 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's cover of WTG Transform 2018. Happy to welcome to the program the keynote speaker and first time on the program David Singer, who's the senior vice president and chief operating officer of storage at Dell EMC. David, great to see you. Great to see you Stu, thanks for having me. All right, so I liked, we talked a lot about transformation and boy, there's a lot of transformations going on from the technology to the workforce, security is top of mind item, let's start there. What does transformation mean with the customers that you're talking to these days? Transformation for our customers is delivering next generation business outcomes, really ensuring that they can find a way to remold their businesses for the digital economy and figure out how to drive tremendous amounts of value and they understand that it all starts with IT and being digital and so it's one of the key things that we hear from our customers as they engage with us and look to move forward. Yeah, it's an interesting conversation because there's two things that have kind of struck me as a little bit funny lately. Number one is, data's really important and two, wow, intelligence is really going to transform all of these environments and the reason I think you kind of agree with me, we've been talking about these things for decades. I mean, you and I both started back at EMC, back similar times when storing was really one of the main things you're doing but of course that data was very important. In the eight years since I left EMC, boy, it's not like storage isn't any less important but it's data and it's everywhere and it's distributed. So maybe we speak a little bit to the value of data to your customers and we'll keep going with that conversation. Data is the next asset class and for our customers it should be their goal. It's not how they just manage their business, it's actually how they start making money. We called ourselves a storage business and we probably did ourselves a disservice. They wanna engage and they wanna ensure their data's safe and they wanna figure out how to monetize it and monetizing it means retaining it, moving it, keeping it safe and then ensuring that you can inject it into the right applications and get the right knowledge and efficiency out of it and what we've seen in the storage industry over 18 years is that the technologies keep changing. Applications have greater and greater demands and there's more and more need to consume, adjust and analyze this data and we need to keep up and we need to deliver more intelligent infrastructure and storage solutions that can move this data and help applications deliver tremendous performance. Yeah, let's talk about the company itself. So when I think about Dell, I think back when I even talked to my parents, they know who Dell is. They've used Dell computers for many years. Over your shoulder is Fenway Park. The club level is the Dell level. You've got such a broad portfolio in your keynote you kind of put together this comprehensive everything from Dell and Dell EMC and VMware and Pivotal and everything but to global companies or small companies, what is, where does Dell sit in the picture? I think the merger has been a major transformation for the company itself. We evangelize transformations for other companies. We're undergoing one ourselves and the transformation we're undergoing is understanding what other companies needs and applying it to ourselves and drinking our own champagne and making it a reality. The brand association is changing and customers are starting to realize that we can become the essential infrastructure provider and they could look to us to solve a holistic set of their needs as opposed to pinpoint set of their needs and make it an easier journey on themselves. Yeah, you spent a bunch of time talking about the operating model. When we talk about cloud, it's, you know, use the line, actually we've used many times. You know, cloud is not a destination, really is an operating model. How does that impact the portfolio? You know, you're helping to put together really the long-term strategy, what does that mean? So the first is the operating model is all about simplicity, right? We need to make infrastructure more simple for our customers and that means re-engaging and re-architecting our software stacks from the ground up to be more nimble, more accessible via APIs and other automation engines that will really drive more value and allow IT professionals to spend more time partnering with the business to drive revenue as opposed to problem solving and punching out bucks. David, that was one of the knocks at competition of, you know, EMC back in the day always had was, EMC has a broad portfolio and leadership in many positions but simple was never the word to describe the offerings. How does Dell and Dell EMC from a storage perspective, how will we be looking at that differently, you know, come a year or two from now? So I think that's a fair point, it's a great point. Simplicity was probably not a great synonym for what we did but what we did was accumulate a tremendous amount of intellectual property and assets that we've been able to mold and transform and adapt for the future. What we're in the process of doing is making it simpler for customers to consume it and delivering it and deploying it in simpler ways to make it easier to choose and implement and what we're in the process of doing is take the lessons of the past, integrate the technology from the past and drive something that's going to be easier to understand and to drive value. All right, help connect the dots, we're here at one of Dell's larger partners, maybe not larger in size, but very important partner. Winslow Technology Group was a Dell partner the year for a couple of years. What is that simplification and change in the portfolio mean and how's the relationship changing with the channel? So, very fair, the channel community is extremely important to Dell and we know that we've not made their lives very easy. They have sales engineers and sales professionals that are trying to deliver solutions and applications for customers and it's hard for them to choose which building blocks or which piece parts to build and by simplifying and putting together better technologies and better intellectual properties that are easier for them to consume and understand make it easier for them to do their jobs and deliver outcomes for their customers. Great, why don't I focus a little bit on the customers? What do you see as some of the biggest challenges that they're facing in their business, not just from a storage standpoint but on the business side? Sure, well, every business including our own is a balance of priorities, right? Customers know that they wanna take their business forward, they wanna drive growth, they wanna drive profitability and there's so many different opportunities to go after and just how do you prioritize and trying to manage those discrete priorities and ideas and initiatives is not easy and then implementing actions, especially within IT to go solve some of those problems is resource intensive, right? And so we need to do a better job of thinking about transformation and simplifying our structure to really get at that. All right, so you're an operations guy. You've got some business background. One of the things I look at in my career is, boy, we've looked at the pace of change but technology is an enabler for how we change operations. It's been pretty amazing in the last 20 years. I'm wondering if you have some ruminations on that as to what you've been seeing in your career and especially over the last five years or so. Yeah, the pace is confusing. It really is. At times we feel like we're moving at light speed and other times we feel like we're at a crawl and I think the interesting aspect is it's a journey and every customer is approaching it differently and there are some customers that are in the bleeding edge and looking for us to keep them on the bleeding edge and there are other customers that are more steady in their operations and looking to take baby steps as they transform and it's been a really interesting challenge trying to solve and maximize outcomes for both those types of customers. Yeah, absolutely. I'd say it's usually, it's dizzying and you need to be careful. One of my favorite Ben Franklin lines is, don't confuse activity with progress because it's easy to chase the new shiny but what am I actually doing to drive the business and drive efficiency of what we're doing? And can actually get any value out of the new shiny. There are so many buzzwords that we have in our industry right now. Some of which customers consume really easily and get a tremendous amount of value. Some that customers just are having a hard time understanding how they actually implement to get value. Yeah, so what's the biggest threat for businesses these days? You talk about them going through transformation. There's everybody's concerned about the overuse term. You're gonna be Uberized or Netflixed or choose your point. How do you balance? I need to transform and move faster but I don't wanna be chasing my shadow. I think the person that had the perfect answer to that would be amazingly wealthy right now. I think that's the dichotomy that we're trying to deal with and the industry has dealt with for a very, very long time. Great point. We talked about, it's not always about chasing the technologies. What's interesting you in the marketplace these days? I think that the pace of change and the pace of innovation has really kicked up. It goes through cycles and right now the new technologies that are gonna be introduced by a lot of startup communities and ourselves organically has been amazing and I love the innovative spirit that is coming back together as we formed Dell EMC and the new company and the collaboration that we're seeing with the intellectual property across the family of companies delivers really exciting results. Last thing I wanted to ask you really about the merger. Personally, you've been from the EMC side of things. There are many similarities in culture but some significant differences between these two cultures. What could you share? Everything changes, right? I think we learned a long time ago at EMC and there's probably some acronym about change using the EMC letters. You need to be able to adapt to change and both cultures were very much the same. The businesses are very interesting and I like to think of them in an athletic metaphor, right? They're very different flywheels to the paces of the businesses. We have a portion of our business that has a flywheel that spills really, really fast and very transactional and then we have another flywheel that is solution-oriented and solution-driven and drives at different speed and the miracle of the merger is we've been able to figure out how to operate both those flywheels at the same pace. All right, well, David Singer, definitely the customer flywheels keep a lot of things going and the feedback from our users is one of the flywheels that keeps us going here at theCUBE. So be sure to check out all the content and as always, you can reach us hitting us up on the website, hitting us up on social media and welcome your feedback. So thank you so much for watching theCUBE.