 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We are joined by Todd Pavone. He is the COO of Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming. Well, my kids call me dad, whatever, whatever we got to do. We can't call him anything we want. Yeah, daddy, oh, all right. So Todd, the theme of this conference is about providing companies with the tools that they need to realize their digital futures. Lay it out for me. What do you see as sort of the biggest problems that you're trying to solve for the customer? Sure, that's a good question. So if you're a CIO today, and there's many, I think there's lots of them in the show this past few days, they have lots of challenges, right? So if you're a CIO today, your budgets are flat or decreasing. Your users are asking to do more faster. The evolution of change is at a crazy pace. You look at your operating budget and the vast majority of it's spent on maintenance. So as a CIO, you have to do something different. You have to transform. And if you think about that, if IT has changed so much in the last 10 years, IT is actually the differentiator if the business will succeed or fail, right? Years ago, I've been doing this a long time. Years ago it was just a support function. It is now the differentiation if you'll succeed or fail. And so if you think about that scenario of a CIO, they have to change, they have to transform. They have to modernize their data center. And so everything we've been doing for the last several years is helping the CIOs and data centers transform. Transform so they can simplify the complex. So they can deliver faster. They can have better service levels with their users. So their staff can actually work on strategic initiatives, none of the things that are just keeping the lights on. So they can help their business transform and differentiate. And that's what it's all about, is helping them transform. So what are you seeing out there right now that's making you confident about the landscape? So for us in CPSA, the BU we've been in and we started this about seven or eight years ago, so what we see is results, right? So it's all about delivering results. We're seeing customers improve their time to delivery by forex. Customers cutting their total cost of ownership by 50%. Customers able to provision new services to their end users at a 5x rate. I mean, measurable tangible results. The metric I care most about in our business is repeat customers. And so every quarter we have about 70% of our customers are repeat, meaning they're deploying the technology and the solutions and they're seeing the benefits, they're saying this is how we want to run the data center of the future. And what's really cool is we're helping them change their businesses and be more successful long term. And that's the best part of what we're doing. So let's talk about overall market. Where is Dell in this market? How big is the market and where is Dell in this market? So, I mean Dell technology, I mean you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollar markets, enormous market, right? And so from a Dell technologies perspective, it's all about how do we help transform the data center? How do we provide the essential infrastructure for the data center? If you start to peel that back and you look at the market that our business unit is in for converged platforms and solutions division, we're focused on, you know, the hybrid cloud solutions, the engineered systems all the way down into our blueprint solutions. You're talking about a 20, 30 billion dollar market depending how you look at it. And so, you know, it's a big and it's big and growing. I mean, fortunately our space is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry, right? Customers are deploying converged and hyperconverged at a rapid pace and thankfully we're the ones helping drive that change. So what are the big value props coming? From a technology perspective, you talked about hybrid cloud, you talked about the actual systems, what are the value props for Dell's converged systems versus competitors? Yeah, so if you think about the top edge, we think we talk about this bill to buy continuum. So what we want to be able to do is have a continuum of offerings depending where the customer's maturity is, they can leverage wherever we are in their transformation. At the tip of the pyramid is our hybrid cloud solution. So this is where companies may want to deploy a turnkey hybrid cloud, right? From applications all the way through infrastructure and within a very short period of time have a fully enabled running cloud that they can offer to their end user customers. That, you know, value for that is time to market. I mean, we have customers deploying a full hybrid cloud in days, right? And if they had to build it themselves, it would take months and many months, right? So speed is a huge part of that value proposition. Obviously the leveraging of VMware technologies in that solution is key to what we're doing. Leveraging Pivotal, right? For our native hybrid cloud solutions is very differentiated. Those are two technologies that are in the Dell Technologies portfolio, right? VMware and Pivotal that we could take advantage of. In the engineered systems landscape, it's, you know, I hit on this before, but it's all about speed to deliver, right? I mean, we know if customers were to build things out themselves, it would take them 140 to 150 days. We know we can do it in 45 days. So think about that. That's a four, three to four X, time to improvement and delivery. We know it requires less people to manage, right? We know we can save, you know, 50, 60% total cost of ownership by deploying these engineered systems versus managing themselves. I mean, those are big numbers, right? Those are numbers where you can actually take those dollars and reinvest in other things, right? We want, you know, it comes back to what I said up front, it's all about solving those pain points for the customer, simplifying the complex, allowing them to go work on the things that are really strategic to their business. I used an example yesterday of Blockbuster, right? My three boys, I would go down to Blockbuster every Friday night, we'd rent movies. Blockbuster's not here anymore, right? What happened? Well, I can tell you, their IT organization was supporting their point of sale systems in their stores. They weren't thinking of new ways to distribute content, right? Why? Because they had no time, right? We want companies to be able to have the time to work on strategic things that are important to them. We want to enable them to go do that. So that is a great example of being short-sightedness and the dangers of being short-sightedness at this time of profound transformational change. What is your call to arms to customers? What's your advice? So, you know, customers have to, it's hard to change, right? It's easy. Be resisted and it's nice. Look, you have people that have been doing things for a long time. It's hard to change, you know, and it's not just about technology changes, it's about changing process, changing the way people work. And you know, you have to have the intestinal fortitude to go do it, right? I mean, people, you know, when they see change, they kind of want to run from it. You have to embrace it, you have to adopt it, because if you don't, you may not be positioned in the long term. And so, you know, first thing, for us, we need change agents. We need customers to have change agents that are willing to push back, willing to, you know, try to do something different, willing to innovate, I'm willing to break some glass. And when they do that, at the end of the day, we know they're going to be better off for it. But it's, again, it's hard to do. That's probably the first thing we ask them to be willing to accept some major changes in what they do and how they do it. So, this seems like this would be something that's contagious. Once the customer embraces that change, talk us through kind of that next level of conversation and the future that you're having with future conversation. Yeah, so look, it's, like everything you need to, typically there needs to be an event, something to trigger them to go change. It could be a data center consolidation, it could be a new application rollout. It could be a strategic initiative by the executive team. So, most of our customers will start with maybe one or two applications. And they'll say, let's go see how this works. Let's go test how this works, especially if they're big. If they're a large enterprise, they're not going to do a global change for everything. They're going to say, let's start with a subset. Once they see the subset work, then they start rolling more and more applications into this new way of running their data center. What we talk about with our customers, I like to use autonomous driving as an example. To me, we see a data center someday where basically things will happen autonomically. You'll set a business policy, workloads will move dynamically based upon that policy. We're requiring humans not to get involved. It's kind of like the same thing back to my analogy of the Tesla. Again, the Tesla, the car actually starts to drive itself. How is it doing that? It's doing real-time data analytics. It's understanding all its environmentals. It's making decisions. Why can't the data center get to that same place? Because if you can do that, think about all the savings you can now reinvest in the things that are really important to the business. So, we try to set a strategy and vision that customers understand and appreciate, and then we try to give them the building blocks of how they're going to get there. And we'll, just as we'll remember the days and we used to have to drive to the supermarket, we'll remember the days when the data center, we had to run the data center. Exactly, that's the hope. That's the hope and dreams of what we're trying to do. Next year's conference. Next year's conference. We've got more. I'm all in. I'm all in. Thanks so much, Todd. This was a great day to have you on the show. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsend. We will be back with more after this.