 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. This is day three of wall-to-wall coverage. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jeremy Byrd, who's the president of EMC's products and marketing and also the newly appointed CMO of soon-to-be Dell Technologies of the Merger. Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. Our seventh year, we started in 2010 when you started at EMC. So we've had a deluxory and pleasure to be on your journey and sizzling up EMC's brand, making it fun, relevant, and now certainly a whole nother chapter is coming on. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you. And I'm always relieved to come on theCUBE because usually I come in at the end of the week. So it always feels like. A little relaxed, loosened up, we can ask any question, get all the data out of your head. So the first question is obviously a CMO of the new entity. You know, you've had a great run here. You transformed EMC and you've done a lot of things. A lot of cool things, some stuff that you experimented with and just some basic blocking and tackling, cleaning up the brand. I remember CloudMeets Big Day, your first initiative, and from there it's been on a tear. This show has been, even with the merger looming, it's still relevant. How are you thinking about going forward? I know you probably say, I don't think I'm sure you do, but let's share with your thoughts. Because you've got to start thinking, okay, I've got bigger budget. What's it going to look like? What's the thoughts going through your head right now? Yeah, I mean, look, the, first of all, the broad Dell family, Dell Technologies, as Michael called it, it's a real opportunity and a real challenge. And people ask me, hey, so you know, you're going to stick around. You're going to do the big company thing or continue to do it. Yeah, because it's probably the biggest tech company in the world, right? Enterprise B2B tech, I'm not talking about. So that is very interesting. And look, there's a chance to, I think reinvent or redefine the company. I think nobody's got a real preconceived idea about what Dell Technologies is or could become. And so in some level, although there are preconceived ideas about both Dell and EMC, what that adds up to and what it stands for in future, I think is still to be- So we're going to be done there. A lot of work. Right, so from a marketing standpoint, you know, why is this interesting? You can recast, there's an opportunity to recast the company. And that's what I'm jazzed about. How do we recast the company, make it or continue to make it relevant to the future? And if we're successful, then I think we've got a, you know, a real shot at doing well. So when you came to EMC though, you were known, you know, you had a reputation as a creative individual, not afraid to put up a banner here, here, there. And then when you came in the cube in 2010, you said, yeah, listen, we're a big company. We're going to start acting like one. You changed a lot of things. And the conventional wisdom was, no way they'll be able to keep Jeremy. He's in Silicon Valley, so many people are going to be, you must have had tons of offers, tons of interesting things. How did it come about? Share with us what you can, the conversation with you and Michael to put you over the edge. I mean, a lot of it for me is about the people, right? And I really like the EMC team. I mean, the reason why I came to EMC, not just it was an interesting company and it was kind of EMC and VMware and so on, but I met guys like Joe Tucci, David Goulden, Paul Moritz. And that group of people, you think, okay, I can learn from those guys. And I have to say, you know, I mean, Dell by name, Dell by company, Michael Dell is the guy who runs the show. I've never worked with Michael. Meeting him for the first time is a very humble guy. And, but he's a technical guy. And I just think he, you know, he's a guy I could work with. And, you know, he's just, he's another one. I've been very fortunate. I've worked with, you know, viewers with, you know, Larry Ellison and John Thompson and, you know, Joe Tucci and so Michael Dell seems like the kind of guy I can work with. He likes to execute, he's an executor. Right, he wants to get stuff done. And look, this is a maybe once in a lifetime opportunity. You've got a $80 billion high tech company that you can redefine. I mean, it's a scary challenge. But I, you know, if work wasn't a challenge, I wouldn't do it, you know? As long as there's a challenge there, then that's what motivates me to come to work. And they still throw up a lot of cash flow. Obviously a huge, it's a huge, now I'd say B2B conglomerate over tech. Great assets and people, I mean, the normal stuff we'll probably have, but you got to figure out the brand, you go through the exercises. But a lot of people are wondering, you know, what is going the future going to be? Certainly, it's a growth story. Michael's not doing it, you know, to turn around. It's not a turnaround. It's a, it's go private and retool to grow massively. He said that on the Cube scale up. It's his company. I mean, one of the things I noticed, probably more so Oracle because, you know, I was one of the founders there and he very much defined the company. I think it's the same at Dell. And the other attractive thing for me is like, this is not a company, this is Michael's company. And he's the founder and he cares deeply about it. And you're like, all right, a guy with that kind of passion for the business. He works like a crazy man, like no one I've ever seen before. And so he's playing to win. And so from my perspective, I'm like, okay, I want to be on his team. Let's see where this thing can go. You know? Founder led company is always great. So, do we have to get rid of our Macs? Are we buying the Cube as well? We used to get heat at some shows. Michael, that's going to be a sticking point for the Cube. Well, we do tell world. I'm sure we could show you some Dell laptops that are a lot better than all the technology. Come on, Michael, come on. He's a Dell. We need our Budweiser sponsor, like big, big sponsor. No, but I don't know all seriousness. I mean, we're talking about a rebranding and there was one little nuance. I'll say Dell Technologies, a big announcement that Michael made. And it was kind of funny and clever. How he said, oh, I have a family name. It's great. Founder led company, I get that. But the EMC portion is a big part of it. David Gould is going to run the show there. You're going to still have the EMC Dell brand or Dell EMC. I mean, also you must have some thoughts on how EMC branding might fit with that. Because is there a space? Is it a hashtag? Is it the two in there? I mean, is it Dell uppercase? I mean... Well, so I think retaining the EMC brand is very important. And I'm not, obviously been an EMC employee. Maybe I would say that. But look, the customers that we deal with in the enterprise, certainly great technology, but service is everything. There is nothing that EMC won't do for customers in trouble. And I think it's a great trait of the company that dates right back to the Dick Egan days. I mean, it's only before my time, but Joe's and David have carried on that tradition. And so that's very important to the customers that we deal with. And if we're to make this successful, I think we've got to keep what EMC is good at. And we've got to keep what Dell is good at. And Dell is proven to be a real formidable force driving a volume business in the mid-market. We can't compromise that. And EMC has been a force in the enterprise offering great customer service. And so, I think just for the customer base, the Dell EMC together is a, you know, it is a comfort factor. How it's spelled, what the logo looks like, I mean, I don't know yet. How about the events? I mean, in different communities, I don't know if you've been to Dell World, we've done it a few times, Austin Vibe. Relatively new, I think it only started in 2012. Have you given any thought, I'm sure you have, but can you share with us your thoughts on, you know, keeping those two? What's the branding challenge that you have there? We're going to keep EMC world as it is and grow it? Yeah, I've got to probably do it justice, find out a little bit more. My sense is that you probably have a bigger, deeper technical community at EMC World, whereas you tend to get more of an IT management community at Dell World. Hey, not a bad thing. You know, one wants hardcore technical content, the other one wants much more, you know, strategy. I think it makes sense to have, you know, one big show, I'm a huge fan of doing that. Why? Because we can bring the key people out of engineering here. We can bring our executive team. If customers want to hear about strategy, we can do it right here. But every year as well, we've had a series called the EMC Forum. So all that you see around here, we package it up and we take it on the road and we do a smaller scale version of it in about, you know, sometimes 30, 40, 50 countries. So I'd love to, you know, kind of take Dell World and EMC World and hey, what does a single conference look like? Let's take a look at that and how can we accommodate both communities? And then how do we scale that around the world? Because, you know, the combined company is big and in some of these countries around the world, we're big. And so we should have a decent size show going on there as well. And it's an opportunity for the Dell and EMC teams and the partner ecosystems, I think, to get together as well. In your key notes and all your preparation for this event, talk about the dynamic around the Dell EMC philosophies and also cultural and also their core competencies. You have, you know, and I asked Michael this, they went from personal computers and kind of moved into direct, direct, you know, mail and obviously direct business model and then scaled up to the enterprise. So they went into the enterprise, EMC's always dominated the enterprise. Now the opportunity is to get personal again with IoT and you've got wearables. So it's kind of interesting, you're already at the enterprise and down in preparing for the show, what have you learned about Dell in particular around their fit? Because they do have great SMB. Yeah, they're incredibly operational, I'd say. Meaning, I think any volume business, you've got to be maniacal about what it takes to get product, price, position promoted in market, what's going to drive demand and, you know, instrument the whole thing. You know, I'd say in the enterprise space, it's a little bit less regimented. I mean, remember from my Oracle days when I would barely ever sit in pricing meetings because Larry would always say, well, look, the pricing is expensive or it's free. They were the two prices. No, you can't do that with a volume business. But if you're an enterprise business and you go through enterprise sales, people, the customers who have an enterprise budget, then it's a question of, well, what's the value of this to you? It's a relationship and it's a negotiation. You can't do that in a volume, you can't afford to do it in a volume business. So again, I think we've just, we've got to be very, very careful to not lose the magic of the Dell operational strength in the mid-market. At the same time, we've got to not lose the magic of what EMC does in the enterprise. And I think if we can protect those, that's where the value comes from. Yeah, and everyone wants to know, you and I were talking, yes, we did a crowd chat, asked me anything. And we were kind of talking after around Virtustream. I saw Rodney on earlier and I want to get your perspective on this because it's kind of product but also teases about the future. You're talking about cloud native here. Dell has a lot of gear that powers that. I mean, everyone wants you to say, oh, Virtustream's our Amazon. You know, we talked about it, but that's not the case. Clarify, take a minute to clarify the cloud strategy for you or the lack of cloud strategy or what is the cloud oriented strategy? Hybrid's the big one, but specifically the Virtustream, what does it mean? And it's not an Amazon kind of thing. The thing that attracted us to Virtustream was that they were doing things that no other cloud provider was doing. And it's that old adage of, don't sell, differentiate, right? They had to differentiate it offering because they were going to SAP customers and saying, would you like the advantage of a cloud-based IaaS, capacity-based pricing, oh, and by the way, we'll automate your SAP landscape and that's going to drive down your OPEX costs as well. And it was very, very focused and we're like, okay, that's something which isn't going to be done by an Amazon or a Google or an Azure any time soon. And of course, there's not just SAP, there's Oracle apps, there's Epic, there's a bunch of ways that you can go there. Those traditional workloads. Traditional workloads, but with a public cloud value proposition. Guaranteed service level response time, so on and so forth. So that was interesting. And then we started to think, well, okay, we're leveraging a strength. As you move more towards building out an object star and something that potentially would be a competitor with Amazon S3, we can't do the build it and they will come. We can't just build an object star and say, hey, developers, come use it because they wouldn't come because they're all going to Amazon. And so for us, the thing that's close to home that can make use of that object star is tiering primary storage and archiving backup copies. And so first base really was to build the on ramps to VirtuaStream to make sure that we could seamlessly move the data off to the VirtuaStream storage cloud. And for now at least, that might be the only use case that we go after. So you got a current solution today and you'll figure out the rest later. We're going to build a business and then we'll grow it from there. But that's a key, it's an integrated solution. Yeah, you're offering. Right, we're selling storage and backup, we're not selling cloud. Cloud's a feature. So I got to ask, with the last couple of minutes that we have, I want to get the final question in because in interacting with you over the years, you always have something that you're learning. There's always something on the Jeremy desk that's kind of like your little project and what you think about it could be something creative, clever or something new. And in marketing, you always have a good instincts. What's on your desk right now? That's not part of your core execution, but like you're thinking a lot about it. That's marketing related. Is it social business? Is it a new way to market? What's on your, what's sauteing around your brain around what you want to do? Technology was excites you. Now, I mean, right now I have to say, so we did the motion capture in the session yesterday. Virtual reality is coming on really fast. And you could just see by the reaction yesterday. Yeah, partly it's new, but it opens up a whole, if you can place yourself in a virtual world, just think what that can do to explain complex technology. And I loved what John Landau was saying in the system in the session today. You know, when you ask him what his favorite movie is, he doesn't tell you. He says, look, I'm a storyteller. I like all movies. And technology is just a way for me to tell a better story. And so I think if you're in tech marketing, if you're not looking at new tech as a way to tell a better story, then you're not a good tech marketer. And so for me, virtual reality, I really think is a new frontier. It's still a little bit clunky, as was evidenced by our software not working at 5.30 a.m. before the keynote. We're off without a hitch, basically. Everybody, I'll tell you this. The only time that motion capture works, flawlessly, was in the session. Even in the rehearsal at 8 a.m., it wasn't working. But the impact of it is huge because you can transport people. I always love the holodeck on Star Trek. The holodeck is not that far away. So anything that looks like a holodeck, like I want to spend time on that. That was cool. I mean, you jumping around to the heat sink and the power supply and the flash. So I got to ask you the same question you asked John Landau. What was your favorite keynote? You know, I really, I mean, I enjoyed doing today just because it was less stressful than yesterday. And I've always liked to do the videos. And, you know, again, if you can take a fun theme and something that everybody relates to, everybody knows the Goldfinger laser theme. If you can wind in there a arch enemy, a competitor, and you can get some relevant technology content. I mean, I think that mix is a secret for great tech market. And it can't just be a fun video and it can't just be tech content. It's got to be a mix of the three. And you guys do a great job in talking to your team and you're knowing how you guys design it. If you get the joke you're in on with EMC, it's a great way to connect something fun with the theme. It's really sticky, so it's a really, really good job. And again, I agree with on Star Trek, by the way. Everything we've said on the queue, everything in Star Trek will be invented at some point. Making magical food or what, it's all going to happen. Everything that happened on Star Trek will be invented. Jeremy, great to have you. Okay, I know you're super busy. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. And supporting the awesomeness of the free content that we do at theCUBE and all the stuff that you guys do. Really, really, really cutting edge and congratulating. So I'll give you the final word for the folks watching. Share with them what this show's all about. I'll see everyone's been talking about the Dell EMC merger and what that might be looking like. But there's a real show going on here. What is the show all about this year? It's really, I mean, we've got the marketing theme which is modernize and what we're trying to do there is say to folks, hey, look, if you can't get your head around a cloud yet, that's okay. A no regrets move is to look at your infrastructure and figure out where you can modernize. Look, if it's based on this today, make it flash. If you're running predominantly scale up architectures, look at scale out. If you just deploy storage arrays, you know, look at software defined. So it's really trying to get people to think, like there is a practical and pragmatic way to get into that cloud strategy which is ultimately, it's going to be a foundation for the business that you create in future. And I think this show has always been about the technology and certainly as long as I'm, I have anything to do with it. First and foremost, it'll be about the development teams delivering those 500 sessions and the education team delivering certification, I think. And actually coming on strong, the most sold out session of the week has been EMC code. I never thought that would have been the case, but we've had to turn people away from EMC code. That's a lot of the cloud native stuff. So to me, why are people going there? High quality technical content. And if we keep that at our core, then I think we'll do pretty well because in the new world, I think a lot of the decisions are made bottom up. We keep the tech community happy. I think we just- It's a demand for modernization right now. It's everyone who wants to modernize, right? Right, and they want to know how, you know. Jeremy Burden, congratulations. Again, the new CMO of Dell Technologies, when that happens, it's been great. We'll continue to track and follow the progress of the new opportunity. Again, once in a lifetime, it's a real historic event. Biggest tech merger in history. Michael Dell, founder, still young. Got a spring to his staff and still strong. So it should be a good run, looking forward to being on the front rope, watching that take place. Congratulations to Cube here at EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE. Looking back at the-