 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2016, brought to you by Dell EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Dell EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Pleased to have Howard Elias here, he's the president of Dell EMC Services and he runs IT. Howard, great to see you again. Great to be back. So I got to tell you a little story. So my old boss, Pat McGovern, self-made billionaire, ran IDG, all the computer worlds and Mac worlds, all those publications. He used to have a saying, if you want to get something really hard done, find the busiest person on the team and give it to him and they'll figure it out. So I don't know how you do it, but they keep throwing challenges at you and just keeps trucking along, so. Well, you know, it's what I live for. We've talked about that a lot. I've done this a lot in my career and I just am so excited about where we are today and what we're able to do for our customers now going forward. Well, you're able to deal with complexity. Well, you start with the customers, I guess. I mean, not I guess, you always say, protect the customer, put a brick wall around them. Design from the customer in, for sure. And protect that customer experience. But behind all that, there's a lot of complexity and you remember in the 80s, the 90s, there's so many stories about mergers, acquisitions, companies changing systems that were near disaster to the company, particularly IT. Is IT just better? Do we have better processes? How are you able to absorb such complexity with such great success? Well, you know, a couple of things. First, I would say we had a great team coming together and we were very thoughtful about what we wanted to accomplish. We know we're two big organizations coming together. We both deliver tremendous value today for customers. And so what we've said day one is we're not going to mess any of that up. The way customers interact with either Dell heritage today or EMC heritage today, we're not going to change that. The account relationships, the way you contract, the way you get your service delivered, none of that changes on day one, because we actually do know it'll take a while with systems, processes, and tools to come together. So we've laid out a roadmap that will occur over a period of time. As far as the customer's concerned, we're operating as one. We are one company today. And whatever the customer wants and needs from us, they will get. But behind the scenes, we're going to have to do some things until those systems and processes come together and we're going to do this at the customer's pace. You know, a great example of services, the business that I'm now running. What we've said is the way that you contract for services, the people that are delivering your services, the escalation pass that you use, all of that's the same today. But we already have some customers that have said, hey, for my Dell data center products like PowerEd servers and my EMC storage products like Vmax or Unity, I'd like the consistent experience at least between those two in the data center. So we've said, fine, we can do that for you. So we're operating as one. We've protect what we're delivering today, but we created a new offering called ProSupportOne. So ProSupportOne says, okay, well if you want that same experience, we're going to deliver it to you. We'll contract it one way for you. We'll deliver a seamless escalation path and a consistent set of experiences. So we're going to do that at, not every customer wants or needs that, we're going to do that at their pace. So one of the things that people are talking about in terms of this acquisition and mergers, not a lot of overlap, but one of the areas where presumably there was overlap was Perot with the services. Dell delevered Perot before the acquisition. How did that all work and come together? Do you just now have that much more to do? Is Perot sort of take that business with them? How does that all work out? It was really a complimentary set of services capability. You know, the Dell services business, the former Perot business, was predominantly APO, BPO, some ITO, and a little bit of consulting around the outsourcing models around that. And so that business is now going to become part of NTT data. By the way, a great partner going forward. So we're going to partner for all of those services, but all the close to the box services, all the support and deployment services, the implementation services, the consulting services, managed services and cloud out of virtue stream, all of that stays. It's still a very large business, a growing business, but for the more outsourcing kinds of things that the Dell services business that are now part of NTT data, that's where we partner with NTT and other partners in our ecosystem. And that's a tough business and not one that you really ever wanted to be in from when you were, you know, classic EMC, right? I mean, you'd partner with those guys. We always partner our preferences to offer the infrastructure to that partner ecosystem. Right, go ahead, Stu. Howard, you've got IT under your environment and for years, you know, on the legacy EMC side, you know, we've talked to, you know, EMC's IT as, you know, a great internal customer for lots and testing out new technology, everything. You've now got a much larger, you know, IT organization, gives a little insight. What does it mean to put them together? You've got IT, you've got the centers of excellence, you know, spanning globally. You know, what stays the same? What changes when it comes to IT? Well, it's one exciting opportunity, that's for sure. And, you know, to your point, I actually feel very good about what the Heritage EMC team did around IT proven, really became a showcase. We implemented our own cloud services, our service catalog, our practitioners actually, they're the most often seek people for our EBCs. When customers come to the EBCs, the folks that people want to talk to are the practitioners. We love talking to those guys. Right, and you've talked to them all the time. And so now we have an opportunity to do this to your point at a larger scale, more technology, more capability. And look, what we want to do is, as well as, you know, as we talk to our customers about their digital agenda, modernizing the data center, transforming the workforce with workforce transformation. We saw, I heard Jeff Clark talk about that today, security transformation. We want to be first and best. And so our IT teams actually look forward to the opportunity to talk to, you know, Ashley and the server and Tom Burns on networking, together with Chad on CI and HCI and all the great relationships we have. It's very symbiotic in the sense that, you know, we talk to them about what they have on their roadmap. We bring it in, we test it, we give feedback back, and then we take that learning out to the customer. The scope of services, obviously, correct me if I'm wrong, but it comprises the entire Dell Technologies portfolio, right? Sometimes we call it Federation 2.0, is that correct? I would say it this way. It's predominantly focused on the Dell EMC portfolio, the client solutions group and David's infrastructure solutions group, server, network storage and CI. But clearly, as we build more integrated solutions, engineered solutions around EHC, native hybrid cloud, business data lake, VDI, using VMR Horizon, using the VMWare tools, utilizing Cloud Foundry, especially when it comes to our consulting arm, we consult across the portfolio and we work with our strategically aligned business companies as well as third party partners and we'll even implement both together with the, like VMWare and Pivotal, will be part of our delivery team with utilizing and leveraging their expertise or we'll sometimes leverage external partners as well. So they're more than partners, those Dell Technologies companies, but they're part of the family, right? They're in the family. So they're partners plus. Well, as we've talked about, it's a family of businesses and brands where we have a unique and common point of view of what we believe is best for customers, but we'll still maintain the opportunity for choice. And so, but what's very important is that we work together and collaborate and we see that in more and more of the engineering solutions. Howard, could you speak to how things like your consulting services, what are the kind of swim lanes between what you're doing and what the channel is doing in the Dell EMC and go to market? Well, I would say it's less about what we do and they don't do, because look, all of us are having cloud conversations, all of us are having big data conversations, all of us are having workforce transformation around VDI and client solutions. It's more about customer geography, breadth, reach, and depth. And so in some cases, customers want skin in the game from us and we'll provide that directly. Other cases, they have valued partners they do this with and so we'll work together with that partner. Sometimes we'll enable with our IP. Sometimes the partner will be the general contractor and we'll come in behind. Other times will be the general contractor, the partner will come in behind. Other cases, partners can do it all. But where we're focused is where you would expect us to be focused. Cloud, big data, application modernization, and workforce transformation. One of the other things about Dell Technologies, what used to be the federation that always struck me as advantageous for you is it allows you to have different levels of conversations. You just mentioned data analytics, Pivotal brings a whole new dimension, above and beyond infrastructure. How do you see that coming together for Dell EMC, the new family of Dell Technologies? Is that sort of, was that largely in place with EMC? Are there more opportunities now with Dell Technologies to do that? There's always more opportunities. I would say the ability now to scale and have more customer conversations, which by the way are going to put some pressure on us being able to have the right skill sets available at the right time because to your point, it is a multi-level set of conversations. We're having conversations in the data center with the infrastructure. We're having conversations with the CISO around security. We're having conversations with the line of business around digital future and big data analytics. We're having conversations with the CFO and the C-Suite around business outcomes and transforming business models. And so I think it just gives us more opportunity. The thing that's been most gratifying for me is, and you heard it from Michael, we had a vision around being the trusted advisor for as the essential infrastructure company for this next industrial revolution. And it, you know, a wonderful set of words on a chart. But we back it up by the technologies, the breadth and depth of our sales go to market, our services organization, all of the businesses. But what's most gratifying is I hear it played back by customers. Customers are saying that they now see us playing a bigger role, having a bigger seat at the table, because now we have this breadth from edge to core to cloud and the ability to have that set of deep conversations. Howard, where are we with respect to services in IoT? Is it still too early in the game? Are you having, certainly having discussions, but how much of that is driving actual activity? It's early innings, as you would expect. I mean, there's a lot of activity going on what I would say on the edge and in the core analytics piece. But there's a lot that's going to happen here over the next couple of years as you think about distributing the intelligence. You've got gateways today that are aggregating the collection from all the endpoints. A lot of times there's some real-time activity going on there, but not as much as most customers would like. So we're getting a lot of that back to the data center for that processing. But you know, you saw VxRail in three use. The amount of power we have with the cores and the storage capacity and the bandwidth capacity. Imagine having VxRails at more and more of these edge locations doing the real-time processing at the gateway level to be able to respond back to those sensor activities. And then the data center core is really about deep analytics, deep learning over the time series of data. And that's an incredible capability. Howard, one of the announcements made this week was that from a financial standpoint, customers can now consume infrastructure from more of an operational model. That has a real impact on your business as to how do we make sure that the infrastructure can actually be elastic, not only just spares there, but when I need more capacity, it's there when I need it. How does that impact your team? Well, first of all, it's a great impact for the customer. We've always had this continuum from capital purchase to lease to open-scale options to full utility, probably six or seven models in between. What's really nice now is we've got with Dell financial services, with DFS, more horsepower, more capacity to do more of this. And what it does for us, especially on the consulting side of services, is it's a much easier conversation with the customer now. You're cloud first, you want to be cloud ready, you want to move to the cloud. Now let's talk about what workloads make sense in what model. Because every workload is not the same. Some workloads make a lot of sense in a utilitized public cloud type of an infrastructure. Other workloads that are more predictable, more sustainable, it is always more cost effective to do a capital purchase or even a lease based on cost of capital in a customer or a partner data center. And that's being proven out now in space. So the ability now to have this full continuum and really from the sales and the services perspective, we're neutral, you know, however the customer wants to consume, we'll advise them based on that workload and help them consume that way. I'm going to ask you a semi-personal question now. It's sort of your career. You've had a long career, you've accomplished a lot. I want to ask you about Joe Tucci. Have you been in touch with Joe much since the acquisition? Your thoughts on Joe as a leader and your relationship with Joe? So, you know, I've had the, you know, great fortune to work with Joe now for 13 years. Actually was at dinner with him last Thursday night. He's in a great place. And what he feels best about is he sees the company that he's helped to lead and was privileged to lead and work with, you know, a great team of people and a great set of customers out there and put it in wonderful hands of the new management team with Michael and the team going forward. He is at peace with that. He feels great about that. You know, Joe is one of the industry legends, you all know, and we've worked with him over the years as well. It's great to see him, you know, segue his career, in next stage of his career by doing what's right for the customer first and for all of our team members. And he's just as excited to be seeing what we're now doing with Michael going forward as well who is also a great leader. Well, one of Joe's claims to fame, and I think one of the things he was always most proud of was his ability to attract and retain talent. You obviously are one of those members. We were always thrilled to see how Michael put in place so many EMC executives in leadership positions in the Dell EMC franchise. So congratulations. It's always been a pleasure having you on the queue. Really appreciate your perspectives. Well, thank you. And I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. And the next couple of years are going to be the best years in IT for sure. You heard it here, folks. All right, good deal, Howard, thanks again. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back to wrap day two of Dell EMC World 2016. We'll be right back.