 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, actually, CUBE virtual coverage of Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. We're not in person this year. Normally we're on the floor. We're talking to all the guests this year obviously because of the pandemic. We're going to be doing remote. And of course I'm proud to have a CUBE alumni back on the program. Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Marketing for Dell Technologies. Cheryl, great to see you remotely. Bummer, we couldn't be in person. Thanks for coming on. I know, thank you, John. It's great to be with you virtually again. You know, I just want to just point out that obviously we're not face-to-face. Normally Dell Technology World is a real celebration. It's the culmination of all the announcements, all the community, all the partners. It's actually a huge partner event as well. As a customer event, you're running global partners. How has this pandemic changed your world? People still got to do business. There's more pressure from modern apps, programmable infrastructure, hybrid cloud. The world's not stopping. What is your take on this? Because it's been a real challenge, but it's also an opportunity for the folks who can get through it. What's your take? Yeah, it's just been remarkable. You know, I tell people in some ways I find this the great equalizer because it has all of us around the world in the exact same place. But our partners have just been remarkable. You know, we see inspirational work all over the place. They're so resilient. And they have just been focused on the customer. And so together, we have just been really focused on helping all of our customers, as we know in the early weeks and months of this now. You know, it was pivoting to support business continuity and enabling their employees to work remotely. And our partners just rallied to the cause. You know, they bring their expertise and their capabilities and their services. And, you know, we've all been talking about digital transformation and the need to modernize all of our infrastructures. And I think we're all seeing it just accelerate. So in so many ways, it's just pushed it to the forefront. And a lot of us, because we don't have an alternative, we're all engaging in modalities like this, but we're getting business done, right? We're helping our customers really respond to the needs of the business. And I think in the early stages of this, you know, we've been characterizing it as there was a lot of go fast, go light, now we're seeing, you know, that we're all recognizing we're going to be in this circumstance for the foreseeable future a little longer than maybe we all intended. And now it's do it right. So we see a lot of just good work around hardening infrastructure, working on security vulnerabilities. How do we harden a VPN environment? So to be candid, you know, the breadth of our portfolio and a lot of the infrastructure solutions, our partnership with VMware has never been more relevant. And a lot of those capabilities, our partners are leveraging to be able to support their customer's needs and demands. Yeah, that's a great point about the VMware. And I want to bring that up because I've been doing a lot of interviews and one of the themes for Dell Tech World Digital Experience this year has been the VMware integration. And what's interesting is that that investment of being tightly coupled with VMware and your other partners is paying off now because as people need to be truly agile and flexible because of the disruption, the way the work environment, the workforce workloads and the workplace has been changed, they really need to lean on Dell and you guys have that slogan, the power of partnering with Dell technology. I want to dig into what that means because the customers, your partners and user customer, there's kind of two spectrums. There's the, this is a tailwind, I have to go faster and put this modern app, I'm going to double down and solve problems, whether it's a call center, it's getting stuff built quickly to solve needs to, well, this is a pandemic that's in terms of, we're going to retool while we're kind of downtime. I won't say downtime, but like while they're not truly active, whether you're in airlines or whatever, there's different spectrums and everything in between. You guys are bringing a lot to the table through these partnerships and the integrations. Can you talk about how that's paying off and to how you guys are helping your partners and give some examples? Yeah, well, thank you, John. And we have been saying for some time that we really do think the cross sell up, sell opportunity is a differentiated opportunity for our partners teaming with Dell technologies. Even in the last several months, while we've all been kind of working from home, our innovation engine hasn't stopped. I mean, we've launched nine new products in nine weeks, all of which are just innovations that continue to represent areas where partners can team with us to bring those modernized applications to bear. And to your point, many of our partners and our customers are using this time when we're all remote and you can't go on site, they're doubling down on their training. We've seen an unbelievable demand in our competency training and our certification capabilities, clearly with the product launches I just mentioned, there's new training to enable them around the new offerings. Our power store product was just launched. So unbelievable opportunities. And as you said with VMware, we have been for some time when we talk about cross sell, our partners that sell two and three lines of business, their revenues are multiples higher than partners that don't. And candidly, partners that sell three lines of business and sell VMware are selling like 148 times the revenue. And I think it's a reflection of their engaging in strategic, sticky services rich deployments of hybrid cloud implementations with their customers. And the customers need their help and expertise like never before. So I think the results are showing true. And I also think in this dynamic of everything's gone digital, everything's pivoted to digital, our partners have been asking, how can we help them be more effective and successful in their digital marketing efforts and activities? How can we assist them in virtual selling? Everybody's accustomed to face to face sales contacts and we've all learned how to use your platform and zoom and teams and all these other modalities that allow us to frankly be highly effective and efficient. And our partners candidly are leaning into some of our services and tools and capabilities that honestly have been there for some time, but like remote diagnostics, for example, remote capabilities so that you don't have to go on the data center floor. And you can still be doing assessments and provisioning and orchestration and deployment for your customers in this time. And you're right, some customers and partners are using this as an opportunity to invest so that when the world opens up, this will end at some point. They are incredibly well positioned to move forward and take advantage of what's already been a fast moving market. And I just think this environment, it's accelerated the move and adoption like never before. Yeah, and to your point, things we're seeing is that the vendors and the customers that have been prepared, suppliers and customers that have been thinking about it, you can see them having performance, even in the challenging handcuffed environment that they're in with the whole disruption working at home to the data center because the edge and the data center are now connecting and you've got hybrid, public, multi-cloud developing. And everyone's got to learn and build out at the same time. So it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because the word virtual event has been kicked around. We have our own virtual event thing and everyone's doing it. This is the Q virtual. But they don't use the word digital, but we say digital transformation. Is it digital or virtual transformation? So you've got virtual, I guess, reality, virtual spaces, digital is digital. Explain this from your perspective, how do you see digital and virtual marketing and or learning as a critical part of your program offerings because people still got to get the new things. They got to learn. I think it's gone from a nice to have and we all acknowledge that it's a transformation in the world of marketing to a, now it's a must have, right? I mean, when you no longer can do in-person events and many of our partners would have looked at that as a demand generation activity, they'd be capturing the leads from all the conversations we'd be having on a solution expo floor, we'd be having our in-person events. To now, we're going to convey our information and knowledge in maybe a virtual setting, but that pivot to digital marketing, your online presence, the personalization at scale, making sure we acknowledge and understand that we have to meet our buyers and acknowledge the buyer journey has changed. And I think it's a must have now. So it's no longer a nice to have and we've all been describing the pace of change, but I think when you couple some of the trends in the industry with just the reality of this pandemic that's making each of us be more resourceful than ever, we, for example, have seen our partners pivot the utilization of their MDF dollars into digital alternatives. They're certainly doing these Zoom experiences, but they're also investing in their web properties and their search and making sure that as we pivot to digital, we, for example, on the marketing side, we pivoted quickly to kind of stand up what we're calling an agile pod. And it was a digital first agile pod that was, frankly, all aimed at training, enablements, social media guides, webinars on expertise on how we as a company were responding, what was our internal communication strategy, our external communication strategy? And I just think this appetite for training, knowledge, some of it was necessity and some of it is we're all home and we have time and we wanna hone our skills to ensure that we're ready. So I've never been busier as much as we're all working from home, we have never been busier on supporting the great and innovative work that our partners are doing, but also really focused on the training, best practice sharing, enablement, and webinars on how we're in it together, right? How can we help each other really respond in a sustaining way, honestly, not just an interim way of our new digital capabilities, marketing capabilities. And I think we're experiencing, what I think the opportunity of this digital trend in marketing is the handshake between marketing and sales has never been tighter. And I think really done well, we are gonna provide a more personalized experience for our prospects and our customers. We're gonna make our sellers more productive. We're gonna be engaging along that continuum. We kind of call it a digital heartbeat. You're gonna be responding to where they are online. And then we're also gonna be meeting in person or over a virtual zoom. And you're gonna be accelerating in a highly relevant, much more personalized way to drive to the outcome of these solutions. It's a richer experience. So it's less about is marketing creating a bunch of leads that I can hand over to my sellers as much as what's the overall customer experience. And that experience needs to be a rich personalized one that kind of transcends over marketing and sales. Yeah, Chair Cheryl, you have an amazing vision. I think that is so spot on, you're on point. And I think you bring up a whole kind of sea change. It's really transformational just in the thinking. You mentioned, oh, just put out leads also just, it's not about just standing up events either. You mentioned sustainability, how to have that heartbeat. This is a whole new level of thinking. I mean, every company, the adage used to be, every company used to be a data company, every company will be a data company, true. Now you're seeing every company becoming a media company where you are probably doing more hosting of things. You're on camera more. So this new media API is developing where you want the commanding control, you want the truth, you want the community, you want the authenticity. This is the new digital marketing, real-time, agile and fast and relevant and cool too. What's your, I mean, expand more on your vision. And test and learn is a word we use a lot because instead of having to build something, go put it out, let's have some metrics and measures on how effective it was. The speed with which you can garner real-time feedback. Everything needs to be more modular in nature's, snackable if you will in nature so that you can adapt and respond to what your customers are telling you, right? And I mean, I think we've been talking about consumerization of IT for some time. And I think this digital marketing is just the expression within marketing of how each of us come to work. And we're all at home as consumers engaging in this digital way as a consumer every day. So now when we bring it to work, we bring our own preferences and in a B2B setting and a B2B context, we want to engage and it accelerates just the learning cycle. So I think it's a combination of the tools, the automation that exists now. So when you talk about leveraging AI and machine learning in the context of marketing automation, it's just putting to use all these technical trends that we've been discussing for some time in the context of customer experience. So I think this, like I said, the handshake between marketing and sales, it's all about staying customer-centric, listening to what the customers are telling you their interests and preferences are, how do we respond in the most highly relevant way around how we can help them and done well, it's a positive experience, but it's also an accelerated experience. You can get to the answer faster. And as long as we get to the answer faster, that's what the customer is looking for, then it's a win-win for everybody. That's awesome. I love that conversation because this brings up kind of the future for your organization and your customers as you guys have this global partner network, okay? And one of the things that the pandemic has shown is that with these digital technologies and virtual technologies, it's not a physical event, it's global. I mean, instantly Dell Technologies world, you have to fly there, certainly from overseas, you could certainly do that, but now with one click of a button, you're in. The programs that you have are global in nature. I'm sure there's some regional segmentation that's done with cloud and all that good stuff, but you are going to have to recast your partner programs. Can you share how you're helping partners with their digital transformation? Can you just give a couple of examples of specifics of, if I'm a partner, what's in it for me? Cheryl, what's going on? How is Dell helping me today? Yeah, well, I commented a little bit about this digital first kind of agile pod work that we did. Some of that is selling guides, social media guides, how to actually do social selling, how to pivot some best practices around, what activities can you put your MDF to good use that is showing really positive returns in the short term? So it's a lot of best practice sharing. And then candidly, we as a company, as we put campaigns in market or we're giving marketing assets, collateral, social opportunities to our partners, it's all about how to help them get educated and use what we're already providing for them. So we recognize that partners capabilities will vary across the board and certainly regionally, as you said, but we definitely are helping them with, here's what we're seeing around industry solutions. Here are certain industry verticals we know or responding or coming out of this environment faster than others. Here's campaigns that you can leverage both modularly or full term key to be able to drive that. So to your point, the handshake, the support, the overall engagement of our partner community has never been higher. I mean, I'll give you a good example. We talked about training and this opportunity to reach more people through these forums than in person. We conduct trainings of pre-sale technical teams around the world. We call it our heroes events and these are typically in person, but now they've gone virtual. We've trained over 18,000 pre-sales technical engineers just in the first half alone to be able to leverage our remote tools, lean in and leverage the integration around VM where like we were just discussing what are the new capabilities that have launched around BX Rail with VCF Foundation and how they can go deploy. So in many ways, we actually are touching and addressing the audience much wider than we might have otherwise. And I can put my subject matter experts, my best experts in the company on a Zoom forum like this and I can have them in Sydney, Australia, Paris, I can have them in San Francisco on the same day and they never leave their home. So it's actually, we've all been very resilient but our finding I think in the go forward world, it'll be a hybrid model. We're going to leverage some of these best practices and tools even when the world reopens. We certainly will be doing in person events again. That's going to come back, but I do think it'll be forever changed and we're going to leverage this hybrid model with our partners and they're bringing their expertise to bear and a lot of the vertical industry capabilities they bring, they're able to reach an audience broader over capabilities like this. You know, it's going to be a lot of fun too, all this new learning and all this headroom from asynchronous progressions that are non-linear as you mentioned, training, people are getting trained faster to made for TV experiences. You're going to start to see and then when hybrid events come back, they're going to be different. They may be more intimate. All new opportunities to learn and move fast. And that's something that you guys have done. So congratulations, Cheryl. Thanks for that great insight. My final question for you this year for the partners watching who aren't there in person because we're not with remote, what should they take away from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience event this year? What's your summary here? Well, I hope they enjoy the couple of days and you certainly have heard, you know, Michael and Jeff and Pat and others talk about the innovation engine at Dell Technologies is not slowing down. You know, the type partnership we have with VMware and the level of capabilities that we're bringing in this as a service, hybrid cloud, 5G, world of hybrid cloud deployments, we absolutely have our foot on the gas and are going to continue to be that partner to provide the world's best infrastructure and capabilities. And when you look at the power of partnership and to your point on what we're describing with our global alliance partners, the innovative and inspirational work, some of our OEM customers and partners have done is just remarkable. And like I said, we are growing faster than the competition even in this environment. So we just really appreciate the partnership very much and I want them to lean in with Dell Technologies because it's not going to slow down as we've just been discussing. I think it's going to continue to move fast and we absolutely are committed for the longterm to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to market. Well, certainly people who have good business performance in this environment, certainly are relevant and have the right product mix, made the right moves and it's paying off a lot more to do, Cheryl, congratulations for all the success and you're a great leader heading up the global partner marketing group over there. Congratulations, you got a great vision. We totally agree. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Thank you, John, it's been a pleasure. I'm John Furrier here with Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell Technologies, the CUBE Virtual, governing Dell Technology, World Digital Experience 2020. Thanks for watching.