 Good morning, John, Michael Beach. Michael. Hi, John, Bob Skelly. Hey, Bob. Pleased to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. Is this your first time on theCUBE? Yes, that is mine. So basically, we just want to learn more about what you're doing. We want to hear what's new and exciting for you. We want to talk a little bit about the integration and channel strategy. You guys were both involved in channel. Enabling a very loyal channel, as I understand it. Yeah, indeed. I think Phil said he was almost in tears talking about one of his channel partners this morning. So it sounds like Phil. So he's very touchy-feely. And then we had Darren Thomas who's talking about charitable giving. So tell me your role and... Sure. So before the acquisition, I was vice president of sales and channel operations for Compellant. And since February 22nd, when Dell acquired Compellant, I've been working primarily on integration of our channel programs with Bob and some of the other folks in the GCC organization and continue to manage things for Dell for the Compellant business like order management and after-point-of-sales, support renewals, channel operations, deal registrations, things like that. Yeah, okay. And I joined Dell a little three and a half years ago, almost four years ago, as part of the Ecologic Acquisition. So I was running channels for Ecologic, came on to run the Global Certified Partner Program in channel at Dell. And Michael and I worked very closely together as we integrated the Compellant acquisition as well. So continue to run the Certified Partner Program, bringing in all of those Compellant resellers into our Stored Certified Program as preferred and premier partners and trying to bring some great programs up to that. What's it take to become a preferred, premier partner, certified partner, premier partner? Yeah, so we have multiple certification areas, storage, server, networking and security, systems management and managed services. And we ask a partner to invest in one of those competencies through sales and technical training and complete that training and that gets you to our preferred partner level. And then if you invest in multiple certification areas and you have a higher revenue threshold with Dell and you've made some other commitments around some solutions training, you can actually be a premier partner. Okay, okay. How many premier partners do you have today? We have 2,500 preferred partners or certified partners globally. And about 10% of those are premier. Right, all right. So what should we be paying attention to here at the show? What's, from your perspective, what's the biggest thing? There's an awful lot of buzz here at the show. I'm hearing from channel partners that are very excited now to have a full Dell storage platform to be able to sell. Partners who used to be just a compelling partner, partners who maybe were just an equal logic partner previously are learning a lot this week about the other product families and the enormous opportunity that's out there to solve more customer problems. And they're, I've had a couple of people today tell me about how evangelistic our customers are. Yeah. The equal logic customers and the Dell compelling customers are thrilled with the products and thrilled with the support that they're getting from the support organization. So there's a lot of buzz here at the show. Where does, where does compelling take Dell that they couldn't go before? So you said, talk about solving problems. What kind of problems can you solve today with compelling that you couldn't solve before? The thing that really differentiates the compelling product are a couple of things. One, it's a very scalable, very modular architecture so that you can have a multitude of choices in terms of the input and output on the front end of the storage area network. And you also have just as many choices in terms of the kinds of disk technologies you can use to store data in the arrays. And that's a unique thing that allows us to go further into the enterprise. I think that's probably a great way to position what compelling does is we can probably go further into the enterprise with the compelling product. There's a lot of investment in the equilogic platform as well that's going on. You can talk a little bit about that from your perspective and what that means to your channel partners. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we've been doubling our engineering and R&D efforts around equilogic for some time now. We're doing the same type of investment around the compelling platform. And we're going to continue to innovate. And one of the themes here that you see throughout is this concept of fluid. And I think what you're going to see is more and more we're going to bring really a seamless storage portfolio to our customers and to our channel partners where they can engage with Dell across a broad line of storage products and that it'll be this fluid technology and these products will work together. And new innovation will work across all platforms. And that's pretty exciting. And so as we embark on this transformational mission of Dell to become a more thought leader and more innovative and really a stronger enterprise player, this is a core part of that whole strategy. What the server platform together with the storage makes a nice bundle to be able to go in and are most of your partners selling servers and stores today or some of the storage specific partners? We definitely have storage specific partners but a huge percentage of those storage partners that we brought over through the equilogic acquisition and I'll expect that we'll see the same with the compelling partners have now gone a lot wider across a broad range of Dell products. Server certainly is a natural next step but even into client products, desktops and laptops and networking and security products at Dell, certainly the storage server fit is really clean and we see a lot of partners doing both. Yeah, I would agree, I would echo what Bob just said. I've talked to a handful of partners that were only compelling partners maybe three or four months ago that are really excited now because they've now got a great storage platform to sell that's additional to the one they had before. Plus they've got servers and a whole host of other things like management software and you name it. It's really been one of the most exciting things for me at this event has been talking to the compelling partners and so many of them are coming up to me this week and saying, you know what? We came in here a little bit unsure and now I get it and now I see the opportunity. This is exciting. Mike Gluck, you guys know Mike Gluck? He came, so Mike came up to me. He told me he closed his first equal logic deal. He's been a talent partner for a while. Thanks Mike. Yeah, thank you Mike. It was an expansion of the opportunity. It wasn't over, it wasn't in lieu of, it was an expansion of the opportunity. So that's great. My sense was that a couple months ago when the deal was announced, a lot of our partners and probably a lot of the existing Dell partners heard about this new or bigger, better together opportunity and we're having a hard time putting tangible results to it. Now they're starting to see that it's a really big opportunity. Yeah, and I heard some concern around, you know, how much was, they're going to continue to invest in the equal logic platform, things like that. I think Laz has done a good job of dispelling some of that, is any of that concern? Yeah, Laz is a great man and that's a great engineering team up in Nashua, New Hampshire and we are investing a tremendous amount around innovation on our existing platforms and then through acquisition, we're bringing new IP in. Bringing in a scalable file system. Absolutely. That's already in that and the Power Vault line eventually going to be in the Compellent line maybe. That's right. Yeah. Data compression and deduplication with our Ocarina investment when that comes to fruition, there's so much more on the horizon. Are you seeing a lot of demand for deduplication that you'll be able to serve up with that? Is that? Absolutely. That comes up a lot. Yeah, very definitely. Yeah, very important. How soon do you want to see that come out? Yesterday. Tomorrow or yesterday, yeah. I'm sure it's a tough one to integrate but you did the acquisition, you did the Ocarina acquisition. I think that was maybe. 2010. Yeah. 2010 maybe around the wire or something like that. Yeah. You know, when you bring these intellectual properties, you have to do it right. Right. That's the most important thing. It's not a race to get the technology out there. It's a mission to get it out and get it right and bring incremental value to the products that we already have. And so that doesn't happen overnight and I think the team's making great progress and we look forward to the product innovation that comes out of it. Yeah, the startups don't always test all the edge conditions completely do that. So, but they do innovate faster, right? Absolutely. So I think some of the core competency of it. We've got some really exciting things about that Ocarina technology this morning in the keynote. Did you? I was really excited to hear that there are unique algorithms that are going to enable them to compress the data further than the run-of-the-mill algorithms that are on the market. So that'll help you in deals where data domains competing today or some of the others. It'll deliver a lot of efficiency to customers that are replicating across oceans and so forth. It'll really be a helpful technology. Yeah, we think there's characteristics about this technology that are very unique in terms of the data duplication and compression environment and we think that it could be a huge competitive advantage to Dell in the future. Remote replication. Do you have resellers that are really focused on delivering disaster recovery capabilities? Certainly, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. A lot of small data centers. A lot of resellers that are providing business continuity services maybe in their data center. They're doing disaster recovery, planning, business continuity, consulting and... Application hosting. Yeah. Hosting exchange for customers. You saw a lot of hosting providers. Absolutely. And they could be large hosting providers but very small boutique companies that might have a relatively small data center but with all the power and cooling and redundancy that you see in a big data center and they're going out to these small and mid-sized customers and they're providing hosting services and application hosting and disaster recovery and backup and a whole bunch of other remote redundant services to their customer base. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. Those kind of services, John, I think are where our channel partners really shine. They've got the advantage of being able to look at all the technologies that are available in the marketplace and to deliver a unique approach to each customer that they talk to and now with Dell on this acquisition path acquiring all these great IP technologies, they've just got more and more things to bring to solve problems. So it's exciting. And they can specialize. Absolutely. We have a partner that we've been working with for a long time down in the Southeast that they understand the railroad industry. End to end. They understand all the problems that the railroad industry is up against. They understand managing data in the railroad industry. They understand that brick and mortar in the railroad industry isn't a common thing. And so they provide a whole bunch of hosting and data center services to that whole industry that are very unique and that you don't see a lot of companies doing. And that's what the channel community can bring is at level of specialization and intimacy in businesses. There are areas where Dell has a lot of competency in terms of some verticals. So you've been big in their government and education and health, right? You bet. Absolutely. But do you work through partners on that or do you work that direct? How is that? Both. Absolutely. Yep. Channel is involved across all segments, all market opportunities with Dell. Right. You know, I've talked about this this week several times but if you took our channel business and separated it from Dell as a standalone business, its own separate entity and its own company, it would be number 350 on the Fortune 500 list. And so, and that would be 100% channel company, 350 on the Fortune 500 list. So we're big in the channel and we're in a lot of places. There are a lot of conceptions around Dell and the channel. So, and we talked about Equalogic, we talked about Compellant, they were 100% channel, right? When they launched, that was from day one. I remember going to C3 and it was all about enabling the delivery of solutions through the channel. Have you educated Dell? Has Dell educated you? Yes, both. Absolutely. How's that? I've been pleasantly surprised. I mean, I joined Dell on February 23rd, the day after we were acquired. And you read a lot of things in the press that Dell's not that channel friendly. And frankly, I found the exact opposite to be true. This is a team that has deep talent, broad talent. There are people that have a tremendous amount of experience with channel programs, understand the unique dynamics of how to go to market with channel models. Bob and his team have created a stellar channel program that we rolled out on May 9th that I think is getting wide acclaimed. And we've learned a lot from our colleagues in the channel's organization at Dell. And hopefully we've brought a couple of pieces of value along the way. We were thrilled that Dell decided to embrace Compellant's registration program advantages. We've got a new policy that's been spread across all of Dell's storage called Extended Deal Registration Protection, which recognizes that a reseller really makes a pretty big investment in time and money to go after new business. And if all they get is that first deal, then they don't ever really get the full opportunity to get a return on investment. So what we've done together is we've made it across the storage platform, our policy that when you win business for Dell's storage, you're going to be put in an advantageous position to keep the registration for that opportunity for as long a time as you keep that customer satisfied so that you've got a great chance to get an ROI. Great. As a reseller. Mike, Bob, thank you for joining me on the queue. Thank you. Pleasure. I really appreciate it. I appreciate getting the perspective on the Dell channel and how you guys are pulling it together. Thanks very much. Take care. Take care.