 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of Dell Tech World. CUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas are down on the floor. Live event, hybrid event as well, online. If you're interested in seeing some of the replays, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, with Dave Vellante. Next guest, Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President, Global Channels at Dell Technologies. CUBE alumni, great to see you in person. Thank you, great to see you both in person. Hey, Cheryl. How are you? We had a virtual last year, but this year in person. A lot of action, a lot of big announcements. The big story is the Snowflake deal. You're seeing the new architecture by design, multi-cloud by design of everything. Cyber is huge. Now the partners are playing a huge role. So the notion of channel and partner value ad is really at an all time high. Could you share your thoughts on where you see it, where we are today and where's it going? Thank you. I absolutely couldn't agree more. And I'm an optimist by nature, but I actually think the timing for the partner community and the partner ecosystem in large has never been brighter. So a lot of the themes we've been discussing is just the inherent complexity that our customers are trying to navigate through multi-cloud and multiple business models, consumption models. That is so uniquely well positioned for what our partners do. So our partners help navigate those complexities for our customers. They bring a lot of expertise in not just infrastructure and multiple stacks and workloads, but also in verticals and industry expertise and everything's moving use case workload, industry centric, and I think our partners are incredibly well positioned. You know, the game still remains the same, but the world changes in indirect and partner relationships. And you know, we use words like ISV, VAR, reseller. At the end of the day, they're helping customers with solutions. And the game has changed. Could you share your thoughts on what's different now because we're seeing a rise of more managed services plugging into your relationships and the value you guys bring? So it's still the same game. Value creation, helping customers, making money. Absolutely, and I think, you know, the one trend that we're definitely seeing is everybody is overwhelmed with the complexity. And I think we all can acknowledge that one size doesn't fit all for every workload, whether it's a deployment model in a public cloud, on-premise, a private cloud. Some customers want to go asset light. How do I put it in a co-location facility? So customers are in charge right now. It's actually about their choice. And what we're trying to do with a lot of these partnerships and announcements is really enable and empower our partners to be able to meet their needs and offer the right solution for what they have, where they need to spend it. And I just think it's an incredible opportunity. And the lines are blurring, frankly, in the ecosystem. So many of these partners are participating in multiple business models already. So our notion of an MSP, a CSP, a reseller, it's kind of, yes, they're all doing it. It's called the cloud. John mentioned the snowflake deal. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. In the old days, it would have been Dell go into snowflake saying, hey, your software can run really fast on our box. So we should go to market and do something together. It's a totally different dynamic now. Can you explain kind of how that deal came about and what the dynamic was like? Yeah, we're actually really excited about the snowflake partnership because I think it's a fabulous example and an expression of what the true partner ecosystem can represent. And what it really showed is we've got a fabulous piece of technology and so innovative with Snowflake and their analytics platform. And it was cloud based only. We have a lot of customers that for sovereignty reasons, security reasons, policies, what have you, that have a lot of on-premise, on Dell storage, quite frankly. So what this partnership enabled was the ability to export and take data off-premise into their cloud for analytics and get it back. But as importantly for their customers, it now gives them the ability to take their IP and their snowflake analytics platform on-premise to where the Dell storage is. And that's an incredibly strong example of how it's a really strong win-win partnership between Dell and Snowflake, but it's a great win for our partners and customers to be able to leverage the best of both IP where it's appropriate. Oh, and by the way, it'll run really fast. Absolutely. So a completely different discussion and dynamic in terms of going into that deal, interesting. Absolutely, absolutely. So that's a good example of the services that are emerging, so also highlights that that didn't exist before, that use case. So as partners come in and want to make more money, there's tons of margin for them to build solutions and they're in multiple business models. Can you give an example of some of the hot trends? Is it as a service? Is it what models do you see kind of like evolving as kind of like the lead play for most of the partners? I would say, you know, the reason I think our partners are so incredibly well positioned is like some of our strongest partners, they all have relationships with the hyperscalers too. So they have practices built around AWS and Azure and the like. And right now, workloads can't live in one single place. Partners are so uniquely well positioned to advise and counsel their customers and do all the value added services you mentioned on where is the best fit in place for that workload. And what we're aiming to do is empower those partners and give them consistency in operating experiences, management experiences, so that no matter where the data or the workload goes, those partners' deep investments and their skills and their expertise is leverageable and extendable across wherever it lands. You know, Cheryl, we always have great conversations around the channel, the relationship and the value, opportunities for them to make money and serve customers. But I want to get your thoughts on what's just happened over the past three years. The pandemic has really shined the light on the value of partners in a time where everyone's working at home and COVID's happened with the pandemic. Partners stepped up. And so can you share what was some of the highlights and different success trends you saw with the pandemic because they had to move fast with technology. People who weren't on the front end had to catch up fast, but yet were handicapped by the pandemic. Yeah, you know, it's really revealed just so many inspirational stories actually. But I think what we learned and what we saw is partners are local, partners are intimate with customers. They understand their business and they understand their need. And then when they leaned into a relationship with Dell, it was everybody focused on the customer. And at first it was business continuity, right? I mean resiliency, how do we do it? How do we enable them to get their workers productive and working remote? And I think customers just needed help and they reached local, right? And the partners that are there have the expertise as we know. It's not the first time they've done these deployments and they had the reach and scale. And I honestly think some of the joint success we enjoyed through that crazy phenomenal period is frankly a testament to let's just stay focused on the customer. I think our supply chain showed up, frankly. I think we helped navigate that and be responsive, but the opportunity was incredible. I heard people say the internet and partners saved companies from going under with the pandemic. Can you give an example of what's changed for Dell because you guys had to rely on partners. What new learnings and changes came out of the pandemic because they had to solve the problems fast for customers. Did it change how you operate and how you run your business? Well, I'll tell you, I mean, I'll give you a real-world example. What we kind of mobilized real quickly was all about digital selling and virtual selling and digital demand creation. And nobody could hold an event anymore. And that's the way we all build pipeline and drive demand. And we have learned, out of necessity, how productive and efficient virtual opportunities can be. And we can also learn, when Michael calls it Zoom Airlines, right, that we were on, we could take our best experts and our most technical resources and engage them in five or 10 customer engagements. We opened that to our partners. We took our executive briefing center, made that virtual, and all of that just unlocked the ability to, one, meet the demand. And then, as we've learned, we were just describing, I think it's going to be hybrid. Some of those lessons learned and how fabulously efficient they were are going to continue. And we can't wait to get back in person too, so we're going to do both. It really makes the digital piece really work. We're calling it Q plus digital on our side, but we're now integrating digital. You have to have that first-class citizen digital into your physical operations. Absolutely, we called it digital first. And I think we have so much evidence and data on buyer behavior changing. The two years we all spent at home, we're all bringing our online preferences to our B2B life and existence. And people want that simplified, elegant, responsive experience, even where we are now. And we learned through the pandemic, frankly, that the MDF resources we extended to our partners, the work we did on digital activities was far more profitable, efficient. The returns, I mean, the evidence speaks for itself, so it's phenomenal. Partnership, by definition, implies a two-way relationship. And so, what's your secret to scaling partnerships and making sure that you can give all your partners the attention? Maybe not equally, obviously there's tears, but what's your trick there? Well, I think one size doesn't fit all, and I think that applies to our partner ecosystem. We've been talking about deployment models and clouds, et cetera, and we're going to have a traditional partner program where we're going to have coverage and resources on some of our largest partners, but then we lean into ISV relationships, distribution relationships that help extend and cascade the experience with Dell, our training and enablement, the opportunity, and I think one of the trends we're also seeing is we're going to have multiple partners engaging on single opportunities. And that's where they're going to play to their strengths, and we're going to continue to have to enable that. You know, that brings up a good point, I just want to riff on this real quick if you don't mind. The local angle that you mentioned, partners are local, partners are servicing, they're changing. With you, look at the edge. Jeff Clark was talking about the future, how the edge and data is so important, and new personas like data engineering is emerging, data as code Caitlin was talking about. You can't get more local than a 5G tower with boxes there, and if you look at the hyperscalers trying to do these regional areas, Dell's actually positioned well with their partners to actually do what you've been doing all the company's history, deploying solutions. At the edge, which is essentially the customers. Your reaction to that? Well, like I said, I'm so bullish on the opportunity for partners going forward, but specific to edge, if you look at our OEM business, for example, there's a lot of edge solutions and deployments that have been conducted through that business. Our partners participate in our OEM capabilities and resale capabilities today. That, I think, is only going to continue. And if you look at almost as a continuum from all the way to custom design and embedded solutions that we can do, up to and including just working with ISVs where we can help build purpose-built technology around their software, or the telcos, as we've discussed. That's a great example of where we're going to build purpose-built hardware that actually has commercial applications that we've opened up more locally. So, I think this edge of opportunity- And the deliveries there? Absolutely, and it's inherently use case-centric. So when you start talking edge, you're by default kind of into an industry vertical conversation. And the unique opportunity for the win-win in partnership is really leveraging what we do well, which is horizontal consistency scale with their vertical industry intimate expertise. It's a phenomenal opportunity and a win-win. So you'll bring engineering resources to, for example, a retail opportunity that is a large enough TAM that you can go after and multiple partners can add value along the way? Absolutely, and because of our strength, our scale, our market share, our presence, we're an attractive partner for a lot of ISVs to partner with. So when you think of the ecosystem, partners want to partner with people that have strong partnerships. So when we have more snowflake-like partnerships and we build out capabilities where we're putting services in AWS and the hyperscalers, and we have traditional relationships with alliance partners and resellers, it's compelling. And ultimately, partners and customers are all trying to simplify the number of vendors they're working with. You can come and work with Dell across a large continuum of both portfolio and services. I think about three years ago when we were in person with Dell TechWorld 2019, it was the same message, core, cloud core edge. And now it's edge is everything and cloud's part of that, so interesting. In fact, Chuck Whitten on his keynote said, multi-cloud by default, multi-cloud by design. We might want to add in your commentary, edge by default, converting to edge by design. I think Michael used a statistic that I think it's selling out of the data center. We've seen this trend on having to sell to the line of business as opposed to the IT department. That inherently pulls you to the edge. And I think Michael said even with the hyperscalers, there's 600 data centers in the world for all of them. There's six million cell towers. And each of those are an opportunity to have these micro little mini edge deployments. I'm smiling because Dave and I have been saying for years, the edge, data center is the edge. And now we have edges being data centers. Now you have data centers aren't going away, they're actually expanding, multiplying. Exactly, exactly. What's on your mind these days? What are you into? What are you watching in trends? What's in the network that you like in terms of partners? What are some of the things you want to share with the folks out there that you think's important to watch? I think the fascinating thing I see is this notion of multiple partners engaging and how do we get that simplified? How, you know, what's our role? How do we help enable that? How do we help orchestrate it? Because the market's moving so fast and the need, frankly, for time to revenue, time to competitive advantage, customers need us all to kind of work better together on their behalf to help solve those. So I'm fascinated with this idea of what used to be a competitor or a co-operative is now a partner and we're all actually kind of looking at things with a little longer term vision and should with the customer's outcome in mind. And frankly, that is just unlocking so much opportunity for multiple partners. So it's less about the traditional landscape of is it competitive or complementary? There's so much opportunity for everybody now. It's like, how do we just lean on each other and play to our own strengths to be able to satisfy the opportunity quickly? It's like a partner operating system. Absolutely. Coming together. How about business performance? How's the scorecard look for you guys on the business side doing well? You know, we couldn't be more delighted and humbled. Who would have thought that coming out of the last couple years, Dell would have had record performance. So when our earnings and we closed our fiscal year, we're using adjectives like historic, epic, record breaking and the partner performance inside those results is just phenomenal. It's growing faster than the overall business and I think we'll continue. So I see incredible consistency globally, consistency across our whole partner ecosystem, whether that's traditional channel OEM alliances and I'm frankly just see that continuing. Because I think the market's coming to them. 100 billion growing at 17%. You can't do that without partners in an ecosystem. Absolutely. And the partner of business for us right now is $59 billion. It's pushing 60% of Dell's revenue. It's only going to get better I think. And go faster. So I think that's going to continue. Well Cheryl, always great to chat with you. You're awesome. A lot of insights. Thanks for sharing the update on the partner and more. We'll have you on our digital program this year. We'll get you back on. Absolutely. Well thanks for being here and it's fabulous to be back in person. Great to see you. Always great to have you. Cheryl Cook, SVP of Global Partnerships and Channels at Dell Technologies. She'll be back with more coverage after this short break.