 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to theCUBE. We are live on day two at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host. The one and only at Stu Miniman. We are here in Vegas with about 14,000 attendees. The biggest event ever. Not just 14,000 people here, but about 35,000 also engaging with the video experiences, live streaming and the on demand. Also going on here is a big event with partners. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Marketing from Dell EMC. Hi Cheryl. Hi, thanks for having me. Welcome back. Yeah. So 6,500 partners. Absolutely. Wow, that's up from last year. We have record attendance. We just are really, really excited about the engagement and how we're resonating with our partners. So we just had a fantastic kickoff to our Global Partner Summit yesterday. So some big news regarding the channel. One of the things I'd like to start with is the name of the event this year, the first time it's Dell Technologies World. Last year was Dell EMC World. Kind of indicative of the EMC Federation, companies being absorbed into Dell, companies with their own channel programs. Talk to us about what you announced regarding the Dell Technologies Advantage frameworks. What is the framework and how does it make it easier for channel partners to sell Dell products of? Well, thank you. You know, as you said, we've really elevated this event to the Dell Technologies World. And many of our partners today already participate in VMware's program or in Dell EMC's program. And really what we're doing with the advantage is we're taking a lot of the messaging, the story, a lot of the marketing collateral that we candidly educated our internal employees on so that we can best differentiate and articulate to our customers the value and the power of all these strategically aligned businesses. So for the partner community, we're bringing IT transformational campaigns to them. We're bringing a lot of the messaging and the story on how to enable and share with their team members and their customers. And we're also working on enablement and really driving more cross-functional, inclusive competencies and trainings to really enable them and their team members to be more effective. Yeah. Cheryl, maybe explain to us some of those, the training and the cross-compancies and things like that. You know, I'm sure there's people on the Dell channel side that need to be educated on other products and vice versa. And there's not new products all the time, new changing, you know, Jeff Clark walked through, you know, interesting things with like AI and IoT that are coming in the future. So bring us inside some of that. Yeah, absolutely. So we're very mindful of trying to develop either reference architectures or some of our curriculum around training that would include, you know, vSphere from VMware, for example, along with the Dell EMC infrastructure or even on our client initiatives, a Windows 10 refresh effort that includes AirWatch from VMware. So really looking at the outcome-based opportunity that we know we have to engage in those conversations with our customers so that we can stitch together the training and the availability. And we want to, on a future state, develop these trainings so our partners wouldn't have to take them multiple times. It would be credited and eligible in both VMware's program as well as Dell EMC's. So we're really striving to give commonality and be efficient with speed, time to market and really leveraging all the capabilities across the strategically aligned businesses. What about some of the feedback that you've gotten from, you know, legacy EMC partners, Dell partners in terms of how to make this complementary? Was that being that the partners are on the front lines talking with customers about all their transformation needs? How have the partners really helped to create this new framework? Well, you know, we're always listening and we host a number of advisory boards and we listen to our partners and we've heard very, very common. We love the product marketing but we want you to give us solution marketing. Can you help enable us in the outcome-based conversation and dialogue? One of the things we announced this week is an IT transformation marketing campaign which we're going to put in market with Dell EMC. It's available simultaneously for the partners that essentially really does map together all the technologies and componentry across the strategically aligned businesses to the business outcomes that they're talking to their customers about. We also launched an IoT competency for the first time this week which, again, is really driving at some of those emerging technologies you heard Jeff talk about, like AI and getting to machine learning and analytics to really help them engage and be more competent and effective in those technologies. Yeah, Cheryl, how's the channel doing? You know, there's been so much change going on. I remember back when, you know, Converged Infrastructure first launched. It was like, oh, we need to create data center practices because they were server or storage people. When cloud rolled out, it was like, well, we're working with Microsoft. How do we figure this out? How is the channel transforming? How do they look at their business? How do they look at where they add value? Absolutely, and I'll tell you, Stu, I've been in this business a long time and I don't know a more exciting time when it's moving faster and that's also true in the partner ecosystem and the partner community. So we're still going to transact a lot of business the traditional way that we do now but increasingly I'm hearing from the partners they're looking at forming new alliances, they're looking at acquisitions, they're buying new skills and capabilities. We really want to help chart that map for them on kind of where the vision is heading and how we can help align with them. So if it's possible, we want to try and help align new alliances and introductions for them with other partners or as I said, continue to bring solutions, reference architectures to market that can help them enable around it. Can you tell us a little bit about what was announced regarding the Dell EMC Ready Stack for channel partners and reference architectures? So that's a great example of where we're going to always continue to work to bring engineered systems together like a VX rail or a VX block but the Dell EMC Ready Stack is really a certified and tested reference architecture for those partners in those instances when they want to go build it. So we'll tell them, here's all the bill of materials and all the capabilities. It'll be a completely inclusive Dell technology stack but it's a way to give them confidence, mitigate risk and they can build it and integrate it rather than buying a system that's been pre-engineered. Cheryl, how is the Dell Technologies world experience different for the channel partners? You know, one of the feedbacks I always get is it was like, oh, well, I mean, everybody from Dell's really busy and you know, there's certain things you can tell the customers but the channel people is like, well, tell us more about the future. Give us some of that NDA stuff. How do you manage that? And you know, maybe it gives a little bit of flavor of what the week is like for them that are attending. Well, you've certainly seen the scale of this event. So we call our global partner summit an event inside an event but we have everything from technical training where the partners are able to take their exams and certifications. We certainly have heroes exposition and heroes going for the pre-sales technical community and we also have an executive briefing center where we're hosting and right behind me we have our partner lounge. We're hosting over 800 one-on-one meetings in that partner lounge where the partners get to meet either with customers. They've certainly brought a lot of customers here. They get to meet with Dell EMC executives or the partner executives and it's really around collaborating, networking in many ways, it accelerates sales opportunities here. So it's a combination of technical training, networking executive meetings, obviously product launches and announcements that we're bringing to market, the opportunity to really cultivate and work globally in our global partner summit. So it's a pretty active week but we have everybody rather busy. Talk to us about some of the ways that you are incentivizing and rewarding partners for their loyalty. Yeah, well thanks for asking. One of the things we announced this week actually is a My Rewards program and think of this as a way to accelerate incentives to our partners, sales reps and their pre-sale SE community. So it's a platform that's going to allow them to redeem points so you earn these points, you can either get cash cards, gifts, trips and it really does go directly to their sales reps and their SEs. So we've launched a really comprehensive loyalty program around our storage offerings. This is an excellent sales tool that our partners can leverage with their customers but it comes with it, a host of incentives and rewards for competitive takeout and displacement, growth of new business and new logos. I mean our partner community in the last year brought 54,000 new customers to Dell EMC. Many of those, if they're targeting these competitive takeouts, they're eligible for those incentives and it's a win-win. Yeah, Sheryl, how's the competitive landscape out there? You know, it's always a balance between well, I want to incent you for loyalty but it's a diverse market and there's a partner you might grow with that might end up being more competitive somewhere down the road. How do you balance that? How do you work through some of those issues in the field? We're very focused on trying to earn their business and earn the opportunity in the marketplace. We're incredibly fortunate right now that we've been experiencing double-digit growth. Many of our partners would tell us that they're growing faster with us than others and to be completely honest, when you look at the categories we compete in, we enjoy market leadership positions, whether it's in our servers or in storage or all-flash or hyper-converged. So when you really bring that together, it's an opportunity candidly for our partners. We're going to have to earn it every day. We recognize and know that they're business people and they work with other companies but we're just trying to make sure that we bring simple, predictable and profitable opportunities in both technology and platforms but also in our program and engagement. So the transformation theme has been really predominantly woven throughout yesterday and today as well, digital transformation, IT transformation, security and workforce transformation and in fact, Jeff talked about that during his keynote this morning. What are some of the expectations as the partners being on the front lines with customers and customers are now looking at leaders like Dell Technologies to say, how do we start utilizing emerging technologies? You mentioned IoT campaign. How are you, what are your expectations for the channel to be able to help customers build infrastructures that allow them to take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT to really be able to then transform their businesses to be competitive? You know, I am impressed every day when I meet with our partner community. In many ways they're leading the charge. So the natural engagement of some of these leading edge and emerging technologies, our partners are doing amazingly innovative work on embedding their intellectual property around these but for our part, what we want to do is certainly make sure that they're aware of use cases, here's business outcomes, many of which were kind of shown in the keynote in the big stage earlier this morning and we'll just drive competencies, we'll give them demo gear, we'll put them in labs in our executive briefing centers. We actively encourage our partners to take advantage of our solution centers and our executive briefing centers. It's a fantastic way for them to come into a sandbox and really immerse themselves in the technology and do proof of concepts with their customers. So we're going to continue to be focused on doing market research for them, much of the marketing material that we're bringing out in these transformational campaigns. The partners can benefit and leverage the research that we've done with companies like ESG and IDC and Forbes to really substantiate and build assessments and use cases for business outcomes with their customers. Cheryl, we've watched since the acquisition, Dell has been very focused on how do we merge these companies, how do we put this channel program together. Would you say are we at kind of a 1.5 version of that now? You know, when you would talk to the channel, how much more change should they expect kind of throughout the year? And you know, there's always feedback and learning, of course. Well, we're moving fast, but we're also genuinely committed to predictability and consistency with our partners. So one piece of pretty honest feedback we receive is don't change it all the time, right? Don't change it frequently. And we couldn't be more delighted with the success we've had in our inaugural year. I mean, when you just look at the fact that we unified and brought the program together, the success we're both enjoying, it's not completely broken. So we want to make sure that we can make refinements, we can adapt and be responsive to some of these new technologies and new transformations without really being disruptive and have wholesale change. So you'll see us really listen and continue to take feedback from our partners, but frankly, we feel like we're winning right now and we want to continue to just try and earn it and keep going fast. The word that comes to mind in summary is symbiosis. Yes, yes. Thank you, Cheryl, so much for coming by. Absolutely. Congratulations on growing the partner community this year and having over 800 meetings. Wow, I know. That's a lot. We're busy, thank you. You are busy, thanks so much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back after a short break.