 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, our eighth year covering EMC World. Now the first year covering Dell EMC World. I'm John Furrier with my co-host this week, Paul Gillan on the blue set, two cubes, two shotgun, double barrel shotgun of content. Our next guest, who's been on theCUBE every single year, we've been in existence since 2010. The Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, Jeremy Burton, formerly the CMO of EMC. And again, 2010 was your first year with EMC now. That's right. Look, I mean, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, yeah, the makeup takes a bit longer to cover up my wrinkles, but you know. You're running the show, you're on stage, your son's doing some gigs up there. I mean, where are you now mentally? I mean, 2010 when we started, our journey at theCUBE was the first at EMC World in Boston. You just joined the company. Now here, look where you're at. I mean, do you have to pinch me moments like, how the hell did this happen? What kind of big we are? What's the, how do you feel? Yeah, it's great. I mean, you know, I've always got this belief in tech. You can never plan more than a couple of years. I mean, so I kind of laugh a little bit at the five year strategy or whatever. And I think even, you know, personally, if you're looking out maybe more than a couple of years in your career as to what you want to do, it's, you know, it can all change. It's like the start of a race. You know, you can have all the best plans in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get around the first corner, right? So, yeah, I mean, I knew last year when Michael asked me to take on the CMO role that the marketing team could make a difference. I mean, I'm a big believer about story and making sure that people understand what we're trying to do. So, you know, it was a, for me at least, it was a challenge and a real interesting role to take on. Certainly a big challenge. You got the merger going on. Obviously a bigger role, bigger company, more portfolio product. You also have a product background. You usually, we're doing a lot of the product stuff. What's been the impact from a customer standpoint as you've been rolling out the brand of Dell Technologies, which I know is a holistic brand. But you now have a lot of brands to deal with in your portfolio. Yeah, well, the good news is we're bigger. We have more budget. We can do a bigger brand campaign. And the real goal here is most people, when they think of Dell, they think of a PC. When they think of EMC, they think of a storage array. Dell Technologies, I mean, if you look at the breadth of the company now, it really is incredible what we can do in an organization. So the brand campaign is really about redefining the company. What does Dell Technologies stand for? Well, it's about transforming your business, transforming IT, your workforce and security. And if we can get across over the next couple of years, the impact that we can have on an organization, that's really where the win is. And, you know, underneath that, obviously, we want to say, hey, look, if you're in a digital project, Pivotal's going to be lead. If it's a software-defined data center, it's VMware. So, but first and foremost, it's getting the big story of Dell Technologies and redefining how people perceive the company. Well, Jeremy, so what's the message? We've been trying to read the tea leaves here about what's the theme coming out of this show. What is the single most important message you want customers to take away? Number one, first and foremost, it's about, look, every company's going to become a digital company. If you want to become a digital company, trust Dell Technologies for your journey. Everybody's saying that, though. I mean, that's HPE's pitch now, too. So why do you adopt digital transformation as a theme? When has it become such a buzzword in the industry? Are you trying to find a nuance there? No, because the thing is, that's where the world's going. And we could make up something that's ours, but the problem with that, I've never been one for saying, oh, we're just going to make up a new category. The category, people are going to become digital companies without a doubt, and I think our differentiation, and this is in the ad campaign, and you see it around the show here, it's about making it real. At some point, you've got to realize that transformation. If you're going to go build a cloud-native app with HPE, good luck, the Army software. I think you said on theCUBE last year, the year before, I forget which year it was. These eight years are blurring in, theCUBE's got its eighth year. I think you, quote, said, never fight fashion, was a phrase you always say. So I do believe the digital transformation is a little bit boring, but it's a reality. It's- And for us, I mean, I feel like our differentiation, whether it be EMC or Dell, is a very practical company. And if we can't make it real, nobody can, and which is why the ad campaign only focused on customers. It was, hey, if you want to look at GE, if you want to look at Columbia Sportswear, Chitly Dare, we had about 10 different customers, because I think, to your point, right, it is noisy. How do you make it believable? You have a real customer say, and I bet on Dell Technologies and they transform my business. So we were talking on the intro about the transformation, and I know there's a lot of hurting cash with the new merged companies, and you got to get everyone on stage, limited time on stage, not a lot of customers on stage. So I got to ask you, look at, the business transformation is also a key message. So digital transformation really means the businesses. How do you evolve from speeds and feeds culture to real business transformation? Because that's kind of what I hear you saying. And that is, if you look internally at how the company's got to transform, it's exactly that. And we created around the time we brought the companies together, a small group, a sales team called Dell Technologies Select. And these are folks that actually don't carry any one brand, they carry Dell Technologies. And they're working with 50 of our biggest, most transformative customers. So obviously the goal here is over time, you want that 50 to be, 200 to be a thousand, and really you're going to grow the DNA within that group. Because the difficulty is that people, the some companies are doing digital transformation, some companies are not even doing IT transformation, some companies are still trying to figure out the last big issue that they had. And the market doesn't, it's not an on off switch. You've got early adopters, you've got laggards and everything in between. So Dell Technologies Select was really geared towards engaging with transformative customers in a different way across the entire portfolio instead of storage or servers or virtualization. Can you dig a little deeper on the sales model? Because you had the merger of two great sales organizations, they're one enterprise focused, account focused, another is channel focused, and direct with SMB. How are you getting them to work together or are you trying to merge those cultures or are you trying to use each for what it does best? It's a great question, because I think this is where many companies fall down when they merge or acquire even, right? So think of the Dell Technologies Select at the very top of the pyramid, they're the biggest, most transformative projects we're engaged on and we have a set of folks who work across the portfolio. Beneath that, we have an enterprise sales team. That is predominantly made up from the EMC sales team prior to the merger. Relationship selling, big accounts, there's 3,000 accounts there. Bill Scandal runs that sales team. Beneath that, you've got the commercial sales team and Marius Haas, who was from Dell, Marius runs that. And so we're trying to preserve the higher end relationship selling that Bill Scandal and team did and the transactional sales team that Dell had. And then even beneath that in Jeff Clark's organization, you've got consumer and small business. So what we've tried to do is not complicate things, leave each area to do what they were good at. And then to the key point we made earlier, build this very broad digital capability, kind of new DNA, start small and grow big. You know, EMC has always had good partner relations. I mean, they were storage and you had some swim lanes and some stuff to partner program and all the different stuff you were involved in. The branding was phenomenal, but you took over on that. But now my observation on this show, just from watching it over the years, is a whole lift in alliance and marketing partners. Intel, Dan, Brian on stage, obviously Dell and Intel make a lot of sense together and then that history is there. But the alliance is Microsoft, Cisco, now a whole new set of industry alliances now at the disposal. Has that changed your thinking a bit and how do you look at that? Because now that's not just like emerging, that's like pre-existing and floating. Now you always need partners, right? I mean, I think both Dell and EMC never believed they could do it all themselves, right? And I think here we are together, we're a much bigger company, but we still need partners. I mean, Intel, we're Intel's biggest customer, right? So that makes us more relevant to them. But whereas in the past, maybe we were always thought as, on the EMC side as an enemy of Microsoft because of VMware, now Microsoft's an alliance partner. And it's nice that folks like Satur, he's taken over the company, he's made it very clear that he wants to build an ecosystem or rebuild an ecosystem. So yeah, look, the big companies like Intel and Microsoft, I mean Cisco, we still do $2 billion of eBlock, right? And as much as I think we do kind of jousting between vendors at times, ultimately the customer decides who partners and who competes and we often partner because the customer wants us to partner. One of the things I always like about interviewing you, Jeremy, because you have your toe in the water of the future, I heard you mentioned VR, virtual reality and augmented reality on stage, AR, VR. AI is certainly the hottest thing in the world, deep learning and machine learning. It's getting integrated into some of the products, but as a brand marketer, how are you looking at these new trends? Because they are great opportunities. You have a great show on stage, you have great entertainment, informative, colorful. But now, soon, as a marketer, you have to start integrating some of these awesome tools into the marketing mix. I mean, it's incredible right now because one of the things I love about the coming together at Dell EMC, and maybe this is not intuitively obvious, but a lot of the client products, a lot of VR and gaming business that Dell has built over the years, I mean all the guys who come here are either gamers or have got kids who are gamers. And so, getting access to the Alienware team, they've got relationships with the Minecraft team, working with the folks that work on the AR and VR headsets. To me, it should make events like this much more engaging. I'm a big believer that over time these events have got to be coming. And by the way, all those new startups are going to be running Dell servers potentially. So, a lot of this stuff is going on, you're hitting this. Yeah, we've got to make this experiential for folks. And a lot of the client technology has got that, it grabs you, right? So, I'm looking forward to exploring, I mean particularly augmented reality. To me, that's a technology which is going to be massive in future. And, you know, I think the way we want to present a company is not as consumer and business or client and data center. I think we've got to show folks the end to end. It's like if you're doing a service request as a field service worker and you've got your augmented reality headset on, you're going to get data for the service request from a back office system. You're going to get your knowledge, I don't know, from an Iceland system, but it's going to be rendered in real time in front of you as you do your work. And I think, I think customer wants to see the solution. We were talking with Peter Burris in the previous segment about are we going back to the future? The old IBM, you know, one throat to choke. IBM was in every market, they dominated almost every market. But they had the full range of products you could get from them from one sales rep. Are we going back to that type of model now? Yes and no. I mean, if you want a good indication of the future, look at the past, right? And so infrastructure clearly is consolidating, right? We believe as infrastructure consolidates, it can sustain fewer players. So you got to be the big player. So, you know, in the infrastructure market, we have a consolidation play. We're very open about that. We're going to be more efficient, more economic. And even if that market's flat, we're going to take more. It's still huge numbers, by the way. It's a huge number. And then, look, there's the new cloud native world. We've got to play with Pivotal there. Look at the myriad of devices you're going to see in IoT. I mean, the IoT ecosystem is not a single vertically integrated stack. I mean, you've got sprinklers, you've got things that attach to cows, you've got, you know, sensors on cars. So, I think when one part of the tech industry starts to consolidate and you get this, maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up and you get this incredible ecosystem. I'd say, you know, IoT, machine intelligence, you know, cloud native apps, that's like the next frontier. And those ecosystems are thriving as the prior ecosystem consolidates. Great, awesome comment there. I think you just encapsulated, well done. The consolidation, that's a huge number, by the way. I mean, that's massive. It's hundreds of billions of dollars. Oh, in fact, I mean, IDC would track it at about three. In hyperconverged, that's going on right now. I mean, two years ago, that was a thriving ecosystem. Now it's all consolidating. It's consolidating because the macro-chetic. It seems to happen faster. Yeah, you've got a, I think, in infrastructure. It's interesting, we don't necessarily, in our business, need to be the first mover. Like, we weren't the first mover in hyperconverged, but we can't be asleep at the wheel, number one, and we have to bring our distribution scale to bear. Once something goes to mainstream, as we proved in all flash, and now we're proven in hyperconverged, we had zero revenue for VxRail a year ago. You know, today it's the market leader. That's, we weren't first to market with the product, but we've got distribution scale, and the reason why a lot of these small companies are struggling is because they spend all of their VC money or their profits, it's all spent on building a distribution channel. And so that's why Wall Street doesn't value them anymore. Scale's a new competitive advantage. We've said on theCUBE, we continue to say that. Certainly Amazon Web Services has proven that. Scale is the new differentiator. It's the barrier to entry. Great, great point there. I got to ask you about a point we were discussing with Peter Burris, and we were kind of riffing on this, and kind of making a joke at some of the vendors out there. Everyone's claiming to be number one at everything. It's like, you know, we're number one at this. We're number one at Morrigal's number one, Dell's number one, HP's number one. So the question is, what is the scoreboard? So the answer in our little opening was customers. That is the ultimate scoreboard. How are you guys going to continue to push? Cause there's been some wins with the combination. That's ultimately going to be the scoreboard. Forget the market share from whatever research firm. How are you getting new customers? Are you retaining them? Are they valuing your products and services? Your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. I mean, and I think the history of Dell is pretty interesting because the data shows that the best way for us to get into a new customer, believe it or not, is with a PC. And it's our, you know, probably lowest price product. It's our maybe most frictionless sale. And the nice thing now is once we get in there with a PC or maybe a low end server, there's a whole lot more value we can bring in behind it. Which is why a lot of our focus, you know, is not just on product, it's distribution channel as well. Because if that's working effectively, we can get that cross-sell going. And we've already seen in the early days of the merger, you know, customers who've got our storage, sometimes a great tactic is to go ask the customer, hey, can we have your server business? And it's been amazing how many folks have come back and said, okay, because we've got relationships. And so I think for the next couple of years, you know, that cross-sell becomes absolutely critical for us because we get a new customer, but then we want to keep that customer. How do we keep them? We've got to solve more of the problem. And that's called cross-sell. Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. I know you're super busy. I know you got Gwen Stefani, the entertainment tonight. Great attendance here at the show. Congratulations, CMO Rolf, the huge organization that's Dell Technologies. Big brand challenge, a great opportunity for you personally. So my final question, as always on theCUBE, what are your priorities for next year? When we come back and look back, what are you trying to do this year? I see a lot going on. Give us the plan. I mean, I'll leave the Dell Technologies thing to Michael. He's probably talked about that already, but marketing specifically, look, 70% of the content on the internet is going to be video by 2020. So as a marketer, we've got to get really great at producing high quality video content. It's the way that marketing is going to be done. So the nice thing or the exciting thing, I think for the marketing team is, hey, if you were great at doing PowerPoint or writing a white paper, you're going to be a media star in future. But I'm a huge believer in the fact that we've got to get great at doing unique content at scale. And that's how you cut through the noise and get people's attention, because the world is going to become more noisy, not less. So that's one of the big priorities. And obviously there's a little bit of bedding in of this new marketing model. We only closed the deal back in September, so we've got to get the team, the model back. You've got a big budget, that's for sure. Yeah, but video and storytelling is huge up there. That's the biggest trend. And don't forget the gaming, you brought up the gaming. CGI's coming right around the corner. We're going to have VR, AR. You're going to see a lot of that. Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, here on theCUBE, here at Dell, the first Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us.