 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, it's a beautiful day here in Las Vegas and this is theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Minin and happy to welcome, fresh off the keynote stage and the first time on our program, Jeff Clark, who is the Vice Chairman of Products and Operations at Dell Technologies. Jeff, great to see you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks Stu, thanks for having me. All right, so first of all, Jeff, you'll be a cube alone when we finish this, so for our audience that's not familiar- Did I get a badge? I've got a sticker for you, actually. Sticker of work? Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your background. You've been at Dell for a number of years. You now own really kind of the client and ISG businesses. Sure. Which is a huge chunk of Michael's business. Give us your background. I'm an electrical engineer by training. I went to the University of Texas at San Antonio and got my double E degree. Out of school, went to work for Motorola and I joined what was PC's limited when that was the first private name of Dell. And in 1987, I've been here for 31 years and I've done a variety of things, all on the engineering and product side. I've had the fortunate opportunity. I started in the factory as a process slash test slash quality slash reliability engineers. We were jacks of many trades at that time. Went to product development in 1989 and have been in that side ever since. I've worked in every kind of product that we had at the core design roles. I got to start a business, one of the funnest things I've ever done. I started the precision business in 1997. From ground zero, me and a few of our top engineers and building that into the business that it is today. Expanded responsibilities, had a stint of running our enterprise business back in 2002 through 2005. Actually got to work with EMC back then. Dave Donatelli and many others back in the day. And now I lead a combined products and operations organization that has our CSG, PC peripheral portfolio and ISG portfolio, our infrastructure products, as well as the fundamental supply chain that runs the company. Yeah, so Jeff, you've done it all and you've seen Michael through, wow, an amazing journey. We've worked together for a long time and it's been a heck of a ride. And to be honest, I think the ride's not over and the ride in front of us, I think is more exciting than the past 30 years. Yeah, well, as we always say, it's a good thing nothing's changing, there's nothing new to get those that, you know, love technology excited about, right? If there's any constant in our industry and certainly in our company, it is change. And thinking about what's unfolded in my three plus decades at this is amazing to where we are today. But again, the future, as Bob DeCrenson said today, wicked cool. Wicked cool, absolutely. We can get up to Boston a little bit more. You can work on Boston accent. Yeah, exactly. Jeff, if we look at the Dell Technologies family, client side of the business is about half. The ISG is another 37%. So, you know, you own, you know, a major, major chunk of what's going on inside. Maybe give us a little bit of, you know, how you look at this portfolio. Are there interactions between the client side and the enterprise side? You know, we've seen most of the other big tech players that had both either, you know, Shed or Split or, you know, kept, you know, the HPs and the IBMs of the world no longer have both of those together. So. Yeah, those are interesting thoughts. So, you know, for us, our customers are asking us to provide a more set of comprehensive solutions. They want more end-to-end. And I don't see how you provide an end-to-end solution if you don't have one of the ends. And as trite as that may sound, I think it's the core fabric of what we're doing and certainly the role that I have now leading this organization of being able to cultivate and build, I think, the world's leading and innovative PC products and peripherals around them. Same thing on the infrastructure side where we have the privilege of being a leader in a number of categories and then beginning to bring them together in new and unique ways. I referenced in my keynote this morning about how new interests of the workforce are pressuring conventional definitions of how we do work and how we deploy technology. So we have leadership products and now you capture or are able to tie that together with a VMware Workspace One or an AirWatch or RSA class of products and you begin to modernize the experience, how could you not do that if you're not integrating the pieces? Or a VDI experience where you take a thin client, our VxRail infrastructure and some VMware Horizon software and build out a solution set. That's what our customers are asking us to do. And I think we're in a very unique position. In fact, I know we are, because no one else has all of what I just described. Jeff, there was a main theme you talked about in your keynote that IT can drive and change business. And it resonated from what I'm hearing with customers. But if you dialed back a few years ago, it was IT wasn't getting it done. IT wasn't listening to the business. We had Stealth IT. Why are things different now? What's the role of IT going forward and how does it fit into that picture? Michael touched on it in his opening yesterday about IT and business have become much, much more closely integrated to compete in this modern world. And I suspect some of this goes back to we've always thought as IT as a cost center, OPEX. Yet over the past decade, we've seen some fundamental disruption of business that has been fundamentally IT led. New technology led. New business models that have been fueled by new technology. I think that modernization, whether it's modernization of applications, taking advantage of information at your disposal and turning that into useful insights to make better business decisions is a catalyst for a reframing, if you will, of what IT does. And the role of IT in a business and a role that IT can help companies be more competitive or at a minimum help them not get disrupted by someone who's doing it as well. So I think that's what's changing. And I think you're seeing companies embrace that. And as soon as you do, you begin to, I think, challenge what have you invested in? Where are you going? How am I taking advantage of some of the new trends that I outlined maybe this morning? And it gets, I think, a pretty interesting time in front of us. Yeah, you actually went through, it was immersive and collaborative computing, IoT, multicloud adoption, software to find anything, and AI and ML. So a lot of new things. One area I'd like to touch on, we heard some great stats from Allison Dew earlier this week. It's great when we have the new tools and the new technology, but sometimes we wonder, how does adoption go and how does that impact productivity and people's engagement? And I'm curious how we help the enterprise and help the client side not just do something new, but be more productive and move their business forward. Well, I think, look, if you start with the client side, I think it's pretty easy to think about productivity, particularly if you believe this boundary between work and the workplace has fundamentally changed and think about where people do work. You're actually getting a much more productive workforce by allowing people to work when they want to work, where they want to work. And that traditional boundary of eight to five, whatever it might be, physically in the office, you now have access to all 168 hours in a week and people want to work when they want to work and we find that they work more, particularly if you put technology in their hand that makes them more productive and they have access to what they need to do the job. You cast that forward into the enterprise and I think, look, at some level, IT is hard and we have a huge role in making it much easier, how to simplify, how to make it more automated so IT practitioners can actually migrate to, how do I configure this line? How do I set up this server? And interesting things and still important things but can migrate to, how do I take this data and turn it into information that helps my business unit, my company win? That's where I think, again, I think this migrates too and we play a huge role in helping that. You know, there's a theme, another thing came up in the keynote, data really at the center of everything and not just talking about storage but you had McLaren up on stage talking about that. How do you see the role of data changing? How do we capture for companies how value data is? Well, I think, again, tie back to Michael's opening, he talked about data being, if you will, the rocket fuel for this rocket change and digitization of our world, the digital transformation that's underway. And between Michael, Pat and myself, we all talked about that happening at the edge in a decentralized manner. I tried to build upon that and say, you hadn't seen nothing yet, there's a whole lot more coming. Well, if you believe that, you have to start preparing today and anticipating that. And again, I think we play a role in helping companies do that. I think it requires a modern approach. It requires an approach to understand how that information is coming in to be able to do something with it. That's where we're focusing, as I mentioned. In fact, I think I specifically said it's sort of the heart of our vision for IT transformation. The data's the goal, in fact, Pat may have said that yesterday Now the challenge will be how do you take all of that data, sort through it, figure out which pieces are most valuable, and then get them to where they're supposed to go to make decisions. That's yet to be seen how we do that, but I'm encouraged given our track record in this industry, we'll find ways to do that. Engines like AI and machine, or capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning are certainly a vast step forward of making sense of all that stuff. Jeff, I wonder if you could bring us inside some of your customers, where do you find some of the strategic discussions happening? I think back to early PC or server days, who bought boxes versus now seems more of a C-level discussion for some of these large trends that you're seeing. What are some of the big changes that you're seeing in the customers, and what are some of the biggest challenges that they're having today? I think, Stu, you mentioned it, one of the things that I've seen in the customer interactions I've had in this new role in getting to see more and more each and every month, the conversations I have or participate in are seldom, if ever, about the speeds and feeds of this, the performance of that. It's about, here's my business problem, how do you help me? How do you help me get this done? How do you provide me a set of solutions to get to where I want to go? By the way, if you have advice, recommendation to help us, they want to hear that. So they want to access our technical knowledge base across our organization. But again, I think this theme that I tried to say a couple of times this morning around outcomes, so it's an outcome-driven discussion. It's solutions, it's end-to-end, and how can you help me would probably, I guess I could generalize them to fit those four attributes. Great. Last thing, you talked about the modern data center. What's that mean for your customers? Well, to me, it's all about putting at the disposal of our customers a set of technologies and infrastructure, solutions and services that allow them to take advantage of that data, allow them to have the data services they need and the underlying horsepower to do it in a fairly intelligent way, hopefully automating a few of those tasks and giving them the agility and flexibility they need. Yeah. Jeff, I wonder if you could speak to really the engineering culture inside of Dell. Think back to before Dell made a lot of exhibitions, like, oh, well, that was a supply chain company, people would say, and then a number of acquisitions and came through, you live with a lot of the engineers, you've got more engineers through the EMC merger. Sometimes people that don't understand are like, oh, it's just all going to commodity stuff, software to find anything means that infrastructure doesn't matter. Where does the Dell engineering culture differentiate and position you in the market? Yeah, you might not surprise you, given my background that certainly we were a supply chain company, we were doing hardcore engineering for a long time. I look at some of the advancements we made back in the day in leading the industry, I think we have a long distinguished track record of doing that. And now with the combination of the two companies, I look at this organization and the engineering capability we have, I like my hand, we like our hand. The trick is to getting our teams to innovate where we can differentiate, where we can help customers solve problems, and part of what I've been doing across this community of engineers is doing that. Pivoting resources to the most important things, pivoting resources to where we can differentiate, pivoting resources where our innovation can actually distinguish or shine against the competitive set. We've seen this in every category, PC, server, storage. And in many of these cases, we start from the privileged position of being the leader. So think about when we get everything aligned to be able to innovate and differentiate. I like my hand. All right, Jeff, wanna give you the final word. Coming away from Dell Technologies World this year, there's a lot of product announcements, people are gonna learn a lot in the sessions, but what do you want people to come away with understanding the Dell portfolio and Dell as a company, as a partner? Well, if I could leave any parting statement and make it very specific to the ISG portfolio. I talked about power, our power brand, now being the brand of our future state ISG products, walk away with a commitment to build a power branded portfolio that is going to be innovative, differentiated in the marketplace, and something that helps our customers with. That's our commitment, and that's what we'll deliver going forward. All right, well, Jeff Clark, thank you for sharing with us all the information. Your update, your first time on theCUBE, but sure, we'll have you on many times in the future. My pleasure, thanks for having me. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.