 We're back here at Dell World 2012, Austin, Texas. This is siliconangle.com. So theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise and Dell World is all about the enterprise and we're here covering it a second day, going deep, kicking the tires, having great conversations, talking to the tech athletes and having a great time and all that's available on siliconangle.com and youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE. So all the videos will be up there. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. And we're here with Steve Felice, who's the president and chief commercial officer at Dell where the rubber meets the road. Nothing happens until they make a sale, is what people say. That's right. That's right. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE. So, like I was saying off camera, we didn't get a chance to see your keynote because we've been going wall to wall. Spectacular. Really, it was a packed house or what? It was a packed house. So tell us, what were the key highlights? You know, the theme, if I had to pick a couple words, it was awesomely simple. I mean, that's what we were trying to get communicated to everyone was that most companies around the world, most institutions around the world kind of tired of all the complexity. They all want to modernize. They all want to upgrade infrastructure, but they want to do it in an elegant, simple fashion. And, you know, we broke this up into a few segments and first we talked about how the front end can be simple and elegant. We used some of our great client products and we had Mike Sonoda in from Lincoln Park and he was showing how he uses an XPS 27 to make music, you know? And that got a lot of great lights. We heard some good music the other night. That was awesome. That was awesome. The concert was fantastic. That was awesome. But then we also showed how he could also do that through the cloud. So, from Pocket Cloud, from the technology we got from Weiss, we were able to show that he could access this music content anywhere on any device. Then we actually took that a step further and showed how anybody could access their desktop image on any device and then actually do it on any smartphone, whether it's Android, iOS, Windows. And then we went even a step further and if they lost that phone, let's say, an administrator could remove all the corporate data so the person still had all their personal information. So, it was a great use of how the front end through the cloud could work, you know? Then we talked about the data center, you know? We really talked about industry standard computing to modernize and had a customer up and that was a great discussion. And then we went all the way to the other end, which is the software and the glue that holds everything together and we brought up a team from Quest and we've been able to take the software capabilities from a bunch of our acquisitions from Sonic Wall, from App Assure, from Weiss, from Case, and integrate it together to create a dashboard, again, making it simple for somebody to monitor every aspect of what's going on in their data center. Steve, you were quoted about a couple of weeks ago at the Austin Chamber EdTech event, big data doesn't help without big insight. And that's really the philosophy right now in the marketplace. People love big data, it's a big hype term. Insights is really the value. So, you know, Dell's enabling a lot of that. Can you talk about what you're seeing at the customer level? Because they're definitely a rabid market right now for big data, CIOs have tablets, they want analytics on their dashboards, and this just magically happens. Can you just share what you're hearing about big data and the insights and kind of what enables that? Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I always think the trends in technology are amazing because when people start talking about virtualization and cloud computing, the questions we were getting asked is, well, aren't you going to sell less servers? And aren't you going to sell less storage? Because it's going to be in the cloud. And I said, because all the years I've been in technology, I said every time there's new capability there's a spike in demand for new uses. And analytics is the one I use all the time now. So, yeah, somebody might put email in the cloud, but now they want to use this data to turn it into ways to grow and to drive business performance. So, every time I meet with customers now, they're all talking about, look, I've got this massive amount of information, and I need to make sense of it. And I think the interesting thing about this whole trend is that the little guys right now have the lead. The big companies have to get off of proprietary platforms so they can take advantage of some of this. They're kind of stuck in these application environments that don't provide enough flexibility. And you've got these small businesses that are using cloud computing, virtualization, and all the data they're getting from the cloud and the insights. And they're competing on a level playing field now, which I think is a wonderful thing. Well, we've talked about all the time that data is the new source of competitive advantage. It's not the operating system or the microprocessor anymore. And, you know, I mean, everybody's all crazy about Windows 8, and now I'm sure you get a lot of questions about Windows 8 is going to drive your business. Operating systems aren't a catalyst for business anymore. I mean, I think the last one was Windows 95, was, you know, I mean, did you agree with that? Is that your perspective there? I think you're not going to see major C changes of adoption rates on operating system changes. I will say that Windows 8 is a bit different. Not so much that it's another enhancement to Windows 7, but it's got touch. And in the commercial marketplace, they've been waiting for a touch solution that also allows manageability, security, interoperability of applications. So I do think touch is a bit of a game changer. Not necessarily the version of the operating system though. Right, right, yeah. Cool, so we cover events like this all the time, and one of the things that we've noted about your business is it's unambiguous, you're intense, in the PC, the end user computing, whatever you want to call it these days. It's clear you're trying to use your scale to really drive into the enterprise, and that's a new story. People, you know, Dell's a pretty formidable company. Should people be worried about that? Your competitors be worried? I mean, they don't seem to be too concerned, but. Well, on the one hand. You like it that way? On the one hand, that's okay with me. If they want to ignore us, you know. But the fact is we're number one in servers in the US now, and we're number one in servers in Asia now. 64,000, you couldn't sell another 64,000 servers? Yeah, well, we asked the audience the other day to just buy a few more each, and we'll be number one around the world. So, I think the big difference here is that we don't have a legacy to defend or protect. And so, the other guys are in a dilemma. You know, they see where the world's heading. They see what modernization is all about, and it's all about industry standard computing, building blocks, scalability, flexibility, but they still have a lot of customers on mainframes, and they still have a lot of customers on proprietary UNIX platforms, and they've got to figure out what to do with this because their profits come from those areas. And so, yeah, they don't want to talk about us, but, you know, in an event like this, we're getting some fantastic reactions from customers. Steve, so obviously, back to the big data thing. I mean, one of the things we talked to Intel about is that they're seeing, obviously, big data is driving more processing power, more storage, obviously. So, I don't think that's going to hurt you, because it might, you know, the footprints are all changing. We heard from the example with the Tulane University that Michael Dell gave on the keynote. So, that's a good thing, but the interesting thing that we're hearing here this week is the software. So, we put out some seminal research around called software-led infrastructure on Wikibon, first firm to do that, and really modernizes the definition of converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is kind of like old, it's got, you know, now it's, but it's different. You got different elements, solid state, you got software, you got IO, centric, you got caching layers, so, real-time web, so, I want to ask you, from your standpoint, you're dealing with the go-to-market and getting generating all the sales guys all excited. How does Dell stitch together that software piece? Is it natural to you guys now? How do you guys address that marketplace? Because Dell's a supplier, a lot of your customers, now you're a solutions provider, you've been that, now you've got, software is a big part of that. So, how do you talk to the customers and tell that story, and how do you motivate the sales forces to get excited by that? Well, the sales force is excited because many of our customers, especially these customers that are mid-sized, we have a trusted advisor status with them. We do a lot of primary research, and they rate us above everyone as a technology partner they want to talk to. So, you've got, you know, at the Fortune 500, there's five, six companies all trying to be that trusted advisor, everybody's in there. In that mid-size customer, we're talking directly with them. And so, I bring that up because they've been asking for more from Dell for a long time. And so, the sales force is excited because they have more to offer. The key thing is how to keep this in a solution discussion as opposed to a point product discussion. Yes, feeds and feeds. So, we've been working really hard at bundling these concepts. When you sell networking, that's a good time to sell security. When you're selling client products, that's a good time to sell case. When you're talking to customers about storage, that's a good time to talk about backup and recovery. So, we've been training the sales force and getting them ramped up on how to deal with all these topics. We have all kinds of specialists now from the companies we acquired. So, you know, we see, we're probably one of the most fantastic lead generation entities of any sales organization. I mean, we have 20,000 strong talking to customers every day. We're generating leads like crazy. We took the case business and made it seven times bigger in about a year and a half because Case had a fantastic product, but they didn't have enough voice in the market. We gave them the voice and the sales came. So, this is what we're trying to build. So, I want to talk about, you mentioned some of the acquisitions before. So, your role as the leader of the sales organization, you're ingesting these companies. Now, granted, they're smaller and you're acquiring tuck-ins and things like that, but they're still an integration. How do you keep up with that pace? I think it's six or seven this year alone. What's your methodology behind that? Well, first of all, we have a great M&A team and integration team that's led by Dave Johnson and it's now a few hundred people that are working on doting the I's and crossing the T's and how to make sure that the infrastructure's ready to accept these businesses. And then we sort of have a graduated process where you sort of start out with pure lead gen and at the same time, you're training these people and as each month goes by, the leads turn into their ability to close. So, we nurture the companies that we buy. We don't grab them and split them up. We do a few really important things. When we buy a company, on average, we've doubled their R&D staff. So, the first thing we tell them is, we know you had a lot that you wanted to develop and you probably didn't have the funds to do it. Go do it, go do it. And that really gets them all excited. Oh, we love these guys, all right. We also immediately increase the sales coverage. So, we tell the sales force, add more because we're going to throw a lot of leads at you. And so, they get really pumped up about it and then we slowly migrate and we nurture them. We don't integrate them fully until, typically about a year later, it's been over the last three years, that's been about our trend. So, it's a careful process. So, I mentioned you talked to a lot of CIOs. You mentioned, particularly in mid-sized companies, you're becoming the trusted advisor. You're able to differentiate there in a big way. What are CIOs telling you about the outlook, their sentiment, their spending plans? What are you hearing from those guys? Well, I even talked about this in some of my keynote today because I was quoting some of the research that we've done and all the meetings. I have been to 13 countries in the last year and I literally have met with thousands of customers of all sizes and in this kind of environment, as you know, you get pretty particular about the return on investments that you have. So, one of the key pieces of feedback is, if you're going to talk to me about IT solutions, they need to be solutions to real business problems. You got to help me figure out a way to drive more growth. You got to help me figure out a way to reduce my risk. You got to help me be faster. The kinds of things that are on their to-do list are virtualization, cloud computing, infrastructure upgrades. We just saw a recent report that says in the last 12 months, 50% of the operating environments for servers are virtualized now. So, their main message to us is we got to get a return as quickly as possible on these investments. And they also continue to remind us, which, and we remind them, that in a proprietary environment, you're probably spending 75 cents on the dollar on maintaining it, which is doing nothing in the way of helping you grow and change your business trajectory. And in a time right now where the economies are stifled, that's a real burden because these companies want to continue on their strategic initiatives and they're feeling limited in their ability to do that. So, it actually is a great segue into how we can help them modernize, how we can help them migrate away. And that's why I think our enterprise business is doing well in this environment. Yeah, speaking of enterprise business, let's talk about a little bit of change. Let's talk about Dell for a second inside the Dell company. So, we had Marius Haas on earlier and great score to get him on board. He's an athlete, a tech athlete, as we say. So, I said to him, I said, hey, you got traded in, you're required, traded or acquired in by Dell and you're taking reps at the first team right away as a tech athlete. You're on the first team over here at Dell. What do you guys talk about? What do you, Marius is new to Dell, not new to the industry, certainly he's a player. He's got some mojo, as we say. So, what do you guys, tell us the conversations that go on between you and Marius. He's the new guy, new sheriff in town for enterprise. He's got to get the product solutions moving. He's got to move to market. You got to go fulfill that and work with the customers. What are you guys talking about? What are the conversations like and that you're bringing him into the team as someone who's on the team and he's new player? Well, Marius has a great blend of experience because of his background. So, he's got some terrific technical underpinnings but he's also got a great business background. And so, we hit it off terrifically right away. And, you know, the first thing he said to me when we met each other was, how can I help you grow more? You got to love hearing that, right? Music's in your ears. I need to close more business. How can I help you close business? We spend a lot of time talking about how do we increase coverage? How do we make sure we're filling gaps in the product line? How do we get geographically expanded? I mean, it's, you know, maybe it's boring but it's basic business. You know, we talk about how to get to number one. And it's a great partnership. Great, what's your outlook for the year now? I mean, you know, it's getting some of the numbers and you guys are public companies. You won't answer it, but like you personally, what's your objective for next year? So, if we come back, we'll be here next year at Dell World. We'll come back and say, hey, you know, Steve, did you check the boxes? Let's, you know, let's look back. What are your key tactical things you want to do and accomplish in the next 12 months? Well, the one bold prediction I want to make is next year we better be number one in servers, worldwide. So, you know, when we're talking- It's already out there, you better follow through on that. We want that, we want that. Look, we want to continue to grow faster than the industry. The economy situation around the world makes it hard to predict what kind of growth rate that's going to be, but whatever it is, we want to take share. We want to take share in, you know, our active infrastructure products. We want to take share in the services that support the infrastructure. We want to really bring software to the next level. So we want to get that fully, you know, disseminated into our workforce because we've only had quests for a few months. So we've got a lot of work to do there. But, you know, next year I really want to sit here and say, yep, the world recognizes that Dell is truly an end-to-end solutions provider that, you know, we can shake the, you know, PC company moniker. We love the PC business, but as you can see from this week, we're a lot more than that. So we still have a lot more of educating to do. So I think another year from now, people are going to have a totally different view of what the company is. Okay, so let's carry that through. So the end-to-end, this is not new. You guys have been at this for now a few years, maybe three or four even. So, okay, and it's getting there. I mean, it's feeling like people are starting to really believe what you're doing here because of the integration focus. Where do you go from there now? It's just to continue to gain share and margin mix, you know, goes in the right direction. Where do you see? Why are you optimistic about Dell's future? Well, first of all, I'm optimistic because our investments are headed right where technology's headed. So, you know, when we talk about open standards, we talk about ease of use, we talk about reducing complexity. Everyone wants that. Who doesn't want that? You know, and so, you know, I think we have the purest discussion set of conversations to have with a customer. I'm optimistic about the fact that, you know, we still have this direct relationship with 10 million SMBs around the world and this mid-market presence in addition to the fact that 95% of the Fortune 500 do business with us. So we've got a great broad coverage with our customers. And now I'm most excited because we have so much value to offer. So, you know, this is really about continuing the journey. We have a lot of work to do. So you saw all this IP that we've acquired. I can't sit here and tell you that it's all working seamlessly together. We gave a demonstration this morning about the power we called the CIO Power Board where someone can literally look at their entire environment from all different aspects and fix problems in a real-time manner. We're gonna be introducing that this year. Bring your own device is going to bring a whole new set of opportunities with our Pocket Cloud offering. So I really think the investments we've made are playing right into that. Okay, Steve Feliz, we're getting the hook here. Great conversation. President, Chief, Commercial Officer of Dell. It basically means you run the revenue. That's the key. Dell's client-focused. We're here from Michael Dell. Dell is more than a PC company. They're establishing themselves end-to-end solutions. Get that name out there. It's not a PC manufacturer. We're going to come back next year. We'll check out how you do. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.