 This is siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv's live coverage of Dell World 2012. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events to extract a signal from the noise. We're here wall-to-wall coverage, six hours a day, both days here at Dell World. We're digging in. We just had Michael Dell on for a good 15 minutes, digging into his vision, his culture, how he's seen these transformations before, and great contents of that video. We'll be up on youtube.com slash siliconangle, and we're just loving it. We're digging into Dell and really looking at the IT, changing landscape, changing data center, changing end user, consumerization experience. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, the source for open source research. We're here with Russ Fugioca, who's the Global Vice President of Solutions Marketing at Dell. Russ, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. No, absolutely. My pleasure. I don't know how I follow Michael, but I think I was mentioning it before. This is Dell world. That means Michael Dell world. I gotta tell you something. It's almost better to follow Michael than it is to follow Tarkin Maynard. Oh, yeah. Because the energy level, let's forget it. By the way, when did Tarkin come? Because as it died down, so I could... He was here at 1.30. Michael was supposed to go on right after him. I was a little worried about that. We love Tarkin. Tarkin is a showman who's good content, great content, great stuff. You're a good guy, great guy. So, Solutions Marketing. Talk about what that is at Dell. I mean, it could be a lot of things to a lot of people. What is it to Dell? Well, I mean, I think that Dell world is the actual incarnation of Solutions Marketing. So, this is a show that, it's 2.0 this year. My group is the one who puts this on. And it is, I mean, I think if you look at where Dell has gone in this journey from devices to really systems to solutions, I think when you get to the solutions, it's really the outside outlook, right? So... Customer view. Absolutely. And customer pay point. Maybe even helping them beyond. So, you become the trusted advisor. So, you're really looking at, what is that business with a thing in IT that can help them change their business, right? So, obviously, there are different things in CRM and Insights and big data that you can extrapolate. The reasons why you see CMOs becoming big IT consumers now, right? So, that whole big data area. Big budgets, those CMOs. Right, absolutely. And, you know, they, you know, so those things tend to be one-to-one in business use, but everything else that you see is the challenges in BYOD, security, cross-aboard. I mean, these are things that we're helping our customers with every day. So, it's not necessarily even saying, I have a disaster recovery application for you. You know, it's more about, let me, you know, help you understand how we can empower your workforce. How we can future-proof your IT infrastructures on both a data side and an end-user compute side. So, you talked to Tarkin. I'm sure Tarkin gave you a little bit of a view on cloud-client computing and pocket-cloud a little bit. He really talked to us, but yeah. Yeah. He's great, we love him. But, yes, absolutely. Yeah, but integration is what he heard. So, first of all, the transformation, first of all, IT services, you guys are, have been in for a while. It's not new to Dell. I mean, remember you guys broke into the server business back in the 90s and, you know, small little position, grew it rapidly. Obviously, desktops were screaming into leadership position pretty much during that time. But over that time, you have a position, you have customers, Dell's in the data center. You've been there, right? But now you're seeing it all come together with some acquisitions, quads, et cetera. So, you're now a full portfolio of a solution. So, okay, got that. But now we're living in an era of financial cliff 19 days away. You got data centers being transformed and reconstructed. We're hearing this notion of, I wish I had a clean sheet of paper. The legacy is not viewed as good enough anymore. So, tell us, how are you marketing to that world? I mean, like, is it, and to end, Dell's the full package, full service? Well, I mean, I think it's more, I mean, that's right in Dell's wheelhouse, actually. And not the fiscal cliff, but the idea that the tenants that we were kind of born of and about is that open, capable, affordable nature of our business, right? And so, as Michael said in this keynote, we aren't really tagged to heritage infrastructures, but what we are doing is augmenting the infrastructures that you do have to modernize and make them more efficient and agile, right? So, we're, if you have heritage apps, you talked about services, right? Apps and BPO modernization, you know, things like that, they, you know, Unix to Linux, taking them from Mainframe to X86. I mean, a lot of these things are the ways that we are creating more efficient IT models and more scalable. So, the ability to get what their compute models are on a platform that scales better, is more open, takes kind of half of the footprint, half of the energy, and again, can grow with your business, kind of Dell's heritage. You know, I always look at the data center discussions, you know, being kind of a geek and knowing having fun in that world and it has gotten complicated. You saw the, you know, the overblown of servers getting racked and stacked, sprawling, power and cooling. We heard one of your clients saying, you know, they cut their footprint down in half, more efficient, actually got more performance. So, the world's obviously changing. So, I look at the data center as like a metaphor, like a metaphor, like a PC. I mean, there's components in there, it's an operating environment. You have disks, you've got processors, you have subsystems. So, Tarkin Mainer used the term systems management overdose. There's like, there's a lot of systems management stuff going on. So, Dell has always been good at assembling, you know, mail order, to build to order, to supply chain scale. So, do you look at the data center kind of like that? Are you assembling now these building blocks? Is that the strategy? Or is it integrating across the board? Well, I think that, you know, what Tarkin alluded to on the systems management overhaul, there's always this elusive single pane of glass that everyone's looking to manage provision workloads or, you know, to move them on-premise and off-premise, but very easily. But there's, everyone has their own systems management. So, you bring your own systems management to the data center work day, you know? And that's really what it is, right? Yeah, it is. And, you know, again, the ability for you to build systems management tools and applications that work with other tools so that you could choose to use one single pane of glass or at least work through something, it's got a lot of value. You know, a lot of it are active infrastructure, launch, and the ability to manage, you say the first thing that comes through. So, you talked about power, it's amazing. You could go into these, we could talk about big data, we talk about all of these really hard questions and solutions, and at the end, the CEO will look at you and say, I need to take my power cooling down and can I do this with less people? Yeah, that's a mandate right now. I mean, we're hearing that across the board. Facilities issues, footprint, and power. So, ARM chips, for example, are interesting, right? We see HP doing a lot of stuff with ARM. They've been in a lot of announcements. Is Dell on the same track there? Are you building your own silicon? Are you looking at partnering with other chip manufacturers? Because, you know, there are innovations that you guys have done with the power and efficiency that's software-related, right? And also chip-related. Can you share with how that fits in? Or is that not your... Well, it's certainly not my sweet spot, but I will tell you if you have, if you have on your interview schedule, Forrest Norrid, or someone from our, like Marius Haas, you'll find that we do have ARM servers that we were actually probably first to market in. We're actually, I think, into our second generation of the ARM servers. So we are looking at all of those different areas. And again, I'm not the one to go into that. Well, let me ask you, that's a solutions marketing. That's the biggest demand right now that we're seeing. So big data is a big hyped-up area, but it's relevant. People want to talk about it at Business Analytics. Analytics obviously is a killer app for today, right? It will evolve into others. But there's also a big data angle in the data center. Measurement, you know, instrumentation of the systems. You know, putting that aside, what is, and that's driving a lot of services, by the way, we're seeing that adoption. What are you seeing as the number one, two, and three, if you, at the stack, rank the solution demand by your customer base out there? As you guys go to market and bring all this together, what are the top three solutions that are on the top of the list for your partners? Well, interestingly, so again, Dell World behind me, the way it's architected is actually the five biggest pay points we hear every day, right? And you look behind me and security runs through all of them. So, whatever the topic is today, whether that's BYOD and consumerization, they'll talk about security. Whether that's cloud do, whether you're kind of in convergence, virtualization convergence to cloud security. When we look at social media and these other forces, these are the things that we hear every day. But again, you know, what it goes down to is also, help me figure out how I can actually invest in that. And in order to help them do that, we have to make them more efficient with their IT infrastructures today, right? So, the idea of getting. We're getting the hook here, but I want to just go back and just give you a 30 seconds for the last word. We've been impressed with Dell's solution. They've always been customer centric. Michael was talking about that. Share with the folks, the bumper sticker for Dell solutions or the quick summary of what they need to know about what's going on with the Dell solutions marketing right now for what you're doing. So, the big soundbite I would have and the reason we do Dell World is, I really don't believe that people understand how much we do today. And. It's mind-boggling. And I just think that they could walk through the solutions I spoke today, and it will be the one quote we'll always get. I had no idea you did this. So, how many people real quick are here on the show? Do you have a number? Do you have any numbers? We're north of 5,000 customers and partners. 5,000. Given the keynote that we saw today where we had to move people out of there, that was set for over 5,000. Well, you guys are definitely viewed as a tier one player on both the hardware and solution set. Obviously servers are growing. Marius was talking about that yesterday. And again, Michael was talking about 64,000 servers away from being number one worldwide. So, business is good. And I think that's a good package. You guys have congratulations. And thanks for having theCUBE here. We really appreciate it. We've had a great first day so far. We had all day tomorrow. And Marius is going to come on. We hear Michael Dell's making that happen. So, we really appreciate it. Well, we appreciate you guys coming. I mean, I know that Michael absolutely wanted to make sure that you were here and experienced it. So, thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. It's the ESPN of Tech. Talking game day here at Dell World. A lot of action options in the data center. Actions in the consumer experience. At the end of the day, it's all about putting together to build business value in the IT consumerization trend. I'm John Furrier, SiliconANGLE. We'll be right back with our next guest at the short break.