 Good morning everyone, live on the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2023, Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We have been here since Monday night, theCUBE after dark, we started all day yesterday. We've just had an amazing master class conversation with the COO and vice chairman of Dell, Jeff Clark. Dave, so much to unpack. We only have a few minutes and we've got a great lineup of guests today to continue the conversation. Yeah, Jeff Clark's amazing. I think he's the only guy here more tired than I am. I mean, he's got great energy. He leaves it all on stage. It's funny, he said, you know, I don't really like doing that. That's not my favorite thing to do. I like solving engineering problems, but you'd never know it when he's up on stage. He's a really, really strong presenter. Clear thinker, he rattles off all the patents, the products, one after the other. He keeps it all on his head, uses no notes. I'm really in awe of his capabilities. But yeah, big week, it's AI, it's the year of AI in Project Helix. We were asking one of our guests earlier, would you have announced this had it not been for ChatGBT? And they said, yeah, we would have announced it, for sure. And they kind of explained that. But I think people would not have paid attention as much as they will now. Now, Dell Stock's not going to get a big lift and not considered like an AI play. Although, you could see how AI could definitely lift their business in a lot of infrastructure companies. I mean, when you think at least about the internet, when it first got started, in terms of commercial internet and wide user adoption, it was the pick and ax companies. It was Cisco, certainly companies like Dell, EMC, Intel. I mean, they all, it lifted all boats. I think AI potentially could do the same. Of course, Nvidia is really the hot company now. Their stock's going crazy. But it's interesting, when you look at the analyst estimates, they've only increased their revenue on Nvidia, just a couple points. So you're like, okay, so this is this hype, right? The stock's running because it's hype. I think a lot of hedge funds are selling it and taking some profits. They're announcing tonight, so we'll see. But, and there's supply challenges too. Getting GPUs, AMD potentially coming out with some competitive GPUs. It was interesting to hear Jeff Clark, he described exactly what we've been talking about for a couple of years now, which is the connect-centric environment. Not just the CPU or the GPU. It's the CPU, the alternative processors like GPUs and NPUs. We've talked about that a lot. But also the interconnection components, the NICs, the RAID controllers, the accelerators, all that in balance. Kim Laynar is coming on later on. She's a sort of real star at this, you know that workday commercial rock star? Well, she's a rock star, I'm sorry. And so we're going to talk to her about that and dig into that a little bit. But I think that is a fundamental shift that we're seeing in the industry. So I'm kind of excited to see Project Helix and see where that goes. I mean, Dell does have a good, seemingly a track record of announcing stuff. So what they're doing is they're basically, as Jeff said, we used to never pre-announce. So they're now they're pre-announcing. Part of that, by the way, is to give customers direction. The other part is I think the signal, hey, don't leave, you know, kind of the old freeze the market play. And then a year later, announce something that will ship sort of, I don't know, six months later. And the sum of that will ship now. And so the project frontier was like that. And, you know, the block and file storage for, for the cloud, for AWS and Azure, et cetera. That is super cloud. I mean, it is sort of the fundamental definition of super cloud where you have an abstraction layer across clouds and it's on-prem. You've got a super pass that's purpose built for making sure that there's a common experience, that there's lowest latency as possible, that you can do recovery, all those things and make it all programmable. So that is what multi-cloud should have been. You know, what we call super cloud. And then it was really encouraging to hear, Jeff Clark, based on, you know, your question and my question about, you asked what's different about the edge. And then he said, no, that common storage layer stretches out to the edge. So that is good news. And that's a trend that we're seeing Microsoft this week at Build announced this thing called Flex, which is trying to do what Snowflake does. I think Snowflake's well ahead of them, but basically building data apps and extending that throughout its ecosystem. So, yeah, a lot going on here and a lot going on in the industry. Dell Innovation Flywheel is spinning, right? I mean, there's no shortage of that you talked about. And I think it's also an accountability factor that I like about they pre-announce, they deliver a year later, they commit to GA and regions where products and software is going to be available. And I think I have a respect for that from an accountability standpoint because from their lineage, the EMC days, as you've told me about, a lot of things announced never delivered or projects never productized. And we're seeing this consistent trend with Dell projects, products within a pretty impressive timeframe. Yeah, I mean, I would say this, you call it a flywheel, innovation flywheel. I think generally people don't see Dell as the innovator per se. What I look at Dell, much in the same way as I look at Oracle, although much different. Oracle's going to kind of red stack and everything's Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. Dell's sort of open ecosystem, Oracle software company, very high margins. You know, Dell, big company, but lower margins. But I will say this, they give both companies very high marks because they take their R&D, they apply their R&D and it turns into products that can generate revenue. This is something I've been very critical of IBM over the years. They will do a ton of stuff in R&D. Look at Watson. I mean, Watson could have had to run a table. I mean, 2011 it was like the most exciting thing going, right? When Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. But they were never able to really commercialize that to the extent that it drove leadership and gave them the imprimatur of innovator. I think companies like Dell, they'll take innovations that are broadly across the industry. These masks are everywhere. They are everywhere. In our hotel rooms, it's crazy. Hey, there was a big hatch. But so they'll take these innovations that are widely understood across the industry. Dell clearly understands them and they look at, okay, very straightforward. You heard Jeff Clark. He's a very straightforward individual. How do we apply those to help our customers in our, you know, and adopt our products and, you know, to simplify things, you know, drive revenue for the company, obviously drive value for the customer. And so they've done a good job at that. I wouldn't necessarily say the industry looks to Dell as the innovator. I mean, innovators are like open AI. It's, you know, very clearly the cloud guys from the standpoint of AI. I would say, you know, where Dell has a leadership, PCs, storage, you know, there's definitely innovation that they're driving in. And so within that world, within that layer, I would agree they are developing a methodology that is flywheel-like. So I think I'll give them that. And I think they've got a lot of work to do. I mean, they've got to get Apex to where it can be broadly adopted. It's got more services, more ecosystem services. I want to see large language models as a service, right? Because that's what the cloud guys are doing. And so right now, you know, 80, 90% of the conversations, if not a hundred percent of the conversations with customers are, how do I take advantage of this? And they're looking at, you know, what can I buy today that I can experiment with? And, you know, Dell's announced some things that you can't experiment with. But it's easier to experiment in the cloud. I mean, let's face it. I want to unpack a little bit in the few minutes we have left here. Your comment in comparison, comparing Dell with IBM and some of the missed opportunities that they've had or how they're different. How much of that is cultural? Because the interesting thing to me about Dell is it's been led by Michael for 39 years now. Jeff Clark's been there 36 years. Cultures must be dramatically different, but it's challenging to have a leader around for that long and be able to shift culture and pivot as quickly as they have so many times. I think it's easier for Dell. Because you have a founder led company, I think it's much more difficult for IBM. And you think about, you know, and again, the comparison was that Dell is doing what IBM didn't. IBM's doing, you know, big, big ideas that never really come to fruition in the way that you would expect. Dell's kind of the opposite. You know, little singles that drive a lot of runs. And that's kind of how I look at Dell. And I think because Michael Dell, the CEO, his name is on the logo, I think that makes a big difference that, you know, he can set the agenda. I think it's much harder, you know, for an IBM. I mean, you saw, you know, IBM was in deep, deep trouble when Lou Gersner came in. He completely changed the company's culture to focus on services after they bought PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, became a services company. And so products became secondary. You know, they sold their PC business. They basically paid global foundries to take their microelectronics business, their semiconductor business. IBM was the leader in semiconductors in the 80s. They had fabs and they were, you know, fabulous, you know, company in that regard. They were a leader in database. And they kind of, when Gersner made that shift, we were talking to Jeff Clark about the horizontal industry structure. When Lou Gersner chose to turn the company into a services first, they lost that product edge, which was a good call. It saved IBM and they made a ton of money over the Gersner years. And then Palmasano picked that up. But, you know, they never had, they never got back their product chops. And then Ginny Rometti picked up. So you had this transition of leaders at Dell. You've got consistency at the top. And so Michael Dell could say, hey, we don't want to do our transition as a public company. We're going to go private in 2012. We're going to address the challenges that we have in private. And so that we don't have to be on the 90 day shot clock. We used to talk about that all the time. You know, the zero interest rate environment. We're going to use our brains and our leverage and our largesse to actually acquire a $65 billion value company, EMC, that comes along with VMware. We're going to do that. This is what we're doing. This is how we're going forward. And then we're going to use that. Essentially, VMware is a piggy bank to restructure our debt. We're going to de-lever. And then, you know, five years or seven years later, they come out with really clean balance sheets and, you know, an amazing new company. As you know, I was a fan of spin-in. I would like to see more software content, but there were a lot of reasons that Michael Dell and his investors, you know, wanted to have that structure. So, you know, I really respect that. My point is, you've got a CEO leader, founder led company, there's always clarity. You can see it from top to bottom. And then it shows. Last question for you, Dave. You had a chance to sit down with Michael Dell yesterday. What, anything in your conversation, you've had the opportunity many times to talk with Michael and he loves coming on theCUBE, which is so great. What surprised you in the conversation that you had with Michael yesterday? Any nuggets that you want to share with the audience? The biggest surprise to me was when I asked him, you know, basically I was asking him, if you were 25 again, what kind of company would you start? And then he kind of, you know, as a gentleman that he is kind of corrected me, he said, if I were 19 again, because that's when he started, PC's limited, I would focus on healthcare. And that was, it was an epiphany for me because basically what he's saying is, the healthcare industry has so many deep problems and the technology industry in healthcare, especially now with AI, are colliding in a way that technology can drive transformation of that industry from a standpoint of efficiency, from the standpoint of solving the hardest problems, whether it's cancer or disease or predictive medicine and basically compliment doctors, maybe even doing some things that a doctor can't do because they don't have all the data sources, et cetera. So that was really eye-opening for me. And I think if you're in your teens or your 20s, you should think about how technology and industry are coming together, not just healthcare, but finance and manufacturing and many others. And so that was really eye-opening. I love that, fantastic. Well, Dave, we've got a great day three lineup. Alison Dew, the CMO of Dell is up next with us. We're going to be talking with Broadcom. There's going to be a show and tell. We're going to be talking with Doug Schmidt about services and how Dell is really revolutionizing that. We're going to expand more on the Dell Broadcom partnership and we've got a really great customer edge story we're going to wrap with which is going to tell you how growers are becoming data scientists. You're going to want to stick around. Alison Dew, CMO of Dell, up next.