 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. We are back in Las Vegas. This is Dell Technologies World, the first ever Dell Technologies World. Last year was Dell EMC World. Of course before that was EMC World, a merge of these two giants. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. And we're here with Howard Elias, longtime CUBE alum. Great to be back with you. Howard's the president of services, digital, and IT at Dell EMC. They give you all the hard stuff. All the fun stuff, I would say. See, that's why they give you the hard stuff. You look great. Oh, thanks. You've always done such a great job with complex integrations. You just must be a patient man. Well, you know what? They don't call it work when you love what you do, right? Right, right. It's been a great, I know you've heard from Michael and the whole team. It's been a great, you know, first year that we closed in February. Momentum strong, customer reactions phenomenal, and we're delivering. And it's just a great time to be in IT. Stu said earlier today, when we were doing our keynote analysis, one of the things EMC never did. It never went out and bought a big services company. You kind of grew things up from within. You kept your swim lanes relative to your partners. That always worked well for you guys. Maybe you could talk about that later. And it's still working well. Look, our goal in life is to provide the strategic guidance and technology expertise around the products and the technologies and the solutions that we offer. Now, we'll certainly want to monetize those services around where it makes sense for us, but we also work with a very broad ecosystem of partners. And that's very important to us. We stick to our knitting. We provide that strategic guidance, that technology expertise. We're the experts around our technology and our solutions, but it's a much broader market beyond that. And so we play very, very well, sticking to what we do well, and then leveraging what our partners do well. So you've seen it all. I mean, you and I grew up in the mainframe era when IBM was sort of the dominant position. And with Compact, you saw a huge, awesome PC business. Then you saw the internet and how that changed competition. And now we're entering, it feels like on the cloud era, I forgot about that. And now we're entering, it feels like a new era, this digital era. Sort of the next big era of IT, as we call it. And we've seen these pendulum swings, decentralized, decentralized, distributed back to the cloud. But with IoT and sensors everywhere and data being created at the edge and the core and the cloud, this really requires computing everywhere. And so you've got to have real-time data analytics at the edge, whether it's the autonomous car, the robot in the factory, the healthcare systems in the hospital and so on, smart building, smart cities. But then you're going to, and that needs both edge and distributed core, the ability to do those real-time or near real-time analytics. And then you'll use cloud for trend analysis, deep learning, improving the algorithms and sending that back to the edge. And the opportunities there are immense. And what's really awe-inspiring to us is we talk about who's the digital leader in IT, it's really our customers. They're really doing some really cool stuff. Yeah, we heard some of that this morning. Yeah, Howard, it's something I remember we said when the whole trend of big data came out. We were like, Hadoop's interesting and it's useful, but it's the businesses that will be spawned off of that that will be truly important. Maybe tell us, you know, data's at the core of it. It's always been at the core of EMC, but you look at ML and AI and even Edge, it's all about that data. And how does the Dell family really help customers get the value, transform with that data? Well, here's the difference, right? Because when we were talking about data years ago in those big Hadoop clusters, it was really more about enterprise data and analyzing that enterprise data. Now it's really about those systems of engagement and systems of insight. It's all that data being generated by our customers, our customers' customers, all the devices that are being used. And it's really gaining those insights and it's really analyzing the data that customers collect with external data and developing new patterns and insights that were just never possible before. So what we do is we help our customers frame their transformation. We talk about digital IT workforce and security and we help them think about where they are in that journey. What are the business outcomes? Because technology is just an enabler. This is really about business outcomes and technology being business technology and business enabler. So whether it's our consulting organization to help a customer plan those journeys, our implementation business, our support business, even our managed services. Again, ourselves and with partners will help our customers every stage of that journey. We often talk about the difference between a business and a digital business is the way in which the digital business uses data. So in thinking about the way in which you as a digital practitioner use data, how is that evolving, how is that changing? Well, let's use one real example in our services business. We have an internal capability we call Support Assist. It is analyzing billions and billions of events every single day with all of our connected devices. And it's understanding the use cases, how it's being used, what's working, what's not working, develop themes, and so we actually build better products and services because of that data. And now this is a traditional call center, connected device, break fix business, support business that is being completely digitized. A little evolved from phone home. A little bit. I want to ask you, Howard, you've been an accomplished leader for many, many years. Digital leadership, we talked earlier with Pat, CEOs are trying to figure out how do I get digital right? How do they get digital right? Who's leading the digital charge within your customer base? Well, as I mentioned before, you saw it on stage with our Trailblazer and Innovator Awards, but we literally have hundreds and thousands of customers all around the world that are embracing. And what it means to really be digital is to get in with the technology practitioners, the data scientists, the people that understand what technology can do embedded in the business, but it's getting the business embedded in IT and technology. It's no more setting the requirements and throwing it over the wall and waiting a few months to get requirement documents back and then a waterfall project in your two years later and then the customer says, well, that's not what I asked for or the market's changed or the customer's moved. And so it's really building these balanced teams now where the business and the technology and the product owners are really getting together and saying, what do we need to do? Let's go get it out there in the marketplace and let's iterate, fast fail, learn quickly. That's what digital means. How has Dell EMC consulting evolved, changed in this digital era? Yeah, that's a great point. So we've had a consulting business for a while, but what we've done is focus them around our transformation journeys. We call it our three by three, three by three by one matrix. So we're focused on three specific offers in each of our IT transformation, digital transformation and workforce transformation. So three core offerings, you can think about IT transformation around, hyper cloud as an example or workforce is collaboration. We of course embed security all throughout all three of those and then we have a transformation program office. So we focus down on 12 markets around the world, those three disciplines, hyper focus where we have great expertise and then we leverage our partner ecosystem beyond that. So that's a simpler approach than it is. What do you need? We can do it, which really was never your business anyway but it kind of bled into that a little bit. Yeah, well this gets back to reexamining what we're really good at and what we wanted to focus on was that strategic guidance and technology expertise around our products and technologies, how we do that best, how we integrate into other ecosystems and then leverage the partners for the rest. Howard, one of the things that we heard from Allison this morning is people are a bit skeptical as to how much the technology can help. I know one thing that your group helps a lot on is the career tracks, how do we move from being an admin of a silo to working closer with the business, being an architect or moving there. What are you seeing on your customer's journey from a career standpoint? Yeah, that's a great point because one of the things we do focus on in our consulting practices, technology is necessary but woefully insufficient. You also have to transform people, process and operating model. That doesn't just mean structure but the way that people operate within the business and within technology. And we've seen a huge increase in requirement for the transformation of people and process. This is where our education services teams come in, not just training about product and technology, but the accreditation, the certifications around cloud, around data science, around what does it really mean to do analytics in an AI ML world? And we're seeing a tremendous trajectory in that. And the data model is changing. So I mean, you maybe have a lot of back end systems around what an Oracle or SAP, but it doesn't necessarily tell the story of what's really happening in the field or closer to the customer. Do you discern a difference between those customers who, sorry, get digital and maybe those that maybe are not as advanced in terms of the way they treat data closer to the customer? Well, I think we're all learning. And this is really that notion of the systems of engagement because the data analytics are no longer just in the core or just at the edge. It's distributed data and distributed data analytics and figuring out where the processing power needs to be to do the right set of analytics for the right data set for the purpose that's needed at that time. And we're all learning through that and it'll be different depending on the use case. What's your sense of, let's talk about disruption a little bit. Everybody talks about it, but I'd like to put some substance behind it. It seems like every industry has its own disruption scenario. Some industries, music, certainly publishing, now taxis, hotels have been highly disrupted. Others, banking, other financial services, insurance, healthcare, not so much disrupted yet. But it's coming. It's happening in different flavors at different paces. Look at what FinTech's doing. Goldman Sachs getting into retail bank with Marcus, a built ground up digital bank from the ground up. Look, every business in every industry is going to be disrupted at some level. And it's all about understanding your customer better, addressing those needs faster, learning quicker than the competition of what works for customers, what needs to change for customers, and actually finding those value points even before the customers realize it themselves. And we've seen this in industry after industry. And yeah, some of the big heavy infrastructure industries might take a little bit longer, but it's coming to all of us. Well, we agree. There's no industry that's safe, which implies that there's going to be new winners and some losers. And this is the opportunity for all of us. Embrace and have the courage of your conviction to go try new things. Not everything's going to work. The best hitters in baseball never bat a thousand. They don't even bat over 500. We need to do better than that in business for sure. But you're not going to bat a thousand. And in fact, if all you do is, if everything you did work perfectly, you're not trying enough stuff. Yeah. Howard, we hear so much about the change that's happening here internally. A lot of change just went on. You were critically involved in all of the integration pieces. How do you help the teams inside? Embrace change, be aware of it, knowing that there's going to be some ups and downs. How does the culture help? Well, first of all, in the technology industry, we're the bastion of lots of change and disruption for many years. Other industries are going to be going through what we've been going through for decades, right? And so, first of all, it takes a certain kind of person to be in this business already, so they understand change is the new normal. But the more important thing we can do is have clear vision and strategy. What we're trying to accomplish for our customers, you know, we're very clear about what we measure, our customer NPS, our team member NPS, our relative market performance, which then leads to our financials. We have what we call a strategy cascade. Well, we're very clear of our purpose, which you heard Michael talk about, developing the technologies that drive human progress, our strategy to become the essential infrastructure company for today's application and the cloud native era that we're entering. And then what are the key things we're doing and what does every team member inside of our company do? And there's only two kinds of team members we have at Dell, those who serve our customers directly and those who serve those who serve our customers. So, Dell technologies world. First ever? First ever. Obviously a lot of synergies with previous Dell EMC worlds, EMC world at the root of this other Dell world brought in, but what should we expect here? What are the learnings? What are the things you want your customers to take away? Well, you've seen a progression since we've come together. We refer to it as better together. It's important that we understand that we have businesses, technologies and brands. They operate at different rhythms. Some of them have different business models. Some of them have different ecosystems. Some of them are platform versus product. And so that's the reason why we've got the structure we do, but our customers are better off when we're better together. And so what Dell technologies world is meant to show is the power of all of our capabilities. Not every customer will use everything, but those that want that full end to end experience, we want to learn how we could deliver that better. And you guys use that as a competitive advantage. We do. I mean, granted, if you're a one product company and you got what's perceived as the best widget, you're going to sell some. But you guys have changed the way in which you compete. I mean, the cross-selling that we're seeing, obviously VMware is a huge piece of that. Your security businesses, you mentioned Pivotal earlier. And we do it in a way that is open at every level. So it's not something that the customer is, has to, that we require them to go a certain way. Because you think about a typical stack of a hybrid cloud, PCF with PKS on VMware Cloud Foundation, running on Dell infrastructure underneath, secured by RSA and secure works, maybe delivered as a cloud by virtue stream. Those are all choices. And customers can make different choices at different levels with open interfaces and open APIs. But we do believe customers that are looking for more integrated solutions, we are better together. Well, I think your secret is you're having fun. I mean, it shows Howard, you've just, you've gone through so many transformations, such a successful exec and a great friend of theCUBE. So thank you so much for coming back on. My pleasure, thank you, great to see you. And thank you, everybody. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Dell Technologies World 2018 in Vegas. You're back.