 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's a big show, the 10th year that theCUBE is at this show, I'm Rebecca Knight. This is my co-host Stu Miniman. We've got two sets and joining us now is Matt Libowitz, he is the global lead multi-cloud infrastructure at Dell Technologies. Thank you for returning to theCUBE. Yeah, like I was saying before we came on, I've been a fan of the show for years, so it's great to actually be on it for once. Well, welcome. Twice. We're going to talk about the stresses of cloud sprawl right now. And there's so many different possibilities, solutions, it's a multi-cloud world. How do you even make sense of it all? And how do you help customers make sense of it? Yeah, well, I think the first thing that we typically do is just try to get customers to understand what they have. You know, they've got workloads in private cloud, they've got workloads in public cloud and we try to do an analysis, figure out what's where, what's the best fit, what cloud is the most appropriate for each application and then just build a plan to kind of build that infrastructure and get them where they need to be. Yeah, Matt, I love that. And I want to hear what you're seeing from customers because when we look at it and we hear what's described is really when we talk about hybrid cloud and when we talk about multi-cloud, I have a bunch of pieces and it wasn't necessarily a key strategy. The customer just like, oh, I'm doing cloud stuff all over the place and in many ways we've got the silos that we've spent the last decade or so trying to get rid of even more. So how do we help get their arms around it? There's so many different layers of the solution to make this innovative and a wholesome solution rather than just, oh my gosh, I've got the things all over here and I'm spinning plates as a company. Right, I mean, I think you said it. The most common thing we see from customers when they say I'm doing multi-cloud is they're actually using more than one cloud but that's not really multi-cloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that's API enabled, they can programmatically access resources. So when customers tell us they've got multi-cloud but they're really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS, they've just like you said, just created more IT silos. And so we're trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together in that common control plane so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it. So it sounds as though customers, I mean, we're sort of painting this picture of customers really, really at a loose end here. I mean, how would you describe the customer mindset today? I mean, obviously some customers have a strategy and know exactly where they're going but the vast majority really don't. I think most customers are responding and the needs of the business are changing. They need to respond more quickly and so they consume cloud resources as they can. And that often leads, like you said, to the sprawl. And so again, we try to just wrap it together, do an analysis, figure out what's out there and help them not only understand where the application should live but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly, understand what they're going to advertise in their service catalogs. One of the reasons I love talking to consulting people is you're not trying to push a product. It's like certain ones, it's like, okay, management's really important but we understand as an industry, we're never going to get to that mythical single pane of glass. So is there a framework, is there a maturity model? How are you measuring where they are and how to move them gently along? I guess the journey is what we've said to kind of a holistic solution. Yeah, I mean, there's tons of, we take what analysts do. We also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we call kind of digital laggards, all the way to the digital leaders. And what we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they're just starting out. You know, maybe they've made some loose investments but they haven't done, they haven't walked the path that far. And so, you know, it's like you said earlier, there's stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don't often know where to start but I think they're responding to the needs of the business. I don't think it's anything that they're doing that's wrong but, you know, it's a little bit of the wild west for sure. So what best practices have emerged when you're talking about the digital leaders versus the digital laggards? You've said they've made some investments, they have an idea of where they want to be. What are some of the other things that you've seen that really separates them from the pack? Yeah, well, so I'm going to be a consultant just like you said and it's all about business value and business outcome. The customers that are the most successful have the business reason for what they're trying to do. They're not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should. They're doing it because they know they're going to get an outcome. They're going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster, deploy applications faster, things like that. And those are the ones that are further down the line. I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peaking under the covers of what they should do. They're just starting out. They've got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it but they're just starting. All right, so the keynote this morning, there's a lot of talk about cloud. VMware is at the center of the strategy there but partnering with a lot of different players out there. Of course, AWS wasn't talked on the stage much this morning but we know how important that is in the VMware environment, Microsoft was up on stage. How do these new announcements fit into the discussions that you'll be having with customers? You know, I think customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but almost an easy button for cloud. If they, often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, it's really difficult to do that integration work like you said, Stu, I'm in consulting so we're all about the outcome but this product is Dell Technologies Cloud I think is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud they can start consuming and then we can help them with the day two to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing. But yeah, I think VMware is doing a great job of reading the landscape and understanding that people are consuming AWS, they're consuming Azure and VMware owns the data center, I think that's crystal clear so they need to work with what the customers are using today and I think they're doing a really nice job with that. I'm curious as a consultant how you are helping companies really implement these new things because as we know digital transformation doesn't really have anything to do with the technology, it's really about getting employees on board and customers on board and thinking differently about how they get their jobs done. So how are you helping your customers think through these things? So we have a framework on how we approach these for multi-cloud and for lots of other things where we use a methodology that we call kind of as is to be where we kind of determine their current state, project where they're going to be in the future, build a roadmap that's actually actionable but then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case, we tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project, they're going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick in three to six weeks that's actually actionable, we build consensus and that's how we get started. Matt, are you doing some sessions here at the show this week? I did one bright and early at 8.30 this morning. Love to hear about it, especially any good questions from customers. Yeah, so my sessions are on migrating workloads to modern data centers. So I think the way I started that was just, hey, let's define the modern data center. And I said, kind of quick show of hands, who thinks your modern data center ends with the four walls of your infrastructure? And thankfully not many people raised their hands because the modern data center is composed of your on-premises resources, whether that's private or hybrid, but also public. So I think a lot of the questions that I've got is just how do I get there? How do I convince IT leaders to buy into this? And that's like I said, we use our methodology to build consensus and help them get there. I'm curious, when you talk about the modernization, what's the role of data in there? Say it one more time. Data, how does that fit into the cloud strategy overall? Well, data is another service. One of the things we've started to look at as we talk about infrastructure as a service and platform as a service is big data as a service as an application that you can build into your cloud and then automated and orchestrated, just like anything else. So when customers or end users need to consume a data lake or something like that, they can do so using the same tool sets and frameworks that they do for other resources. When you're thinking about the challenges the customers face today and sort of looking ahead in terms of what you see are the future challenges, what is it that keeps you up at night? Future, you know, cloud sprawl, the way we started this keeps me up at night because when every, and I talked to a customer this morning actually who was talking about their yearly Azure or yearly AWS spend and the numbers were staggering and they're getting higher and higher and it's not, at this point, it's not shadow IT. This is IT leadership saying we want to drive more and more to the cloud and I think it's quick and it's easy and you can take your credit card and do it but a lot of IT is not prepared to operate as a, you know, kind of capex instead of capex. And so this is a big change for them and that's what keeps me, that's what gets me worried is in consulting when we come in really late to that conversation and they're already consuming millions and millions of dollars a year in AWS or Azure services. It can be hard to write that chip. It can be hard to say, okay, that's fine. You've made that investment but let's look at what makes sense to run on-premises. Let's look at what makes sense to run in different kinds of clouds and do it at an application level. All right, what other things at the show this week? You've been to the show for a number of years. What's exciting you? What are some of the conversations you're already hearing? So as a cloud person, for me, you know, where I focus on multi-cloud, the announcements today were really exciting specifically and I'm kind of interested in your opinions too on the Dell EMC cloud or the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. I think giving customers the option to consume cloud in a way that is just like public cloud but using the same tool sets and frameworks they've been using for years, I think it's compelling, you know, the virtual stream has proved that that works, that model works and so I'm excited about that although, you know, I'm kind of interested in your opinion of what others have said on that. So actually if you listen to the keynote analysis we did this morning, I'll do, but I'll frame it back as a question for you to get your thing. Well done. When, it's our show, you're not allowed to ask questions. Chad tried to do that once, but so when the VMware and AWS partnership happened, the question we all had as industry watchers was, oh my gosh, what does that mean for Dell? I feel today really started to answer that. I'm curious how you positioned it with customers. I'm sure you must be getting a question for customers being like on the Dell EMC side, hey, VMware and Amazon, where do you guys fit in this whole puzzle? Well, you know, it's funny, someone made a comment today that the keynote today sort of answered the question of who won the hypervisor wars, they're over. At this point, I think we've conceded VMware has won that battle. And so when you think about VMware partnering with something like Amazon, to me and the Microsoft too from the announcement today, it makes perfect sense because customers that have large investments in on-premises VMware deployments, it's a lot of work to convert that to something like a public cloud in Amazon or in Azure. So to be able to consume public cloud using AWS services on the network so it's operating at land speeds, but doing it with the same tools I think is compelling. So to customers that say, does this compete with you? Does this compete with Dell? I say, no, this is part of the story. Multi-cloud is all about bringing pieces together in a common framework that we can consume all together. So now that doesn't concern me at all. But well done, reflecting it back to me. That's a specialty. It's been doing this a long time. Yeah, this is not his first rodeo. Matt Liebowitz, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great having you. Thank you, appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have so much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell world technologies coming up just after this.