 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is theCUBE coverage, SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. Our next guest is Baskair, who's the CIO for Dell EMC. CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. Sorry about NASA, tennis before we came on. The digital world is a complete converges with the analog world, so people's interests, how they work are really key, and one of the things I would like to get your perspective on this morning is a lot of the announcements we heard from Pat Gelsinger specifically was about workspaces, but endpoints. And that really speaks to how people want to work. The bottom line is that I got a phone, my phone, now it's a work phone, those days are over, long and gone, but now what are the challenges for digital, as the workplace becomes digitized? You got to make it run on time, keep the lights on, but also put in an environment that has empowerment, has all the right software, and meet the expectations of the now enterprise consumer. What are the challenges now? Yeah, I think, first of all, IT industry has been changing in our generation, more or less, right, it's a young industry. When I started running trains on time was important, and it's still important, so you can't say I don't want to run train trains on time, but that's just the basic stuff right now. So a lot of people are worried about getting Uberized, what happens to my business, and so on. On the end point, the issue is, people want to talk to things now. So I thought mobile, last time when you spoke, we talked about mobile, mobile, mobile. And mobile is still not really there much in the enterprise. People still rely, a lot of things are not available on your mobile other than email and calendar. But home, I'm talking to things, and we didn't think we would do that, but next year, a couple of years, you're going to be talking to your refrigerator, you're going to look crazy talking to it, but you are going to be talking to your refrigerator, your Alexa, your TV, and so on, right? So I think it's a unique combination where enterprises have to be consumer-like. People come and expect to do that. Pretty much like, I'm sure your son, I do it sometimes, I go to screens and touch it, expecting to be a touch screen. So you and I are going to come and talk to things that work and expect it to talk back. My Mac doesn't touch, but Dell's do. So I got to ask you, so now that you expanded your role for all of Dell as a CIO, it's a cultural integration between two different companies. And now, you know, I had VMware in the mix, you got EMC, you got Dell, now Dell Technologies. What's it been like? I mean like, has it been a firestorm? Has it been smooth? Share some insight into the CIO's role because none of you are going to bring people together through software, but systems, you got to operationalize multiple companies and cultures. Yeah, I think you have to pick a few notch stars, right? So what happens is, we kind of accentuate our differences. That's human nature then, talking about commonalities. And I work for J&J, Glacier, Smithline, Honeywell, Juniper, VMware. So to me, this looks like, well, same code of conduct, we want to do good things, we want to make money, but we want to do the right thing by customers. But people tend to kind of exaggerate the differences in the companies a lot, right? So some notch stars help. The first thing is, we're not going to put the customer in this confusion. So in holding an integration, one of our notch stars is, whatever happens, the customer is going to get its way. He or she is going to order what they want from Dell Technologies and get it. They will not see the confusion. So having a few things like that, and then surprisingly the code for VMware, Dell, and EMC is very similar. I mean, we're not going to steal, we're going to do the right things for the people, we're not going to discriminate, we're not going to, you know, epic values, doing the right thing for societies and so on. It's kind of common across. So I think we are gravitating towards the common, but, you know, inside the sausage making, there are always people who say, I work for this company and my company was better. It's just natural. It's going to take us some time for that to settle down. But externally, we want to make sure none of you feel like you're working for, you know, several companies. That's the goal. So the customer experience, knock that down first. Yeah, absolutely. You always wait in line, get used to your current email systems, no media radical changes. No, no, that's right. The first focus is, you know, you want to order anything from Dell Technologies, you can get it, you want to work directly with VMware, you can, if you want to choose to work with one account person, you can, billing and everything we take care of. Internal employee experience, we are working, we are shipping, we are building, we are emailing, we are processing and so on. There will be a little more frustration as we bring collaboration and technologies together But the key is non-disruptive operations. It's very non-disruptive. We're not stopping production, we're not stopping that and so on, right? So in that vein, last year we had you on for VMware, and you predicted, I want to say you predicted the oncoming of VMware on AWS. We asked you the question, what tools did your internal developers use? As you're making this transition to a much larger organization, Dell is known as a branded shop, so I'm not going to show up in Dell with my MacBook, necessarily. But let's talk about the difference in tools from a VMware culture to Dell culture and how you're enabling that new workforce, the combined workforce, to basically get the job done. What's been some of the challenges and some of the victories? So I think VMware maintains a fierce ecosystem, right? So you want to make sure VMware software runs on every hardware possible, every database possible, every storage possible. That's why me as a customer bought VMware and it continues to have that independence. But some customers wanted to be put together, like I'm an audiophile and I want to assemble my own stereo system, I want to buy the right amp and I want to buy the right speakers and so on. It takes me years to put that system together and I listen to one song in a year that is beautiful. My wife goes and buys an integrated system. A lot of customers want that integrated system and they say don't explain how it works, put it all together. Then Dell Technologies makes a lot of sense for them. But VMware is going to say, we'll run on anything that you want. So there are customers who say I prefer this and prefer that. So it's to be natural. But we find more and more customers want to get a cloud in a box. I don't explain that. I don't have time to put it together. So I think it's making that transition. On my mobile technology, yes, VMware will support Apple, will support Android, will support Dell, will support everything else. That is the power of that. And the Dell ecosystem allows you to do that. But we did that though. Remember with EMC, we were selling, we were enabling other storage devices to work on VMware. So that's the way it works. So Pat Gelsinger talked about the VDI thing on stage and I kind of had a flashback. Oh, it's finally crossed the finish line. So it's been the promise for, I mean, I'm a decade, but it's been a changing market. So it's not really a negative on anything other than the fact that people do want to have an end to end full environment and have that. What does that mean, that VDI announced, because it has a little VX railing, which has been tooled up and it's looking like it's doing very well. Are you guys VDI'ed up within Dell? What's that announcement truly mean to customers? So there is a place for it. I mean, if you blame, the reason VDI hasn't taken off as much as you wanted is, you can blame it on Dell. Our PCs are getting so much more better and better. People want that, right? So VDI has always been racing with the laptops to deliver what you want. But you can't force it. So here's the use cases for VDI. If you have a school environment, you have a training environment, you have labs, high security environment. If you have contractors working over your network and want to work on joint development, VDI is perfect. We use it all the time. Banks who have branches, and they don't have IT people in that branch to go fix it, VDI is perfect. Libraries is perfect. Now it's even easier and it looks and feels. Now, you know, we also have some products that you can use Macintosh to run Windows if you want. Those things are perfect, right? So I think that if you try to mandate it as a CIO, if I try to mandate it, if I say you must use that PC or you must use the notebook, you would deliberately use something else. I've learned that lesson. That I have to enable you on every device possible. Any device, every device possible. And, you know, we have to win the hardware based on competition, making the right device. Yeah, and software's going to be the key there. So I got to ask you on the digital transformation question. As you guys are transforming as a company, the combination certainly has got its own CIO challenges. But one of the messages on stage yesterday and today is we want to make it operationally efficient for IT. And I won't say reduce the number of jobs, but in the side effect of automation is to shift resources. So the question to you is, in your digital transformation, where are the areas that you're automating and creating simplicity? And where is that talent creative and also operational talent being deployed into? Yeah, I think data centers clearly. I mean, my definition of a cloud, a non-technical definition of a cloud is, if you have too many people running a data center, you don't have a cloud, right? If you have very few people running your data center, then you have a cloud more or less. So automation data center. Just from an operational standpoint. Yes, from an operational standpoint. I mean, that's how you get the costs down. Is, you know, you totally automate it. So there clearly automation is working. Now, those folks could be used, in my own case, those folks can become spokespeople for my company, they all come and talk about how to automate it. So they become pretty useful. A lot of work on development, so I can actually add value for development. And then security. Security is an area that investment is going on pretty high. A lot of the infrastructure- And there's not enough talent there either. So you need to deploy some people on the security front. Yeah, and the infrastructure guys know security very well because they've been fighting the battle. So you can retrain and redeploy them. So I think that the value's there, but you know, I think you should hire what I call very smart and lazy people. People who say, I don't want to do the same job again tomorrow. I want to automate it. And in our experience, the best people do get better opportunities. Why would you want to do mundane things, you know, over and over and over again? Yeah, I mean, that's the, that is the Facebook meme. I've saw, hey, highest IQ, people are the ones with the laziest because the points, they're smart. Yeah, maybe, maybe I'm very high IQ. You have to tell my wife. They say if you have a glass of wine a day, you must have a high IQ as well. So that's why I drink a lot of wine. You know, good point. Now, back to the data center, this is another point that's come up, not just here, industry-wide, modernization. The modern era where they're calling it, we're calling it on theCUBE, you know, playing IT in the modern era requires different tactics. What is your definition of modernization of the infrastructure? What does that actually mean and how does that become a reality for customers? Yeah, I think the first thing is the things like deployment backups, recovery, disaster recovery and so on, highly scripted and automated. That's one example of a modern. You also have, I mean, products like all flash and so on in data centers, which is pretty cool because the recovery time to go and get a data is much faster. But the main, I will start with automation. If I go to a data center, we've talked about lights out data centers. We haven't delivered on lights out data centers a lot. There's still a lot of people. What does that mean by that? Lights out means there's no humans, right? So you can pretty much shut the lights off. What we did is took the humans out of the data center but put them somewhere else. They're still working on them, right? So I think not having too many people, so if the company grows from six billion to eight billion or 10 billion, you don't want to add infrastructure folks to them, you should just scale with it. So I think that is still the number one clue thing to do. The other thing is we're sometimes stuck with legacy systems and we try to sweat the assets for the longest times. My experience, the technology changes so fast. So you can't take an artificial financial numbers and say five years, six years. You have to look at it and say, if I just throw this off and update it to the latest one, how much money and time would I save? Typical CIOs don't do that. I mean, I'm one of the guys who said, let me sweat the asset for 100 years if I can. But the tech changes so fast that it doesn't make sense. So talking about changing tech fast, you've always had the power EMC behind you guys for the past few years. But primarily you've come from a software CIO background. What has been some of the surprising differentiators as Dale has backed you guys up internally? What have been the things that you've like, you know what, maybe infrastructure, physical infrastructure does matter. Where's the key differentiators? I think the first is from a business standpoint, it's a lot of work to be a hardware company. You know, in the software, you develop something. Now you need a supply chain. You need to be global. It feels more like a real company. There's real products you're making, factories, you know, and global supply chain and so on. It's complicated to do that part. I mean, from an IT standpoint, so we had set up this, you know, I think we talked about the private cloud in VMware. I was very proud of it. It was one of the best private cloud. All the hands-on labs that are run on our private cloud. So it feels like a public cloud to most of our customers, but it's really running in our data centers. Well, the Dell and EMC are in different stages on private cloud transformation. Great opportunity for us to say here's the world's best and biggest private cloud. And by the way, Wikimon just put out research yesterday. I tweeted a piece of it that the true private cloud market is going to be about 260 billion. So it's not like it's experimental in any capacity. And I think hands-on labs are a great example of a great use case. I think we see it here at the show all the time, but can you talk a little bit about how massive hands-on cloud is and some of the technology you've got as a laboratory name? So the same cloud that runs my SAP, my engineering applications and everything else runs the hands-on lab. The beauty of hands-on labs, I don't know what they are doing to my cloud. You know, typically in CIO, you come and ask me and say, hey, I'm going to increase capacity and are you ready? Do you have people? I didn't even know they were putting this up, right? They just put it up and when they put it up, they have customers coming and banging on keyboards, creating virtual machines and so on. My system has to be elastic to scale it up, right? So private cloud, you can do all of that and you can do it at scale. I still believe if you run a good private cloud, it's going to be a lot more cost competitive than a public cloud. If you run it the right way, because it's automation that you do it. But with the Amazon and other kind of links that we're building, you don't have to make the decision. You can say these things have to be in a private cloud and these things have to be in a public cloud. I always kind of, you know, twitch when people say everything should go here and everything should go there. It doesn't, if you and I are a startup, we have no money. Of course we've put it in a public cloud. But if you have a little bit of a scale, you know, you should look at both. Right? We talked about it on our intro package today. We think multi-cloud is a little bit way out, but Ivory Cloud is a gateway to the multi-cloud. My final question for you is really more of a strategic one that ties into the theme of the show and a practical day-to-day operational issue that you face. And that's IoT. Obviously Dell is manufacturing. They have suppliers. A supply chain is huge. And besides blockchain being potentially a great solution for a supply chain, IoT instrumentation is important. How are you looking at IoT? Can you share some color into how you're thinking about as a CIO, architecturally, and how and if anything you have in motion today relates to that theme? Yeah, I think this is a big wave. And I always tell CIOs, we always seem to, a lot of us seem to miss the waves, right? We kind of miss the mobile wave and then we are trying to catch up with it. We miss the bring your own device wave and then we try to catch up with it. Because some of us are conservative in nature. This wave is coming. I'm telling them this is coming like a ton of bricks. Don't be passive about it. What's going to happen is all your facilities, guys, are installing IoT devices. They don't call it IoT, unfortunately. They call it building automation systems. It's all sensors. There are coffee machines that are going to tell you that the beans are going down and so on. It's probably already happening. Every factory's got these things that are hooked up. So this wave is coming. They're IP connected. They're all IP connected now. Because they want to offer a service now. If you're a coffee vendor, you want to say, how about I fill the beans for you? And I know when it's done. You know the printers did that with toners. So why not I offer it as a service? So it's coming. And it's all there. The thing for IT is better get on top of the architecture and security, right? I mean, because these devices are all communicating back and forth. You get a lot more attack vectors. So how do you protect them is number one. Better think about it right now. If you come later, it's going to come across like you're stopping progress. So it's better to be cool right now and say, let me help you be successful. It's like surfing. You know, you got to get in shape. Then you got to jump on the next wave. So catch up. Catch up now. Don't wait for the wave to go past you. I think we actually used that quote last year too. Best thank you for coming on. Thank you. Great to get the CIO perspective. Real practitioner also happens to be transforming in real time at Dell EMC, formerly with VMware. Great stuff. Here in theCUBE, catching the waves here and Las Vegas for Dell EMC. We're breaking it down, all the analysis and coverage and commentary and opinion here on theCUBE. Go to youtube.com, so that's SiliconANGLE. Check out my interview with Michael Dell. Go to wikibond.com for research and of course, siliconangle.com. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more of day two live coverage after this short break.