 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE and our continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Mario Soss is here. He's the president and chief commercial officer of Dell EMC. Great to see you again. Dave, great to see you. Stu, wonderful. You're looking good. Business is good. The commercial business is cracking, particularly impressive in servers and networking, but the whole business is just really booming. What's going on? We're very pleased with the progress that we're making and I think from a, you look at it last year and the share gain that we'll be able to have and all the key lines of business, the transformation stories are real and enabling our customers to progress in the journeys that they're on into a digital transformation movement, into an IT transformation movement, a workforce transformation, security transformation. Every one of our portfolio elements plays a role in that and it's resonating well. We're doing, we're aligning our team members to best serve our customers. Our partner community has really stepped up and performed really well around the globe as well. So we see every region doing quite nicely. And just to clarify for our audience, the commercial business is not the top of the pyramid, it's sort of everything else. Maybe you could just... If you think about it, take the top 3,000 accounts around the globe, it's the top of the pyramid as you said. So everything below that. So you take all public sector, you take so federal and then here in the US also department of defense, we've got a big customer in NATO and Europe as an example, all commercial accounts. And then in addition to that, I also have the pleasure of hosting our channel program. So we wanted to make sure we had two amazing channel teams when we brought the company together. We wanted to have one channel team, one program driving simplicity, driving a predictable engagement model and obviously making extremely profitable for our partners. So that was the objective and it's all starting to come together very nicely. So a channel, obviously a critical component of your business. Maybe talk a little bit more about that. You brought in sort of EMC's channel piece, your channel piece, those things evolve. I mean, every five years the whole channel business changes, the cloud changed everything. So how have you dealt with that? How would you describe the sort of state of your channel business? I think, let me start by, the first thing you want to make sure you do is that you align every single one of your core assets, which is inclusive of our team members as well as our partner team members towards how do we best cover the total time. It's a three and a half billion, almost three and a half trillion dollar addressable market, large account base, well over 500,000 that we've got as named accounts around the globe and they can imagine all the other small medium businesses as well. So first thing we did is ensure that we understood how do we best cover those accounts with our team members and that how do you best augment with a complimentary coverage model with our partners. And then, now that you have the ability to get more at bats with more customers, then how do you make sure that you present the best possible plays or solutions that solve their key business problems? And being able to do all of that, refining all of that takes a lot of time and effort, but once you've got those levers and pulling them right, you just start to see the progression and the nice momentum that we, for example, see today. Marius, what are some of the key concerns that you're hearing from the consumer clients that you have? Is it the digital transformation that we heard in the keynote? You know, how much is that pervasive across every company these days? Well, there's no doubt. I think every customer in every industry is going through some transformation today. They're choosing Dell Technologies as a partner of choice for them. The first question is, help me assess where I am in that journey. And then how do I translate or how do I intersect that journey with the right technology so that I can now move forward? And many a times it starts with the conversation around, how do I become a digital company? How do I transform my applications into a native cloud application-based model that can reside on any OS, on any cloud anywhere? You talked to Pat earlier today from VMware, clearly a big push for what they're doing. That conversation is typically the first one we have, but then very quickly it translates also into, well, what are the core infrastructure components that I need in order to be able to modernize it, automate it, and then start to orchestrate service levels so that I've got the best optimized infrastructure to be able to deliver those applications and those services to my constituencies. So your relationship with clients since the integration has evolved. I mean, when you think about Dell, the Dell brand, EMC's long-term relationships, VMware, and then the other business, RSA, Pivotal, Dell Financial Services, you bring a lot to the table. Maybe talk about how you use that as a competitive weapon. Well, I think it's a, the ability that we have now to transform the business problem conversation into here's how you solve it with technology and here all the components and solutions that we have, and we bring that together in a business problem-solving manner. That's where, it's what we call the art of the possible. It truly transformed the way we have the conversation with our customers and truly puts us in a position to be a strategic partner of choice. And how about the cross-selling, the cohort selling? How has that transpired? How much of a lift is that to your business? Maybe you could give us some color there. I'll give you a little bit of a sense. One of the things we obviously we did during the integration planning when we still had to operate as two separate companies was how can we dissect all the accounts that we have? How much of our, in every one of these accounts, how many of our lines of business have we sold into those accounts? So from a planning perspective, we were able to get ready for the cross-sell enablement as soon as we became one company. That truly put us in a position where once the clock started ticking, the teams went off and running. They knew exactly which accounts to go pursue. They knew exactly what solutions that would be offering to the customers. And our team members came together very nicely. We compensated them to go bring together a single architecture strategy. So all of those pieces were all part of the planning cycle that once we were able to execute, people were running at a fast, fast pace. So that requires some leadership. We were sort of talking off camera about some of the complexities of bringing two large organizations together, EMC for years, belly to belly, those guys love account control. You've had your organization and you were hitting a groove swing before the merger. So how did you address that cultural sort of mix? Well, I think what, the cultures actually were a lot more similar than people expected. I think we've talked about this before where we put all of our cultural traits and asked every single one of our team members, I think it went out to 75,000 of our team members that said, rank these 27 cultural traits in order. And the top five were exactly the same and in exact same order from both cultures, which was impressive. And the first thing was always about embrace the customer. So when we then go through and said to our team members, okay, we're going to align by our customers and then make sure that we've got an account exec, we've got a pre-sales team, we've got a specialty organization that is all aligned towards how do we best serve this customer and then make it a very scalable model. All of a sudden you see that engine start to click in. You start, the team members starting to realize that we're going to win together as long as we win the hearts and minds of our customers. And that was a truly a differentiator in the process. Marius, one of the themes in the keynote this morning, Michael talked about the pace of change. We want you to address how the channel is dealing with this pace of change because I think about when, you know, converged infrastructure first rolled out as cloud over the last 10 years has come out. It's been challenging for, you know, some of the channel to work their way through where they add value, where they make dollars. You know, what are you seeing out there and how are you helping the channel, you know, through their own transformation? Yeah, so we're kicking off our global channel summit today. This afternoon, George Mullen is our channel chief. She's going to have Michael on stage. Willie Scannell, myself, will be there with her as well. You see over 60% of what we call our metal partner, so these are titanium and so forth, grew well into the double digits with us. So these are the majority of our partners that have understood how to embrace a solution orientation with our full portfolio. They're selling more lines of business. We added and reactivated 54,000 customers just this past year alone. That's a big number. And so what they're finding is, is again, embracing the transformations, embracing the portfolio and becoming a lot more relevant to the customer journey. And we've seen nothing but success so far, so we've been very, very happy. So you have to position yourself with the channel. Obviously, it's relevant. And then of course, at the end of the day, they care about margin, they care about things like deal registration. How complicated was it to bring those two different systems together? And it seems like you've done it pretty quickly, but... We've done a good job. Now, we had plenty of time to get ready for it too. Now, as systems go, you know, that's never perfect. So there were still opportunities for us to improve the deal registration process. We got well over 70% of the inquiries coming in are getting approved right away. And then you still got to work long tail of the 30%. And how do you try to do that in a frictionless manner as quickly as possible? We've got SLAs that we've deployed for every one of our partners, so they know exactly how long it'll take to get a deal ready done. In some instances, it's automatic where they've got a line of business and come as see for example. So trying to put as many rules into the process to make sure that we have a very efficient, effective engine. Now, we're still in the process of consolidating all our quoting and config engine site. You know, I think you're familiarized with the EMC engine was an SAP-based model. The Dell Core engine is an Oracle-based model. Well, bringing those configurations, engines together isn't something you do overnight. So what can we do to mask some of that complexity to our partners by giving them an SLA that truly enables them to compete effectively across the globe? And we get better and better and better at it to the point that our partners are feeling obviously able to grow, obviously are being in a position to be extremely competitive with us. So I'm guessing you masked that with people in process. Some of that, yes. And we continue to invest significantly in our IT infrastructure to continue to improve that. Right, right. Okay, so what's going on in this show? You talked about the Partner Summit. What else should we know about? Partner Summit, obviously you heard Michael's keynote. He was signaling some of the new technology announcements that will be made tomorrow. Jeff Clark is going to have an amazing keynote and he's going to launch a number of new products, new solutions, new updates, basically across the full portfolio. So, hey, close attention. I'm glad you brought up Jeff Clark because he's not been shy about talking about simplifying the program. I mean, you've done very well despite the fact that storage businesses not held up to expectations. So you've got some upside there. Jeff has come in and said, we're going to simplify this. And so that could potentially add fuel to the fire in the next 12 months. I think, and he'll certainly help for sure. And it's all about how do we simplify? How do we streamline? How do we accelerate the pace of innovation? How do we create a more consistent management orchestration layer across all of our storage assets as an example? And he's marching down that path at a feverish pace. So we're extremely excited about all of the things that are going to really enable us as sales makers to present an even better portfolio to our customers. But look, in the fourth quarter, we grew storage. We've seen that same momentum continuing in the first quarter. So we're feeling pretty bullish about where we're heading. And I was, you know, we were pretty bold. And then our communications to our channel partners say, hey, this ought to be a refuse to lose approach. All right, we're number one in storage today. Our customers have voted to be, to have us as part of their solution. So let's make sure that we embrace them. Let's make sure we bring them the best technology possible. Yeah. Marius, one of the things people on the outside often don't notice some of the big changes that happen inside company. We remember back when you joined Dell, you know, it's gone through the whole privatization. We've had this huge merger. How is Dell different today than it was when you joined just a few years back? Make you believe it. It's been six years ago. I think that's when we probably first met, right? And it's, again, the magnitude shift in what this portfolio can now do for our customers, it's mind-boggling. It's just unimaginable six years ago. Yes, we had great technology in the clients that we are making great strides on the compute side. We were starting to make hay in the networking side, starting to progress on the storage side. And we've just now completely changed the industry landscape where I don't have a conversation today with a customer where there isn't an opportunity that they want to engage with. Not a single customer said, I'm not interested in working with Dell technologies. It just doesn't exist. I think the stat is 99% of our Fortune 500 customers are Dell customers, Dell technologies customers. Well, it's hard not to bump into Dell when you walk into an account. I mean, it's virtually impossible in some way shape or form. That's a good thing, right? That's true. Yes, yeah. When your customers, particularly in the commercial area, go home and they write up their trip report. What are their takeaways? What do you want them to take away from this event? I'd say it's a place your bets on Dell technologies. That's the right partner for you. It's going to move you and your company into being future ready all the time. Michael's got the right vision of where this is going. He's got the right technology to do it and we've got great team members to help you get there. Marius, you look great. You got a winning spring in your step, so congratulations and I know there's a lot more to go. You're not done yet and we'll be watching. So thanks so much for coming on the team. There's always more to do. Dave, good to see you. Yeah, it's still awesome, great. All right, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We'll be back right after this short break.