 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. We're here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, John Troyer. John, good to be working with you. Great to be here. Charlie Haney is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Dell EMC Consulting. Charlie, welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So, let's see. Michael Dell, the other day in theCUBE, just yesterday said, look, let me make it clear, we're not trying to replace Accenture. Right. So, what are you trying to do? Well, look, we talked a lot about these four transformation pillars, you know, throughout the entire week, around digital IT workforce and security transformation. And our customers are struggling with how to go through that process. And I think we have a unique opportunity to bring the technologies, whether it be hardware, software, solutions across Dell Technologies together, to go help them through that. And so, you know, I think it's important for Dell Technologies to have a set of consulting capabilities that has experience around those technologies and the integration of those technologies and help customers through that transformation journey while consuming our technology. And so that's where we're kind of focused. And is it the right inference that your real expertise is in that, on that sort of architectural infrastructure, architectural layer, or do you seep into sort of more nitty gritty business process type of stuff? No, it really probably is closer to the technology. I mean, we partner with many of the large SIs as well, to bring in a lot of their deep business expertise. We are absolutely strongest in our Dell Technologies. No one would hire us to go be an expert on someone else's technology. But if they're going to go do an Azure Stack solution, built on our hyper-converged platform, who better to go do it? If they're going to go do an SDDC solution with our VX Rack kind of solution, embedding VMware and doing automation and orchestration, who better to go do that? Because those are technologies across Dell Technologies. And we have deep expertise and capabilities to go help them with that. So how does that generally work? I mean, you say you partner with some of the big guys, a lot of those times those big guys are at the board level doing some huge transformation. And then what you get brought in to do that architecture layer, or does a reverse happen where you're sort of knocking on their door? How does that all shake out? I mean, it always depends on the customer, right? I mean, it's not uncommon for us to have a large customer who's investing substantially in an SI and or within Dell EMC or Dell Technologies products and technologies. And so those large investments from those customers, they expect us to partner and work together to solve their problem. So oftentimes the customer expects us to partner, expects us to work and leverage the capabilities. There's a very large project that we have around data center modernization that actually Deloitte is leading the PMO and we're leading a series of technology work streams within that. And so we're working together to go solve that customer problem. And they're integrating a lot of different vendors, technologists as well. Well, Charlie, I'd love to kind of drill down on those work streams, boots on the ground, kind of competencies, you know, 10, 20 years ago, we were there and there was a lot more of people who were just shifting boxes in the channel and let's move equipment. It's much richer now. Our theme this week, right, was digital transformation, making it real. It's a much heavier load, a much deeper conversation. Can you talk a little bit about those work streams and kind of the competencies that you all, do you expect your people to bring to the table and how you're working with the client organization? Yeah, absolutely. So you've already talked to Howard, I think, right? So Howard, within Howard's organization, he has a very large services organization that focuses on specific product implementation and support services, right? So 60,000 members strong with partners. And then there's the consulting team that actually augments and extends that. So the consulting team that I represent, we compliment that. So when we talk digital transformation, we're talking about helping customers understand what is it to go build a cloud native application? What are the 12 factors of a cloud native application? How am I going to switch my processes into a DevOps agile process? How am I going to leverage a Dell technology platform, such as PCF and Pivotal Cloud Foundry from our sister company, to go transform how I build cloud native applications? And so we have a set of capabilities in that space that would go help customers through that journey partnering with Pivotal. How big is your organization right now? Several thousand. I'm kind of curious what kind of folks are you looking for to join it? Like yeah, that's a wide range of expertise. You're looking for senior IT leaders, folks that have been doing it before? Yeah, usually they're practitioners that have been doing it for a number of years, although something like Digital and Cloud Foundry, those are brand new technologies, right? So you're going to get a mixture of people that have been doing software development for a number of years, and a mixture of people that have maybe born up just recently really growing with the industry around these new technologies. When you get into IT transformation, you're going to get some of the more hardcore data center, data center consolidation expertise mixed in with business resiliency. And then we're extending that with our private cloud and public cloud or multi-cloud sort of services to federate, integrate, and then move workloads across those. So as you go from digital into the data center and IT transformation, that mindset usually is a little bit different in the type of individual. Are you finding initiatives within your customers? You talked about digital IT workforce and security. Are you finding that they're generally bespoke projects or is a big mega project? And these are somewhat interrelated or kind of a hybrid? Usually, I mean, it is a hybrid. I mean, like workforce transformation sometimes is something that's unique, I would say. So someone's looking at, what is my workforce? How am I going to enable my workforce? How am I going to make them more productive? You usually start out with personas and understanding their workforce, trying to align the right technologies, whether it be physical or virtual with the right tools like communication and collaboration to enable them. You start to talk about digital and it is a hybrid because it's hard to do digital transformation without having the right infrastructure underneath it and going through some level of IT transformation. And so for that, it actually starts to meld together. In fact, a lot of customers, when we talk to them around IT transformation, we talk about thinking about your application model and helping transform that, your infrastructure transformation as well as your people and process transformation. And those are things that you shouldn't do sequentially one after another because you're not going to get business benefit and value until you've actually achieved that. So we actually recommend doing three of those things in sequence with one another, but then maybe chunking it up through MVP so you do it in an iterative fashion, but you're hitting your people and process your application and your infrastructure. And so that starts to then support things like your digital transformation as you enable the technology that then is going to go right in the cloud native application. Let's go through a simple example of take IT transformation, something that we've all sort of discussed and somewhat familiar with. You really can't do that and modernize your IT infrastructure without understanding your application portfolio. You can't really understand your application portfolio without understanding the impact on the business and the business process, right? So how far into that do you go? Where do you sort of leave off and some of your partners come in? Or could you do, maybe it's a lightweight business process touch point. How do you handle that? Yeah, so we're not redesigning the business process. But what we're doing is, if we're looking at, say, application transformation within the context of IT transformation, many customers don't even know what applications they have. Let's be honest, they talk about a CMDB and oftentimes we look at their CMDB and we go inventory their environment and they're night and day different. So we have 10 CMDBs. Right, so we start out usually with an application portfolio discussion around what are your key applications? What do you have? What are the dependencies around those? And then what is the right disposition as we think about those applications? Are we going to archive it? Are we going to retire it? Can we consolidate it, move it? If we're going to move it, sometimes it gets into a cloud suitability study because where should it get moved to? Are we going to modernize it? Would it benefit from being modernized with a PCF kind of platform? And that will drive those application portfolio decisions. When you get into the cloud suitability, then you're getting into the infrastructure. And am I going to do it on-prem, off-prem and things of that nature as well? And then that example, you obviously want to understand that what business processes get affected, but that's where you stop. If they have to do a business process, you know, you know, retransformation, then that's something that they got a, that's a bigger fish to fry. That's correct. Or we're usually partnering with someone else that's focusing on that. How about security? Who are you working with there? Is it largely the CISO or is it still the CISOs and an IT problem or is the scope wider these days? It is wider. I mean, obviously you're working with those individuals, but it's so embedded in everything that you have to do today. It's not an afterthought. I mean, if you're building a private cloud within a data center, you've got to be thinking about the security inherent within that. If you're doing business resiliency, you know, one of our biggest business resiliency offers and capabilities is around cyber recovery, which is an air gap solution to actually have an off-premise copy with an air gap in between it. Because of cyber recovery issues. So everything we do has a slice of security embedded within it. Another question on digital. Oh, sorry, John. Go ahead, please. Oh, I was just thinking about, a lot of this is discovered, there's an element of discovery to all this, right? As you go through transformation, what's going to work? What's not unexpected problems? Oh, not anticipated problems. How much is this need to be driven from the C-suite from a predetermined conclusion and how much is their discovery in the ground with the people below the C-suite and then reporting back up for support in the direction of the business? Yeah, we have found that it's difficult to undergo any transformation without a ton of executive and senior executive support to go through that. Anything that starts up really from the bottoms up, at some point doesn't get the right level of governance and financial support to actually go through it. Especially if you're thinking about doing, as I mentioned around people process and organizational change, as well as application and infrastructure, you could do any one of those maybe individually but to do all of those sequentially, you need a lot of strong support and so that's really what we're trying to educate based on our experience. So let's unpack that a little bit because my similar question is who's leading the digital charge? Obviously you're saying it's going to have top-down leadership but there's a lot of C's. Yeah. Who's leading, you start with the chief digital officer, where's the chief data officer if one exists, where's the CIO fit, who's leading this? I mean usually if you're focused on a digital transformation, usually it's coming to IT through the business, right? We're working with a large insurance company who's actually building a series of online banking applications, using cloud native application development processes, we're teaching them DevOps, we're doing PCF but all of that came through the business. The business says this is what we're going to go do to actually go change how we deliver insurance in their case. So it's a general manager or P&L manager or the COO? In this case it was the business owner of that business unit within this insurance company driving into IT and IT is obviously enabling them to go do that. We are working with a large gold mining company who's focused on IT transformation. They've grown through the years but they haven't actually modernized their infrastructure and they're starting to think about well what should I be thinking in terms of cloud on-prem and off-prem? And so we went through an entire advisory set of services to help them understand based on what your needs and requirements are, based on what you have, where you should go, what is the right multi-cloud kind of strategy for you and what is the roadmap to go do that in a realistic sense of terms and then what would be the financial and investment to go through that process and that was required because they had to go to their actual board to go get the investment dollars to justify that. So when you guys engage with customers, how does it start? What's the catalyst? I mean, as you said off camera, you guys are talking way more about problems than you are about products. Yes. So what are some of the problems that you're hearing? We talked about it at a high level, digital IT transformation, et cetera, but how does that conversation start and where does it lead? There's two ways that it starts. One is a customer has invested a ton in Dell products, Dell EMC products or technologies and we find that well they're investing in all this infrastructure because they're modernizing their data center and they're going to go through some level of transformation and then we actually strap on consulting and work our way up into well, what is the problem? Why are you acquiring all this and have you thought about the following things around automation and people in process to wrap around the product installation that you're going through to actually get that value? The other is like in the mining example, that customer actually was not a Dell EMC consumer, believe it or not. They were an under pen account and they're like, okay, we know we need to go do something. We know that Dell EMC and Dell Technologies has a suite of technologies that we should be considering. Help us understand what you've done for other customers and it's because of that conversation that now it's leading into a complete set of product and technology opportunities. So those are the two ways they work hand in hand. Interesting, so you're either tip of the spear where you're competing with somebody else or you're basically brought in as part of a big deal where you're really not competing with anybody in that case, right? That's right, and we're just expanding and helping them hopefully realize their vision or their value sooner. All right, Charlie, hey, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you. Really appreciate your time, John. Thanks for hanging out with us. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watching theCUBE.