 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President of Global Partner Marketing Dell Technologies joining us. We're just reminiscing about the old days of how when computing was going on, cloud computing, sun microsystems. To now, Dell Technologies is doing extremely well. Congratulations, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you. It's a fantastic time. Thanks for being here. And what a time to be in tech. Michael's on stage. This is the pre-game show of what's coming, kind of teasing out like the best has yet to come. A lot of things are going on in tech. Certainly the business performance for Dell is strong, but you guys have a huge partner ecosystem, a huge global channel. That's changing and transforming. That's your wheelhouse. Tell us, what's going on in the channel? Because you have partners that are making money with you. How's that going? What's happening? Thank you. Actually, we are thrilled with the momentum we've seen in the partner community and thanks to a lot of their engagement and support and solutions that they're developing around Dell Technologies. I mean, our channel business has just hit $50 billion in orders this year, growing faster than the market, growing faster than our competition. I honestly think it's an expression and a reflection of just the opportunity they see in the family of companies and just the assets of the technology that we have. One of the things that's happening with cloud and data is that these trends are kind of rising tides. Not just a, there's no zero sum game anymore, this versus that. It's like a whole new shift. What are some of the trends going on that's impacting the channel specifically that allows the partners to take advantage of the trends and either serve, I think serve customers and have happy customers and ultimately make more profit, cash. Absolutely. And you know, I kind of call it the art of the end. I think there is a lot of traditional consumption that's still happening right now. While at the same time, they're increasingly being asked by customers for as a service business models. So I think our partners are realizing that opportunity and meeting that demand right now. That's why you see the growth figures we have frankly in the channel in our traditional server and storage business. But also in our Dell financial services and really meeting these dynamic consumption model request as a cloud, as a service, manage services opportunities. We actually think some of the announcements we've made here this week, it's going to allow our partners to really enable and build services capabilities for their businesses that are highly lucrative, high margin service capabilities around these cloud offerings, these integrated solutions really leaning in and leveraging their expertise across Dell EMC, VMware, and the rest of the family businesses. Take a minute to explain some of the notable announcements here at Dell Technology World and what will be the impact to the partners? Well, I think one of the most exciting things is we've been on an evolution as a company and we unveiled the new name of our partner program. We're now the Dell Technologies Partner Program. In many ways, just simplifying the ability for the partners to lean in and realize the advantage of the offer solutions and capabilities of the family of companies. So all of the requirements for their tier attainment and tier status go unchanged. The strategically aligned businesses such as VMware will continue to have their own independent programs. But the opportunity for the partners is it really empowers them to now be able to get access to these integrated offers, more access to the strategically aligned businesses and go build out services, as I said, that allow them to really bring those customer solutions at the level of expertise, either in a vertical or an industry, that their customers are struggling with their own transformations. How are they transforming specifically? What are partners doing? I mean, I always, you know, we love selling boxes, but if you're a box seller, you just can't keep doing that. So you've got to change your business model. What are some of the things that they're doing? What I've seen actually in the community is I've seen certainly M&A, there's been some mergers and acquisitions where you'll see traditional integrators or solution providers investing and augmenting their capabilities with application development expertise. So they understand that not only do we have to modernize infrastructure, but it's about the workload. And we have to modernize the applications. So we've seen those kind of mergers happen. We've seen alliances form where you have different partners that may not possess security capabilities, for example, they team and they partner. So I think the community and the ecosystem is evolving and they're leaning on their strengths and really trying to best position themselves to realize the opportunity. So you think about trends like converged infrastructure, hyper-converged, some of the stuff you guys announced. 10 years ago, I remember when CI, the modern CI first came on the scene, a lot of the channel partners didn't like that. They're like, no, we want to screw the bolts in and we make money doing that. That has completely changed, hasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's all, it's less about how do I integrate the bag of parts and the piece parts of the infrastructure and it's much more about the workload and the outcome. So I think where partners are really savvy and where they're uniquely advantaged and positioned well to help customers is in those complex workloads, in those inventory and assessment services of which workload is best served in a public cloud, which is best served in a private cloud and helping their customers navigate that journey. It's richer services but they have to monetize their value add in those type services than traditional system integration type services. And how to secure it, how to manage it, how to monetize it. Absolutely, how to migrate it, how to modernize it, absolutely. So those services used to be reserved for a unique qualification of partner, highly technical solution architect. Now someone says, I need a multi-cloud architecture. You know, if you go back a couple of years in DevOps, you'd be like, okay, I got to get an alpha geek and we got to lay out architecture, you know, usually a higher price person. But kind of what we're seeing now is almost a democratization or an increased aperture of opportunity capture for partners because the tools and technologies are, I won't say totally turnkey, but they're composable. So you don't need to have an advanced computer science degree to be a solution architect. You can be more of a composer of solutions, not the tech lead. So this is a trend we're seeing. Do you agree with that? And if so, how's that increasing your capabilities? Well, I do. And I think frankly, we at Dell Technologies are uniquely positioned and one of our aims is to simplify the access to that type technology. So when you look at the announcements around our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and the integration with VM, where it really is to provide that seamless, simple, common management layer, operational and orchestration layer to be able to migrate and move your workloads to public on-premise. So the skills in our partners are really leverageable. So they're VMware expertise. It really is about the workload, less about the infrastructure and how to go stand up a virtualized environment. Cheryl, talk about the impact that's having on your job because I can only imagine the complexity involved in soft dollar programs, incentive programs, compensation programs, how to get more training, skill gaps closed down. And now that's hard in and of itself. So I'm sure there's a lot going on there that you're spending and working on. But when you start overlaying, oh, VMware's got a program. I got this program. It's like, are you wiring up a bunch of programs or is it just first, take us through the stages of your evolution because you now have to be agile with how you market globally. Absolutely, absolutely. And we're trying to be as thoughtful as possible with an outside in perspective to be fair. So across the family of companies, we're actively engaged with my peers at VMware and Pivotal and we're really looking at how do we take the investment that our partners are making into their capabilities and make that leverageable and protect that investment across the offer. So we, for example, are offering reciprocal recognition within the credentials for like credentials. So the VMware capabilities they earn with VMware will recognize in our Dell Tech Cloud competency. We want to try and offer an easier path for them to engage across the companies. And to be honest, incentives, capabilities, they're on their own evolution and we're trying to help just ensure that we can externalize a lot of the training that we create internally for our people. How can we leverage the strategically aligned companies jointly for what we're doing in the program so that it at least holistically can be common and make sense for the partners to engage? Sure. Training's important to you. Absolutely, absolutely. Partners now account for over half the revenue of the company. You said that you're growing faster than the competition. That's something that we've heard a lot this week. Two part question. One is how is it that you guys, it's almost like you're being set up by a great coach to win, okay? And everybody seems to be growing faster than the competition. That's what we're hearing as a theme. So how does that happen? Why is that? And then the second is, do you set targets for how much of your business you want to be through the channel or is it just let the business go as it may? Well, first of all, I would say we are really clear inside the company on what the strategy and vision is of the company. And as we take that to market, both on the direct side and through the partner community, we try and listen to the partners and gain feedback from them on what they need to be most successful. But then again, we are really ruthless in aligning our strategies, our goals, our metrics, our measures, our rewards to ensure that we can go deliver those results and the outcome. And I think frankly the success we've been seeing and enjoying is I think it's resonating. Our partners are responding with the strategy and the enablement that we're bringing to market. And I think it's combination of good strategy, good vision, relentless execution, and commitment. I mean, frankly, and we listen, right? There's always more to do. We know we're not perfect. We have a lot of advisory capacities with our partner community, our distributors, our system integrators, for them to tell us how they can monetize and realize the maximum value out of what we're bringing to market. And we adapt, we adapt, we adapt. Cheryl, final question for you. Over the past three years, it's been an interesting journey. EMC comes in, you guys went public, got the VMware relationship clicking, got the things going on. So you got the end-to-end operational consistency as a big land grab. We see that as a big strategic opportunity for Dell as well as specialism up to top of the stack around vertical industries with data. Clean strategy, we've been saying that on theCUBE for years, that's the killer formula. You guys are doing it. But without learnings along the way, take us through personal observations that you've had inside Dell around just getting the ship tightened up to keep executing going. What's it been like to share some stories? I'll have to say, a merger as large as we did, and certainly as large as we are now growing at the pace we are is never easy. And I think we have an amazing culture in the company. And I think it starts with Michael from the top down. And I think as we came together as teams and we started really decomposing and working on what we needed to strategize, we quickly found ourselves very like-minded, really like-minded, very complimentary. So it allowed us to move faster. So I would say my learnings are you've got to be really authentic. You've got to have a lot of trust. You got to lean on the culture, which is a bit of an intangible. And then there's all the obvious strategy and execution. But I would say one of the enjoyable learnings out of this has been you have to just trust. And we've been very like-minded. We've been very fortunate. Really good talent, amazing talent. And now the plantation of brands has got some fruit coming off the tree. Business performance is coming out. You're seeing some results. Yeah, well I think we're realizing the vision of the mutual R&D. And I think we're so uniquely positioned for the level of R&D and innovation going forward. The expression of bringing those technologies together is now coming to market. You're really seeing the work of the joint innovation bear fruit. Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President, the Global Partner Marketing and Dell Technologies here on theCUBE, sharing her insight and observations and learnings over the past couple of years on what's happening. They're doing great. This is theCUBE bringing you all the content from Dell Technologies World Three Days of Coverage. Day two, we'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us.