 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We are joined by Kevin Roach. He is the president of Dell EMC Consulting Services. Thank you. Nice to be here, thank you. Well, it's great, you're a veteran, so we're happy to have you. So talk a little bit about what's new with the services consulting business, particularly since the merger. Yeah, so if you don't mind, I'll put some context around this, right? So, you know, as we brought Dell and EMC together, the services piece became a really critical part for our customer's journey. As you think about the transformation they're going through, the consumption of our technology. So we have right now today, Dell EMC Services is about 30,000 people globally today, and we're augmented with another 30,000 partners across the globe. We're able to deliver services directly in about 160 countries, and our ability to look at the entire portfolio from consulting to design to deployment of technology, and then the ongoing support of that, and then the managed services piece of that. You know, we feel we're in an interesting position to be able to help our customers through any parts of the transformation they're going through, and those conversations have been really relevant to them. I think they've really appreciated that. So the coming together of Dell EMC and the role services plays has really been fascinating. We're excited about that role, and you heard it earlier today with Michael and David Goulden at the keynotes. You know, they really emphasize the importance of services in bringing this technology and helping our customers through their transformation. So we're excited about playing that role and helping them through that process. So what's on your customer's mind as they begin to realize this digital transformation? What are you hearing from them? It's interesting. You know, I've been fortunate this morning they've had three customer meetings today. Last night we had a great customer appreciation event. You spend some time, but the one thing that I'm finding, you know, if we go out and say, here's the story, I don't think we're doing the right service. And I think what you really have to get to is that you have to first listen to customers because they're at various stages of that journey where they are in their digital transformation. Some more mature companies are further along. Others are just starting this journey. If we come out and say, here's the cloud story, you know, you could offend people who are further along in the journey or you could just be talking over people who haven't started. So I think the most important thing that we're finding is making sure that we're listening to our customers. It's the most important thing you can do within a services team. And so the big part of that is listening to where they are and what we're finding is we just did a study and we found that of the companies who identify themselves, less than 5% are identifying themselves as mature in that digital transformation, which means that they're still a long way through a process that they have to get to on their digital transformation. We're pretty excited about the role that we can play in helping them with that. So, you know, we feel right now what we're hearing from customers is the opportunity is there to help them. They're looking for answers. They're looking for best practices. They're looking for what are others in our industry doing so that I can help apply that to my executive team to convince them to take the journey to make the investment of the transformation we have to go through. It's really kind of fun to listen to them. It's exciting that they want this right now and you know that they have to do something and it's exciting that we can play a role in that. So, Kevin, let's talk a little bit about the transformation inside of Dell EMC. EMC was a very respected but very big professional services even before the merger with a lot of products, the cover and the storage, hybrid cloud, just a lot of services. Combine that with Dell. Now, the workforce has to be overwhelmed by the sheer depth of services offered by the new Dell EMC. How has that transformation occurred and how is it going inside? It's, I appreciate you asking because I think that's one of the things we've been able to share with our customers is the transformation we just went through from the combination of Dell and EMC coming together. And you're right, there is a little bit of history from both companies and one of the things that we've wanted to do is preserve the value that we've created to those customers in the different segments where Dell has been great on the server and client side of things. You can't lose that intimacy and the relationship that they had with those customers and it's really an important piece. And you certainly couldn't change the model that EMC has traditionally had at the large end customers, enterprise customers. We wanted to make sure that intimacy and that relationship with those customers are really important. So we've been blending the best of as we brought the teams together. And if you look at the leadership team and the people we've put in leadership roles and as we looked at bringing the portfolio together, it's been a bit of best of breed, if you will, as we've landed now the Dell EMC team. So our team members across the globe, there has been a little bit of gnashing of what does this mean and the complexity of this large transformation. But we've asked them to do one thing for us, focus on delivering services to our customers. The rest will fall into place. Just stay focused on our customers. And all of the indications seem like we're moving in the right direction and our team members across the globe have certainly done that. So I think that was a big guiding principle to ask our team members, stay focused, don't let the noise distract you from the execution and the service we have to have with our customers. So a lot of weapons, a lot of tools in the tool belt, be poor, pulse merger. What are the folks in the field, the consultants? What are they most excited about when they're talking about digital transformation? Well, there's a couple of things that we're really excited about part of this. The first starts with the market and we talked a little bit earlier. Customers and the market are asking for help in their transformation. It's no longer, hey, we think you should transform. Now it's customers in the market asking for help of some sort. And we're excited about that. So the first thing is, when the market drags you into things, you get excited about that as opposed to trying to push something into them. The second, most of our consulting team are pretty excited with now having the identity of being the place to go to help in the transformation. We think that that's a very important role that we're going to play. We're aligned very well with our core sales teams. So we're going in now with one campaign that's consistent across the whole company. IT transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation, and security transformation. That not only talks about it from a product portfolio, but all the way through in the consulting side. And we know that there's a role that we can play to help our customers. So they were actually pretty excited about the alignment piece and the demand that's coming from the marketplace. Can you talk a little bit about the learning that you're discovering and you mentioned best practices. What has emerged and is there a template for this is how it happens in healthcare? This is how it goes in financial services? Yeah, it's interesting to bring that up actually. Some of the customers earlier today, one in healthcare, a couple in financial institutions, they were asking that question a little bit. And without sharing obviously the confidentiality of our customers, we are able to aggregate what's happening in those industries. Those two industries in particular, especially the more proven companies, their ability to move quickly through that transformation is probably going to take a little bit longer. They have to deal with confidentiality and financial and legal requirements in their industry that they have to make sure they preserve that value, that trust that they have with their customers. So for them to move too quickly through that transformation could jeopardize their value proposition in the marketplace. So I think you're seeing those industries and some of the traditional customers taking an appropriate pace and that pace and sharing of best practices could start with modernization of the infrastructure. It could start with, I want to change my operating model within how I operate IT. It could be my endpoints. I want to make them more trusted, more valuable, et cetera. And it could start the transformation from a workforce standpoint. So we're pretty excited about where that's going, where that's taking and the ability to share that with our customers. I think what we're seeing is not one template is perfect, but when you think about the transformation in three areas, IT infrastructure, the operating model of IT, and then what you want to do with your applications, I think those things become really critical as you think about the projects that are probably pretty consistent across every single industry today. You mentioned that most companies really get this and that they are on board, but there have to be some that are resisting. What's your advice for those? I mean, even at a workforce level that did just are either for being curmudgeonly or just resisting because it's new. It's a great question. We would be saying a successful project looks like this. First, you have to have executive level sponsorship. You need somebody at the executive level in the company, whether that's the CFO, CIO, somebody who takes sponsorship for this transformation that basically can shepherd through bouncy times for that. So one of the things that we would say for a company who might be a little bit reluctant, who is that sponsor? Who is that person who's going to help shepherd the transformational message at the executive level with that company? The second piece, allow participation of the business. It's not an IT project anymore. This is a project that's a shared project. It's the business and IT coming together and being able to share that experience and trade-offs of priorities of what's important or not. So build the project governance in place to allow you to be successful in these projects. We think those things, helping some of those customers who might be a little bit reluctant, those are the things you need to put in place. And then what we've been suggesting for some companies who might be a little bit reluctant, take a piece of this, find a pilot, find a proof point, give yourself a chance to validate some of your assumptions, some of your guiding principles to be able to demonstrate to your executive sponsor if we make these changes, this is the value that you can get. Those are called assessments or pilots or small sample areas have seemed to resonate really well with some of those customers who might be a little bit reluctant to begin that journey. So can we talk about the inverse, the customers that might be a little bit too excited? You know, we're going to devops the world. What's that conversation, that education conversation? What has that been like? Yeah, that's actually probably the harder one, right? Where they probably want to go at a pace that might be a little bit challenging and risky for them and how do we make sure that that risk has been balanced appropriate? You know, what we want to do is, again, share some of those best practices in those environments and say, here's what three other companies in your industry, here's how fast they went, here's what they've tackled. We never want to slow down a customer if they want to take the risk. Our job is to make sure we expose the risk and so that they can make the best decisions. This has to be a customer decision. And our job, I think, is advise and present the risk and the opportunity associated with the speed or the pace that they want to go. I think that's the most important thing that we can do. Thanks so much. This has been great. It's been fun. Thank you very much for the time. We really appreciate it. We're pretty excited about the role we can play within Dell EMC Services to help our customers through this transformation. Enjoy the rest of the week. Thanks, you too. Yeah, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for my host, Keith Townsend. We'll be back with more at Dell EMC World after this.