 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage. We've had a lot of great folks on, talking about multi-cloud, partner ecosystem, SaaS, et cetera, the last day and a half. Now we're going to have a conversation with Dell and Deloitte. We've got two guests joining us. Please welcome David Lenthicum, the Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte and Brad Lewis, the Senior Vice President at GM of the Global Transformation Office at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Hey guys. So lots to talk about multi-cloud. You can't, it's one of the biggest themes here. David, I want to start with you. One of the things that Michael Dell said in his keynote and he said it on theCUBE today is, it's multi-cloud world by default. What does that mean to you? What that means is that if you don't find multi-cloud, multi-cloud is going to find you. It's a complex distributed system that basically is invasive to what we do within the enterprise. So anybody who's leveraging cloud computing is going to find that there's a need to leverage multiple clouds and multiple kinds of technologies. And therefore we're kind of focused on what's in and between the clouds versus the clouds themselves. And I think that's okay. We're leveraging multi-cloud by choice. It's driving innovation, it's driving agility. That's why people are adopting it. So whether or not you have it or not, within your enterprise, chances are you do or you're going to have it pretty soon. Right, I think a stat I saw yesterday was 75% of organizations have at least three to four different clouds. What is your take on when you're talking with customers in the field, how are they managing that approach? What are they doing right? What are they maybe not doing right? I think what they're doing wrong, main labels, hit that one first, is that they're managing their clouds within the silos. And so in other words, they're using whatever native tools are in the particular cloud provided to do operations, do security, do governance, things like that. And the reality is it's a more holistic approach that needs to be taken. We need to span these solutions across the different cloud providers and also the existing legacy systems. Thinking holistically about that is just something we haven't done ever within IT and now we're having to do it. Brad, what is the global transformation office, Del? What's your role and your mission? Sure, so our mission is working with our customers who are really focused on driving outcome-centric types of relationship with us. So worried less about the tech just in and of itself and really wanting to figure out how do I take advantage of all of those capabilities that Dell and its partner ecosystem have to drive business value ultimately? What does a great experience look like for their developer? For my lines of business, how do I start to improve the type of agility that I've got? How do I offer some of the types of flexible platforms that I'm really reading about or aspiring to be able to offer? So being able to look at that holistic through the lens of technology, the economics of that, the operational constructs and operating models around it and being able to really take all of those assets and capabilities and map them to the types of outcomes, milestones and timelines that are relevant to that. Who's your ideal partner at the customer? Is it the CIO, the line of business, somebody in infrastructure? It's all of the above. I think as we get through the conversation, model become apparent is tech is part of the answer. So it's important. It has to be considered. It has to be architected well. It has to be operated well. But as important as tech and increasingly more so is to David's point, how are you going to go and build that common model of operational construct around all of these different platforms so you don't end up with a silo-based approach? Application owners and driving utilization and adoption is important and more so than it's ever been. So having those line of business that tie-ins and the application owners, all of those different stakeholders finance and being able to set expectations well and being able to deliver against those consistently and reliably and the impact that has and confidence and investment. All of those things become part of a fabric of a collective that's about mapping to those. So there's no one set of stakeholders that we work with, but what is really important is having somebody who sits across all of those things that has the ability to call the shots and make decisions when hard decisions aren't having to be made because where things don't typically work well is when we get into stalemates or standoffs where there's different factional issues or politics comes into it or somebody's not empowered. Having that governance model so that there is a senior stakeholder who can move roadblocks and make sure that we remain aligned is one of the most critical factors. David, a question for you. Removing those roadblocks. The last two years, obviously, we've seen a lot of organizations massively pivot multiple times to survive and not to thrive, but we've seen so much investment in the remote workforce and now a lot of businesses facing aging infrastructure. What do we do? How do you help them remove those roadblocks? Obviously, time is of the essence, right? So from a competitive perspective, what are some of those conversations look and sound like? Well, number one, get the obstacles out of the way. In other words, if you think this is about building more data centers to have more VPN traffic and things like that, that's not what it's all about. This is about finding solutions that provide scalability within the organization and it's going to maintain scalability. Keep in mind, we're running to a workforce. People are going to work interdependently. They're going to exist on their own infrastructure. They're going to have their own data which is personalized to them. They're going to basically interact with other employees and other coworkers in different, more collaborative ways, hopefully. So the idea being that we're trying to get everything back centralized again is crazy. We need to figure out ways in which we can diversify the workforce, diversify the kind of technology we're using and leverage things that are really kind of on-demand and scalable and quit thinking about building data centers. Okay, so square this circle for me because I totally agree with what you just said but it seems like a lot of organizations, when it comes to data, aren't taking that approach. They're like, okay, let's centralize all the data so we can make it more manageable and more efficient to manage. Yet, we talk about edge. Data is distributed by its very nature. So help me understand that Yin and Yan. I think it's partially, we get into obviously the governance and the data governance and sort of all of the regulatory and compliance aspects of that. Part of it's also emerging technologies. It's the area that's probably the least mature. We spend a lot of time figuring out how to have operational tool sets around multi-cloud. Then we figured about how to have applications traverse multi-cloud. Now we're moving on to the real crux of the problem and especially as trends like edge start to take hold. We're generating large volumes of data. It's being generated at the edge. It's being generated in the core and that ability to look at things holistically is going to become increasingly important. It's an area of focus for obviously us at Dell Technologies. It's where we're investing heavily from an R&D standpoint. It's where the marketplace is going to evolve but it's still in an early stage of maturity and being able to look at that holistically. So not necessarily shove it all into a single data store but enable it to be distributed and managed and governed. Who should own the data lifecycle? Yeah, should it be somebody in the business? Should it be somebody in IT? Should it be the data group? It's, now there's a long, how long have we got? Well, I mean, you must have these discussions with it. We do. We absolutely do. But sort of being serious about it, I think the important point is the people who ultimately are the ones who are responsible for getting value from that data is where it should reside. So because they're the people who have the greatest insight and understanding of how to really get value from it because ultimately we want to pivot from having a data conversation to how do we generate information and actionable information? It's not a data problem in and of itself. This is a business intelligence. How do we get value from this? And the best place for the data to live is the people who are going to be able to make the most of that. So Deloitte's got to be having these conversations all the time with your customers. But this is an organizational discussion, isn't it? It's also a functional discussion. You have to remember that there's two tiers there. There's the people who own the data tier but don't necessarily want to administer the data. So they know what the data is, what it does, they control how it's changed, they control how it's monitored and we have multiple people that are distributed all over the company that do that. And then there's the people that actually run the control plane. And we get to distribute the data. We're having to get to a common control plane that goes across the various databases which is able to make the changes to the metadata and changes to the technical geeky stuff we have to do to keep the data running. And so it's okay to have that. It's okay to have non-technical and technical users who still maintain ownership of the data and they work together in kind of a DevOps situation to make sure that we're maintaining the data to the needs of the business. And we have the business owners in there to tell us what that is. And we have the data administrators in there to actually make the changes. So the technology is an implementation detail in that model that's not, it's not the tail wagging the dog, it's subservient to the business essentially. They're working together. And the reality is that the people who have the technical know-how and have the business know-how are often sitting in two different organizations that can't exist anymore. They need to be maintained. They need to remove the barriers. And I deal with this with my clients all the time. They can't sit in silos. They need to collaborate together to make sure that the systems and the data are going to reflect and to solve the needs of the business. The only way to do that is to have collaboration at that level. So Lisa referenced multi-cloud by default. Chuck Whitten was talking about that on theCUBE recently. So I have often said multi-cloud is really multi-vendor. Like, ooh, I woke up, I got all these clouds. Okay, so what are the right strategies for customers? Where are they starting? How are they thinking about it? The people who are making the best progress is looking at it holistically, looking at what does good look like? What are the things that are important to us? What are the capabilities we're wanting to offer up? And going into things worried less about the tech of it, but more about how are we going to do things like accelerate business agility? How are we going to start to empower our business, the lines of business to have first mover advantage? How do we take advantage of all of these disparate capabilities that in an overtime it's going to vary who has competitive advantage. You could have one provider comes up with something that's a really compelling use case for what you're looking to do. But so if you've got the ability to be able to consume as a consistent ecosystem all of those different partners, it's very easy to tap into that quickly and effectively to leverage it. If you're trying to build things so that you're only tied into different people in different ways with different operational constructs that don't really talk very well together, it's going to become very difficult for you to really take the maximum advantage of multi-cloud. So the thing that I would stress is what are you actually trying to accomplish out of that? Work from the top down, think about what good looks like, what are the capabilities that are meaningful and impactful to the business? And then the easiest thing in the world is to figure out which technology choices you have that enable that. But it has to be done through that lens of what does business value look like and how do we manage that and maximize that versus making disparate sort of distinct technology choices. With the focus on business need, which is absolutely critical, David, what's the GTM like between Dell and Deloitte? When do you bring them in? It's a perfect relationship. You got to remember the customers and our clients have to have two things. Number one, they have to have a trusted advisor and someone can bring to bear risk, financial analysis, ability to deal with technology, data, security, governance, things like that, which are hard problems to solve, but do so in an objective way, making sure we're bringing the right solutions to bear to solve the problems, looking after for the client, as well as a technology partner that has the breadth of everything you see on this floor that we can pick and choose different technologies to bring together to solve their exact needs. So having a partner like Dell is very important because ultimately allows us to pick the right solutions for the customer and to bring to bear the exact solutions that are going to solve their issues and do so in a way where they're going to be 100% optimized, where the solution that they're running is going to be near 100% optimization as much as we can and therefore that's going to value the business. Do you tend to these days to come into an organization on a more sort of project basis or is it more things like, we're talking digital transformation or data architecture and then you figure out, okay, where's the priorities and the spending have to be? Is it kind of a top down or is it a bottom up or a middle out? It tends to be a little bit about, well, ultimately it ends up being both. So whether the conversation starts at a macro level and it's a more existential, how do we want to go to market and how do we want to support our business? A lot of conversations start that way. Sometimes it'll be bottom up where it is a specific project. We've got a net new application, we've got to go to market initiative and new geography, whatever it happens to be that is sort of what spawns that type of a dialogue. But ultimately those two things do end up balancing out because if you do anything well and the expectation is that we're going to do things well then it will grow or alternatively if the aspiration is that you want to do things in the best way possible, it'll attract and pull through use cases and projects as and where required anyway. So the two things end up becoming pretty symbiotic, irrespective of whether it started as a top-down, Michael meets a customer and sort of starts that way or it's something from the grassroots up that it's more demand-based from a project. When you have edge discussions with customers, how much of that is maybe it's the OT people or the folks out at the edge and how much is IT involved in those discussions? Tends to be, so it's becoming more mainstream that it's a more holistic conversation. So a little bit is always the case. Some of the early conversations tend to be about use cases that are very business-centric so that you'll have conversations with somebody who imagine somebody doing payments or distributed payments in financial services, something like that. And it's all about mobile banking and proximity and things. So you tend to talk to people about, well, what are the potential use cases? How do you monetize some of those things? And then you end up in a technology conversation or some could be potentially somebody says, well, look, we've got the capital markets group want to do something or the consumer bank want to go do something that's edge-centric. How would we go about doing that from the IT organization? We're now getting to a much greater degree of maturity with a lot of customers where it is a collaborative where you've got the person who owns the business problem or the business opportunity plus the technology group and it's a collaborative around, well, what does the technology solution need to be able to offer up and deliver? And if we can do those things, how would we then go and leverage that technology in the most effective way to drive those types of business outcomes we're talking about? Seeing a similar patterns? Yeah, I'm seeing very similar patterns. Ultimately, this is about tactical technology that has a strategic purpose. And you've got to remember, we've had edge-in-one-way shape reform around for the last 30 years. We just haven't done it very well. And the thing is we're starting to move a lot of these processes and a lot of these data collections and a lot of these analytics and a lot of knowledge engines out to the edge of the networks. And by doing so, that creates a strategic opportunity for folks in the organization to figure out how that's going to work for them. And so it isn't necessarily a geeky conversation that we're having, it's strategically we're looking to expand the way in which we're doing compute and doing data storage. It has these opportunities within the industry we're in. We're going to build this technology to make it happen. And that goes to both sides. People who do the implementation, boards of directors and CEOs. But you can geek out if you have to. Yeah. But they've all got to be there and that collaboration seems like it's absolutely foundational to overall projects being successful. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about Dell and Deloitte better together and all the opportunities that there are to unlock the value in multi-cloud. We appreciate your insights. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure. Thanks. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Las Vegas, day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest. Thanks.