing the system. I just have to focus on the workloads and I just have to focus on the applications. And then our customers are saying again, we're running out of the real estate. How can you give us a more dense box, right? We need the performance of a hybrid but we need the capacity of an archive systems. Again, we need to be able to do more with less almost. So we introduced the age 5600 this week or today and really just being able to give our customers what they need to really continue to drive their business forward. I always say it's always about the workloads and the applications. I'm inspired by what our customers are doing. They're just doing these innovative tools and work and everything because they're like, no longer they're being constrained from an IT perspective, right? The technology is now doing the heavy lifting and now we're able to really utilize the data for what it's worth and getting the most out of it, which I think, which I just love that, right? I think that's important to businesses. Put today's announcements into the perspective of the workforce. We've talked a lot about workforce the last couple of days about really enabling businesses to do so much with this distributed workforces. But in terms of workforce optimization, the density that you just talked about, what are some of the immediate impacts that customers are going to realize that's going to, you know, I'm besides productivity improvements. Yeah, I mean, again, I've had this direct conversations with customers who was like an autonomous driving system and they were saying, listen, again, we, I don't have the headcount. Like nobody wants to give me more headcount. I can't keep doing this. What the business wants to do is they want to get to market fast. And they want to, because if we can get to the market fast, then we can drive that business faster. And that's what we need. How can you help me? And that's what I love about, you know, not only unstructured data conversation, but the isolation conversations that we're having is like, how are we, how can you help my business? Well, okay, we understand that the struggles, again, no data center, don't have the headcount. They're not giving them, they'll give us developers, right? They want to drive these other markets, right? And then we're saying, great, we'll continue to drive this one file system capability, but give you this enormous growth and really continue to drive that, right? They get revenue, they can get headcount. So this is back to the cloud model of, let's get some value out there quickly, time to value. Yeah, and then the question is, where is the optimal headcount that you need? Is it to do somebody just continue to rack and stack? Or is it someone that's really going to get the value out of that data, continue to push that to test the systems? Again, they want to get to the market first. How can we enable that? How can it really help them to do that? That's our goal. So talk about customers and their receptiveness for AI. We hear a lot about it all the time, but really looking at, we talked about the volume of data, we could talk about that for days and days, but really enabling customers to harness the power of AI and machine learning to extract the insights. Where are those conversations going with customers as it relates to Isilon, some of the things today, but just in general, where is their appetite with respect to being ready to harness the power of AI? I think overall, we ask this question a lot about where are we in the AI landscape, and some customers are really focused on that, but they have a completely different model than some of the companies that have been, the traditional companies that we've been focused on, so it's kind of between the both. I think a lot of it, in my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the culture. It's a completely different way of thinking about a business, and it's a completely different way of focusing on not only your data, but like a data management, with the joke about like a data swamp, like cleaning the data, having a business focus that's driven specifically from data is a culture change, and not a lot of people are willing to have that culture change. New companies can do that, because that's how they develop the company, right? But when you see some of the companies that we've all been a part of for all of these years, that's not that easy, so they're little like baby steps, which is why I love telling those customer stories, so I'd be like, listen, this is possible, this is not just fake, we're not just like fairies like floating around us, right? This is true capabilities. It's real transformation, that's the theme. The developers are a key part of this, and this is something that we've seen developers using data as part of their application, making that addressable, making it fast, access, is one, that's awesome. The other interesting dynamic that I want to get your thoughts on, because you have a security background, is securing data, and also governance, or also driving use cases and applications that might not have been foreseen over one year into GDPR, and I don't think it's really gonna change, but I don't want to go on that rant, but now you have other regulatory things that are saying, hey, you know what? We might have to deal with the data differently, so how is Isilon enabling that? Is it just another use case? Yeah, I mean it is absolutely just another use case that we're just going to have to focus on from the aspects of what's the implication, what are the customers looking at? When we talk specifically about GDPR, that's fairly new, right? We're just trying to figure this out, and trying to look at those different kind of aspects. A lot of that was also the right to know, and right to remove, and saying, what do you know about me, and how do you kind of manage that? So a lot of that is really focused on a data management aspect, and it's not just from Isilon, but it's how do you manage it, right? So the clarity now, capabilities that we have, this product that we were able to acquire, that really will give you that great insight into your data, so you can make those decisions. It says, all right, well this is all of our information on Aaron Banks, this is her likes, dislikes, whatever that information has, right? We're able to really manage that a lot better, and that the data management part is the really next important step of the data collection, the data processing, is understanding what you have, because it all comes in, but it doesn't have value until you really know what you have and what you don't have, because even from an analytics perspective, you might have to supplement that from data from some other resource. Maybe you need to change the application and get additional data. This is all really driven across that same kind of aspect, this is the same conversation, and we'll just continue to view that and have that and enable them to do that. That's why I say like, we want to inspire our customers and be like, wow, I didn't realize that I could do that with tech, right? And then start enabling them to be innovative, and that's what we're still continuing to do. What's one of your favorite stories of, you talked about your tenure within the Dell Technologies family when we first started, but looking at today in 2019, every company is a tech company or has to be. If you look back over the last 10, 12 years, what's some of your favorite stories of how this company, Dell Technologies, has enabled in its companies a surprising customer to become a tech company? Yeah, and I think the number one thing that, I mean, I personally love, right, that keeps me here, that brought me back, right? You know, not only was it just 2006 and Stain, but said, I want to go back to that, is because what I really feel is our experience that we have across every market, right, the geographies, the struggles that customers are having, and what we're able to learn from them and really help our customers excel. It's not just us selling products, right? It's not just selling services. It's not just selling software, right? It's us trying to get out there and saying, this is how other customers are using it. This is how they've been successful. This is where they've downfall. Let's help you, right? As we're trying to bring companies further along on their business journey, and we're saying we've worked with customers to do this. We'll continue to work with you to do that, and we can do it across all seven of these companies end to end. It's a very impactful capabilities across applications security, which is incredibly important, right? IT and workforce and all these individual transformations. And that's what I think is a passion and the best part of what we do. Well, Erin, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon and walking us through some of these key things, helping customers of any industry really excel and unlock the capital in their data. We appreciate your time. Appreciate yours. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live, day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.