 the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering Dell World 2015, brought to you by Dell. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. You're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. When we go out to the events to extract the signal and noise, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by Dave Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Cheryl Cook, the vice president of Global Channels and Alliance at Dell. Now Dell EMCBM where Pivotal, RSA and a school of other great companies that have been acquired into the Dell. Welcome to theCUBE. Good morning. Welcome to Dell World. We're happy to have you here. It's great to be here. It's super exciting. I mean, it's like, we're like a kid in the candy store right now. When we cover enterprise tech, we cover like a blanket and there's more action happening now. And the timing of the Dell World couldn't have been better than having the announcement just last week. How fortuitous, right? It created certainly a lot of excitement, a lot of energy. So my first question that everyone wants to know is, your phone must be ringing off the hook. What does it mean? Cheryl, tell me, bottom line, what do I go with? How do I implement my channel strategy? Who am I partnering with? Is there a reconfiguration? These are the questions on one side of the table and the other side table is great. Now I have to consolidate my suppliers into one couple partners. It's more efficient for my business. So it's kind of like the scales are tipping. What's your thoughts? Yeah, well, you know, the initial reaction and reception that I've received, as you said, I've got a lot of calls and inquires has really been more positive. One, it's a big news. It's a big acquisition. And the entire industry is in this inflection of consolidation. So I think the reaction candidly from our partner community is Dell is going to be one of the acquirers. And we're going to be bringing together opportunities to simplify and extend the portfolio for our partners and our customers to be able to continue to really work as we've been discussing here at this event, the digital transformation and really trying to drive to the future of flexible models. You know, one of the things that have here is talking about from Coca-Cola on the keynote is localization in different countries. In the channel now you have a localization issue across all the different relationships, certain bars, ISVs, channel partners, alliances per company. You know, get Dell. How are you managing that? And are you guys doing a little overlap map? Is there a grid? Is there a solutions mix? I mean, customers are actually buying Lego like solutions. Is it okay? I mean, what's your thoughts and how are you managing that? Well, I think we have it still very early, right? And the transaction has to officially close and we'll go work the integration plans accordingly. But many of our partners are shared partners in the partner ecosystem. They're currently already working with EMC or VMware, certainly Dell and others. And I think our opportunity is to really try and be sensitive to the pressures that they have in trying to serve their customers. And I'm a big believer that customers are trying to simplify and narrow the number of vendors they're doing business with and our channel partners are as well. So the more we're able to integrate and innovate and bring really integrated solutions and offers and programs and incentives together, in many ways, that should unleash some value that the partners can free up some time. Talk about you mentioned a lot of the same partners. You guys have been doing business with EMC as a partner for a long time and a variety of their companies. How has that changed? You mentioned that this kind of a preexisting relationship base across the different partners and alliances. What does that give you guys for insight in the integration? Obviously makes it a little bit easier. Any thoughts there and what's different is where are the hotspots? Well, I think as you look at how we're serving our customers, you know, Dell and EMC had a partnership for about 10 years. And then as we've expanded our portfolio, we continue to cooperate, compete in the marketplace. I think culturally we know each other quite well. And I think if we look at serving our mutual customers, as Michael highlighted in the keynote this morning, EMC is just world class at tier one enterprise customers and relationships and offers. And Dell is really strong and differentiated in the mid market and small business. So I think bringing these two together gives us quite complimentary scale on how to serve the customer base. So you mentioned, Cheryl, that customers and the channel partners want to consolidate the number of vendors with whom they do business. And that's, they've wanted to do that for decades. And it's kind of been a slow motion collapse in the number of vendors out there. But what does that mean? So it seems like we're now at this sort of steady state potentially. We saw this spate, you know, 10 years ago of consolidation. Now we're seeing another one. What does it mean for the channel partners to consolidate? How do they make more money through that consolidation? Is it better focus? Is it better margins? Can you take us through that? Sure. Well, I think it's a combination of focus. And I think the more we can integrate our offerings and through the alliances and partnerships we have with VMware or Microsoft or OpenStack, we launched here actually at this event a set of blueprints and reference architectures that we, the Alliance OEM vendors will test, certify, will do all the sandbox testing. And what that means for a partner is they can have the confidence to go propose and make these proposals and recommendations and configurations. And there's a lot more services around assessment services, consulting services, leveraging diagnostics and best practices that we can bring to bear that frankly brings more value and hence more margin in the offering to the customer. And I think the focus and simplification is the monetization is not at integrating the silos of technology. It's really in helping the customers and the line of business at the application in the workload really map it to the business value and the business return. It's not infrastructure for infrastructure sake. And I think those relationships, those type of consultants, those types of business acumen unleash a lot more value. So that's a big change for a lot of the channel partners. So I want to come back and talk about EMC in a minute. But independent of that, you guys are separate companies. You got to make investments. Is that really where you're making investments is trying to remove some of that heavy lifting for the channel? And how are they responding to them? And that's a big change for them, right? They have to reskill the cloud comes in. What are you seeing in the channel in terms of their ability to move up that value chain? I think we're actually seeing a lot of partners. The market is taking us all there. So I think our customers are taking them there. And one of the things we've announced actually at this conference is an effort to kind of help our channel partners make that journey and help be what we call future ready future ready channel. And it comes in the form of these blueprints and reference architectures as I've described. It comes in the form of training and solutions competencies that are really around these hybrid cloud solutions that couple services, software, hardware, not just the silos of our product orientation. And it also comes with financial tools. So we've been very flexible and innovative with Dell financial services, and have launched some financing opportunities that the partners can leverage to be flexible and accommodate the consumption models that their customers are increasingly demanding from them, whether it's pay as I consume or pay as I go. And through Dell financial services, we will help provide them the support to be able to be flexible and adapt those billing. You know, Cheryl, one of the things I'm most proud of when we do these CUBE interviews, we get to talk to a lot of people and and see the trends early with the first research and blog to cover cloud mobile social, big data DevOps. And those were trends that we saw early in talking to folks, and we get to glean some insights. So we got some nice insight out there on the intro saying that the DevOps movement really created the cloud mojo for Amazon now hybrid, where the developers were in charge, the developers were dictating what the infrastructure should do, which is a flip over from the old way. Some of the things Michael is talking about. Now what we're pointing out here in the CUBE this week and then we keep on research is the customers are now in charge. Now the customers are now dictating terms, I say terms loosely speaking, they want a Lego block solution. They want that kind of developer agile feel from their suppliers. So the channel parties are a key part of delivering services wrapped around a modular set of portfolio based products like Dell offers. So can you share some color to some of the consumption of the large enterprises down to the SMB. I mean, the SMB they consume little bites of IT. And you see the IT guys on the enterprise side buying shadow IT in little bite size. So you're seeing kind of an SMB trend. What is some of the color around this new customers in charge idea for future ready channel? Well, I think it's time, right? If there's a common theme, it's the pace of change and the pace of the demands on the line of business. So I think all that you just described are happening because they can no longer wait for the traditional IT timeline to deliver the solutions and innovations to be able to address the business. So one thing our channel partners clearly do and bring value is their local, their nimble, they typically have amazing capabilities and expertise that aligns far more strongly to their customers, their verticals and their lines of business. So I think actually this trend of customer being in charge voice of the line of business has a natural advantage actually to the partner community, who's really close to those lines of business too. When we look at expanding it, it's how can we be a really world class partner on bringing the innovations and frankly the form factor of the technology to the partners such that they can spend their time and expertise on really addressing the business need, but consuming and delivering and deploying and provisioning in a far more simplified way the technology, which is really where we're trying to add value. So you mentioned the positive response from a lot of the channel partners. I've talked to some of the channel folks on the EMC side and there's some concern and I wonder if you could address it. So their concern is, oh my gosh, EMC and Dell is now this huge $80 billion monster. They're going to come in and go end to end. They're going to take my customer and they're going to do kickbacks and I won't be able to compete with that. What would you tell the channel partner who's freaking out about that nightmare that I just described? Well, I would say be calm. Don't freak out. We certainly have lots to do. I think the one thing we share with EMC is a priority of serving the customer. So I think we want to make sure that we do the right thing for the customer. I think Michael, you also heard is incredibly impressed with the EMC's approach of a federated model where they've acquired some amazing technology and capability and in the different spaces, allowing them to flourish and appropriate level of both R&D and go to market. So this notion of a behemoth end to end, we know we have to be nimble and fast. So my feedback to the channel partners would be we're going to make sure we do the right thing to serve the customer. We're going to make sure we do the right thing to serve our partners and our shared partners and they should see this as a coming together with some amazing resource of innovation, R&D, certainly technology and go to market capabilities in a private company. And the one thing we definitely will see is how can we be more agile and flexible and responsive to the needs that those channel partners or our customers have. And isn't it true though in a two trillion dollar market that even if even an 80 billion dollar company has to have a very strong channel presence for leverage, for reach, for effectiveness, efficiency. I mean, can you talk about that a little bit in terms of the strategic importance of the channel? Yeah, well, we are firmly committed. And as I said, if we stay customer focused, the reality is there is a huge percentage of the marketplace that prefer to do business through channel partners for all the expertise and capability and local presence that they represent. I think in the enterprise space in particular, it's like 70% of the market prefers to work with channel partners. So for me, it's certainly a value for us, the OEM and coverage and extension. But for me, it's a mandate from our customers to make sure that we're allowing them to do business the way they want to do business. And we're providing the best experience from a value ad perspective and the channel partner ecosystem and communities help us do that greatly. They're certainly going to be afraid of all that moving parts around the acquisition today was mentioning is always going to be the peer. What's in it for me? Everyone wants, you know, with them. What's in it from me? Where's the soft dolls? What's the revenue? Where's the solutions? So that's one thing. But on the other side of the coin is the investment side that you guys are making. What are you doing with the channel partners to be specific on some of the investments you're making with respect to building out because now the mandate for the channel partners and alliance partners is we got to build the future. That's the theme of the conference. And Michael is very clear about that innovation strategy, internet of things, mobile, plenty of fertile ground to build on. No doubt about that. What are you guys doing from investments? Can you share any things you're doing? Absolutely. So we're going to continue when we made some announcements here. We had a partner event yesterday in advance of this group. I get a lot of feedback and request for training and knowledge and certification. So you're going to see us make tremendous investments to continue to not just provide product level training and expertise. But again, the solutions training and expertise around cloud and hybrid cloud solutions around big data and big data analytics solutions and around services. So we're really launching our deployment and pro support deployment capabilities to our partner community, which now opens and extends the ability for our partners to not just resell the product and do all the surrounding services, but actually do the deployment, implementation, installation services, creates a revenue and margin opportunity for them. But most importantly, creates a richer customer experience for them to be able to really manage the end to end offering with them. And you'll also, as I said, see us to make continued investments around Dell financial services. We've had a phenomenal uptake in our global financial services offerings that we've taken to our partners, which gives increased credit capacity, gives extended payment terms, gives a lot of flexible business model resources to them, one to help fuel their growth. We've been experiencing just some phenomenal hyper growth, and that puts a cash flow strain on a small business or a medium. They want a reliable partner. Absolutely. And Dell has amazing resources and capabilities. And we want to just open those up and extend them to the partner community. So the message is, calm down, don't freak out. One, two, there's an investment behind the deal, a lot of wood by the arrow from financial stability standpoint to support the partners. Absolutely. You know, the one thing the partner community gives us, at least remarks or credit for with Dell is we've been very consistent and stable. And when I hear partners, they want stability, predictability and consistency. And even as our family expands and we're going to be far bigger, we're not going to lose sight of that core tenant of how to remain simple to do business with, maintain some of the best of breed capabilities of all these programs and really help them. And you've got some new partners with CDW doing some expansion. What's going on there? I mean, that's big news. That happened this last week, too, is a newsworthy week for us. So we kind of got buried, I think it was a little overshadow. CRN might have picked it up. But I mean, yeah, we did. So we did announce last week that we're expanding a partnership with CDW and, you know, through several of the acquisitions Dell had made, we had a meaningful relationship with CDW already with some of our sonic wall and our wise capabilities. They absolutely do. They're a world class company. They also just announced a couple weeks prior that they've formalized a final acquisition of Kellway in the United Kingdom, and they were a very big son partner. So what we announced is an expanded partnership where CDW will now take all products and services from Dell to market. We're delighted and thrilled with, I think that's a reaction and a response to customer requests. Customers, we're asking them for increased Dell. We certainly are looking to expand our ecosystem. So we're excited about... Well, you're excited. You've got your hands full. Certainly your inbox will be flooded with emails, your text, your Snapchat, your Instagrams are going to be, all your direct messages are going to be hounded from everybody. What's going on? Don't freak out. You're investing. I want to really just, before we end this segment, I want to get your personal take on something. We were just at the Grace Hopper celebration last week. I know last year you had a chance to talk with Jeff Frick on theCUBE. We didn't hear a lot of that on the stage today from Michael about diversity and leadership. We heard about entrepreneurial, but there's a lot of stuff going on. I want you to share the color because you're a real leader in women in computing, and we had great presence there last week. We talked to some of the smartest people, and it's really amazing. And theCUBE is so passionate about promoting leadership for women in computing and all folks. So share your color on what's going on with women in computing and what's happening at Dell. No, I'm happy to. And I unfortunately wasn't able to make the event last week, even though it was in Houston. I was a little busy. But I think they do an amazing job and just have created a community that I love the way they're starting at the education level and where they're trying to take it to the market. At Dell, we're a huge believer and an advocate in diversity at all levels. You heard Karen comment a little bit about our Dwen network, which is Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network, which is trying to bring not just funding, but resources, technology, networking to help women-owned businesses and women entrepreneurs thrive. We just need more women in our business and our industry. So the more we can create opportunities, we have in Dell some training. We're actually taking all of our executive leadership. I've already gone through it. We're training what we call Mark, which is men advocating real change. And we're very active in the Catalyst Group, and Michael and Karen are on the board of Catalyst, and we were a pilot partner on really saying if we understand we're in a male industry where we have that, men have to accept some of the ownership to help create the opportunity and create the environment and the awareness. But we have 12,000 women as strong. It was beautiful. It was awesome to look at. And it was all geeks too. I heard DevOps in the hallway. I was totally geeking out and I was like now I know how it feels to be a woman in the tech conferences. And then again, I was pretty excited because we love women in tech in general. But but we are we are Mark, but also we're dads of daughters, right? So we were DoD's and we really appreciate all the work you're doing and let the follow up. You can do a whole new segment. I'd like to do more. Now I'd be happy to. It's an important topic. It really is an important topic, and we need to make more progress. Thanks so much. We are here live at Dell World. We'll be right back with more at this survey wall to wall coverage day one of two days of coverage. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back from Austin, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube covering Dell World 2015 brought to you by