 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And welcome back here on theCUBE, which of course is the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. Proud to be here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We've been live Monday now, today, Tuesday, back live again tomorrow. Hope you join us for all three days of coverage. All with Keith Townsend. I'm John Walls, we're joined by Jim Franklin, who's the Director of Solution Management at Dell EMC. Jim, good to see you this afternoon. Hey John, nice to see you as well. How's the show been for you so far? Fantastic, there's always a lot of energy at Dell World. Yeah, it's always exciting to be around, see our partners, our customers, hear our executive speak, gives us some clarity on what we're doing. So it's a fun time, it's energetic, it's Vegas. Yeah, good combination, right? Yeah. So, before we jump in, what are you hearing from customers now? Because we've been talking to a lot of folks in your shoes at Dell, and just kind of curious, what are people bidding your ear about? What are they most curious about? Yeah, so a lot of our customers and our partners are interested in, I'll call them hot trends. So what from our perspective are we seeing? Where are their problems? So for them, things like, how do I continue to try and outpace the data that keeps coming, right? Because like death and taxes, the data keeps growing and growing and growing. So they're looking at it going, how do I start to consume all this data? Can you help out? Hey, but what about this cloud, and how do I make the cloud reality? Several of them haven't actually even started on a cloud strategy. So they're saying, hey, what's the best way to look at that? And then they're looking at it saying, if they're the infrastructure guy, or if they're the backup administrator, they're saying, how do I actually flip my economic model from a cost model to a profit model? So these are the sorts of conversations we're seeing not only with our customers, but our partners are trying to help them out as well. So take us back, let's go to the most simple or at least maybe the most elementary stage, to say they're not even thinking of a cloud strategy yet, or they're just now embarking on that. Just sniffing at it. Yeah, walk us through that. What do you do? Because you would think by now, obviously their awareness is viable. We should be there. They don't know where to go. Right, so most customers know that this is now trusted technology, a trusted operating model. The problem has to be is how do you actually get there? What's that journey look like? And what choices do I have? So even those early adopters that jumped out to public cloud for sort of a quick fix, we see them especially from my area, which is business critical applications, SAP Oracle, Splunk, they're coming back to an on-premise cloud for reasons like being able to recover out of that. Or this now they've discovered is their intellectual property. And there's a little bit of reluctance just to go send that out to sort of an unknown place. So we see a lot of customers that are now bringing it back, but they now learn how that economic model can work. So they're trying to go in with sort of a cloud mentality. So still do the operational, the showback, the chargeback, but maybe bring that in-house. So you're more comfortable with it. So you can innovate on that. So as we're talking about these traditional mission critical apps, SAP, Splunk, Oracle Suite, these applications that are very rigid. You know, the cash register, you know, SAP, the cash register of the world. We don't want to change, you know, you get the product guys, you say, hey, we want access to the mission critical data. We want to be able to change it on the fly. You have the SAP guys going back and saying, no, no, no, wait a minute. We'll give you an M plus one environment to develop in and then you prove to us. But it takes nine months to get an M plus one environment to even do the development. How is Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, hoping solve that agility problem for these legacy applications? Yeah, so the first thing that we have to do, if you're going to keep it on-premises, we advise our customers, modernize the infrastructure. Because a lot of times you'll come up on a server or a storage refresh, right? This is the plumbing, right? This is underneath the guts of the house. It's not exactly attractive stuff. So if you can actually move to speed-based technologies, things like Flash, right? Fantastic technology. If you can virtualize, if you can start to consider scale out and scale up technologies that are ready to go. Software-defined has been a boon for these things. SAP, right, is now adopting things like Software-defined. That's fantastic for folks like us. You guys know the advantages of Software-defined. They can spin up, spin down, scale up, scale up in a much more pragmatic, quicker way. So these are sort of, now we're entering into things like VXRAC, VXRAL, and they have the resiliency, the stability, the scale in order to support these applications, right? They're built now solid enough that you can trust them to run. So now you get those operational efficiencies, you get that ability to scale, you get the performance, and you get it at a little bit better price point as well. So I think that's where customers are starting to be less reluctant to move those big, humongous SAP, Oracle workloads, right? Because it can be trusted. It's now that technology's aged enough and is resilient enough that now customers are doing it and they're doing it quite rapidly. So step two of this is once I get some agility, what I thought was traditional rationality, you know what, doubts are never moved SAP to the cloud because it's static, it doesn't change and it's costly. Well, now I have these use cases where I'm spending up N plus ones all the time and I'm bringing them down. That's elastic, that sounds like cloud. How do you help make that transition? So SAP actually, as one of the trigger points is this move to Han at the in-memory database and the economic model was, it's a little pricey that software, right? So SAP actually has gone in with a cloud first mentality. They've actually helped us out here, right? They promoted us. So Han Enterprise Cloud, for instance, is a way for you to get in on Han at a price point that's a little better, the subscription-based model and you can start to migrate some lower, like a BW app, something, something a little smaller. Remember back in the days when we first virtualized, right? You wouldn't virtualize your mission critical app right at the back, right? You pick something small that you could eat. We don't eat our meal one big hunk at a time, right? We eat little bites of it. So we're doing the same thing. You have four brothers. What's that? Unless you have four of them. And then you eat your fancy, then? That's what you do at all, right? Yeah, or you get real quick with your elbows. So we advise our customers, take a small BW app, right, that you got on Oracle right now, flop it over there, put it in the cloud. You'll be able to cost justify this much, much better and then we can work on tangible use cases. Start to pull in or data rich, hydrate that really fast, awesome analytics engine and start to use it for the power of good, right? It's a superhero, right? It's a superhero technology. So we want to invoke it. We want to bring it alive. We want to apply it towards new innovations and that's what our customers are doing now. Financial services, healthcare, the retail market. So now our customers are starting to say, hey, how can I apply this super awesome superhero technology to my retail space? How can I inflate my tires by PSI more so I save my company $10 million, right? So all these use cases now are, now I call this my personal thing. I call it now cool IT. We're no longer in the trenches doing the plumbing for SAP. We're now moving on to cool IT where we can start to do data analytics. We can start to apply use cases, start to ingest more data. Maybe that oil rig out there in the Gulf. I can start to pull in more of that data. I can start to do analytics on it. I can start to show the business that I'm meaningful, that I am a profit center. I know what's going on. Yeah, what's been the big jump there in terms of opening people's eyes, opening a company's eyes into how rich that data is for them, how applicable it is and how actionable it is because that's been one of the bugaboo, right? People realize, I got all this data. Well, there's treasure there. There is treasure. You got to find it. You got to get there. So we've had advancements in some of the technology. Like Han is a hardened database now. Not hardened in terms of its access, but hardened in terms of the technology itself. So I can actually put more in it and ingest it. The other thing that's happened is we've moved out to the edge, things like the gateways and things like that. Now I can apply that technology, but I don't have to suck it all in. And we'll go back to the original point. The cloud has enabled a lot of this traffic, the data traffic to go out there. And what we see our customers now doing is now they're able to actually quiesce the data ingest. We always could do this, but it never came together in such a way that it was cohesive. That I could have universal translators of all this different data coming in and that I could actually quiesce it. And now to me, the part that always matters, the UI work, like I can actually visualize an MSAP and Oracle and all that, they can now make it visual. I think that's the key. So if I'm a CFO or I'm the CEO, and I'm talking to my CIO, and I don't need to talk about numbers, I can literally visualize the data on my screen, on my iPad or wherever, whatever device I have. That now, what we see with our eyes, right, is much more believable than what we hear so you can see it. And that's I think, that's the big differentiator I've seen is we don't do customer presentations. We show them with their own data. So we used to do that design thinking way back in the day, but now you can actually apply that with the technology we have and I can visualize. Scenes believing. And immediately customers, you don't have to do a business justification, they see it. They see it right there in front of their own eyes. It's fantastic. So talking about design theory or design approach, that has to be a point where we're at industry ride or even within your practice, where you're at the 50, 60% of the solution for most customers and there's a customization point. Where are you guys at in that? Is it 50, 60, 70, 80% of that customer? Well, that's what makes it fun for a guy like me, right? Because in solutions, we can validate, we can do performance optimization. And that's for the most part, you're talking servers, network storage, stuff we've always done and we can optimize that to a larger step. But once you flip the script and you look from the application down, you can start to tune from that perspective. So we can get about 70, 80% of this well constructed. It's that last 20% where the customer's saying, hey, I'm a financial services arm and I'm trying to catch the flash boys or the stock traders that are manipulating the market. Well, that requires a new set of tools, right? A new set of approach to how to do this, how to analyze your data, how to introduce automation. So for us, the last mile, particularly with our SI partners, right? Who are really good at doing this, SAP's really good at doing this design thinking session. We can sit down with a customer now, we can ask them, where do they want to make money, right? How do you want to invest in IT so that your analytics is fully realized, your data is fully realized. And they have wonderful use cases. So now we're not talking about how does WidgetX work with application Y? We're talking about, hey, how do I apply this data in the direction of the use case you're trying to solve for? And that's the last 20% or something like that. Is that where art meets science in a way? I'm all of a sudden, like you said, you've got your 80%. This is what it's going to be. And now we're going to find two. So there is some art maybe that comes in the play there. There is, we found that it tends to be vertical specific and there is an art form to it, which is why our global system integrators are wonderful because they're artists, right? We could go in with them and we could have that conversation. We could sit down for, you could even sit down just for a couple hours and pretty soon you're having a great conversation, understanding really what the customer's business is like and then targeting that particular use case and making it tangible. So that's pretty interesting. You say you sit down, what was that like you sitting down with it? Because traditionally Dell EMC, Dell Technologies talk to the infrastructure group. You're talking about a completely different level. This sounds like application level folks, analysts, not the traditional Dell contact. Yeah, which makes us a little bit specialized, right? So you still want to sell to the back of the house, the infrastructure guys, you know, folks that are there. They need a power make. Right, but the, and it's a completely different conversation though. And I'll connect the two in just a minute, but we go in and we'll talk to the VP of applications. We'll talk to the DBA. These are the folks that actually they're not worried about the widget, the disc behind it, right? We'll sell them a VMAX or a Power Max, excuse me, at the end of the day, but they're not so worried about that. They're worried about how do I get fiduciary responsibility at this? How do I control my regulations? What do I do about data locality? How do I look at the pressure on that oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure it's not going to burst? How do I proactively send out my maintenance man not on every month? When I know on the 5,000th open of that train door that I need to proactively go do that because at 5,000 open and closes, it's going to fail that we've done that with analytics. We know that. So for us, most of those conversations tend to be at the, you look for the DBA or the VP of applications or the CIO, and in this way, this is the beauty of how this works. We're actually going in with the Rainmaker ISV. So we're going in with SAP, we're going in with Oracle, and now we've combined what traditionally has been Dalby infrastructure guys with SAP, and we never used to call, we used to call six months detached from each other, not anymore. Design thinking, IoT, use case, data analytics has brought us right together and we're in the glide path together now. It's a much different partnership now with those guys. Yeah, good recipe, right? It's fabulous. It's great, it's fun time. Yeah, I can tell. And thank you for being with us. We appreciate the bird's eye view, but as I said, this is kind of an exciting time, right? Because you're able to, you're transforming your business and other businesses at the same time. Yeah, best thing to do. Yeah, thanks for being with us. Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us from Dell EMC. Back with more from Dell Technologies World 2018. We're live here in Las Vegas.