 Okay, we're back live here at Dell World 2012. This is siliconangle.com's web TV program, The Cube, where we go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com. I'm Joe Michael, Dave Vellante, and we have a special guest, Marius Host, the president of Enterprise Solutions. That's the official title? I think so, yes. Glad to be here with you. Nice to see you again. Michael Dell told us that he was really excited to have you come on board. He'd been looking at trying to get you for a while. So you were at HP, we did a podcast way back then, when we did the three-com acquisition with HP. Took a little bit of a break, not a break, but you know, out of the tech business for a little bit, but now back at Dell. So tell us, tell us, why Dell, okay? And what's the Marius vision of coming in? Because you're leading the charge around the enterprise side, which is the fastest growing sector right now. A lot of construction going on, a lot of build out going on. So a lot of transformation, that's the key message, this modern infrastructure. What's your view of Dell right now, and what's your plans? No, absolutely. As you mentioned, I had a short break. I had an opportunity to, after departing from H-Fate, I joined KKR, the Sexier World of Private Equity, as everyone would say. It was a phenomenal experience, got an opportunity to be on the deal side, but also operationally help fix portfolio companies. But I was clearly getting the itch after almost two years to go back in the saddle, own something, run something, grow a business. So when Michael calls and he has an opportunity, which I consider to be a once in a decade type of an opportunity, you jump on it, and you say, let's go after it, make it happen. An opportunity to come in, help transform the business into a full solutions end to end business, help accelerate what we're doing on the enterprise side. I'll tell you when I first got here, the very pleasantly surprised with the level of IP that we had acquired as Dell in our server area, where we added our capability to do tier zero WAC, server side caching with our RNA capabilities in storage. Number one in ice-cozy storage with Ecologic, we clearly are doing fiber-saddle storage. We can do best in class tiering technology with the with compelling compression and de-duplication capabilities with Ocarina and accelerating our NAS file system capabilities with the acquisition of Exynet. So the storage portfolio is coming together very nicely and outpacing the larger competitors. And also on networking, we're able to complete the acquisition of 4-10. So we now have a nice core-to-edge kind of ecosystem. And the key for us is, how do we bring this together for customers? How do we focus on helping them accelerate the deployment and utilization of specific workloads so that makes their organizations that much more efficient? So it's about a $20 billion business that you run, right? Comprising server storage and networking, as you said, the 4-10 acquisition was a real catalyst for you. That's a bright spot, really, in the business growing double-digit rates. And is converged infrastructure, as you call it, the sort of next wave of growth? Sure, let me give you a little bit more insight than some of the data points on all these business, how it's actually a bright spot in everything we're doing. All right, on the server side last quarter, we grew 6%. We saw a line of sight to an 8% growth. Our nearest competitor was minus five. The next one was minus six. So we're the only major server vendor that grew share last quarter year over year. And we are literally 64,000 units away from being number one worldwide in the server market. You're taking orders here, I take that. We are. Is there a countdown? Trust me, we have one here. So I took number one share at Asia Pacific this past quarter. Before that, we were already number one in America's. We got Europe, got a little more to go, but we're very, very confident with the value proposition of our 12th generation platform. So you, go ahead. And then, you know, so that's just one part of the portfolio, right? Then on storage, it already indicated that the Dell IP in storage, I'd grew both EMC and NetApp in from a revenue growth perspective as well. And on networking, as you indicated, we had a 39% organic growth, 79% inorganic growth, if you had all the force tenant. So aggregate the portfolio results. It's been phenomenal. Now, when you look at some of the data out in the market, you start to see that by 2016 roughly, that at least 25, 30% of the market is going to be looking at buying a systems view, right? So they're looking for how can I accelerate application of workload deployments? How can I operate when I've got on-premise, off-premise, public cloud, private cloud solutions? My data centers are going to look very different. Yeah, so we think it's a $400 billion TAM, your business. So you can show up some cheer there. I got the money I had 20 going today. There's a lot more to go. Yeah, a lot more growth. So we had Michael on yesterday, and he talked about, you know, it's obviously the modern era. And, you know, we've been focused, hyper focused on that word since the conference, the press conference, the analyst conference, you guys, the leadership conference. So we also talked about the valuation of Dell right now. And so, you know, he talked also about the pieces coming together, Quest, the acquisition. So, and then we referenced back to a time in his history when I remember when he had no notebook, he transformed the company from a desktop and he had to build a world-class notebook. So he's in that similar transformation and he's got to build out that growth strategy. You're a big part of it because the enterprise is the key right now. So you get the building blocks. This next engine, the Dell, will be, is being retooled. How do you look at that with your team as you tune this new engine of growth? Also, you've seen it at HP from that scale. Dell has scale as well. You got flash, you got storage tiering, you got servers that are kind of converging. What's the engine? What's the marry sauce? You know, what's your race car going to look like? The secret sauce you're looking for the secret sauce? I don't know, what's your vision? Is it more as the cash is on the server side? I mean, obviously customers want solution. They want building blocks. You know, is the software piece, is that going to be in John's group? What's your view on all that? Look, it's all of the above, right? But then how do we deliver that efficiently, effectively to customers in a unified way, right? In an active systems way. All right, if you think about it, the enterprise business today is about a third of the overall Dell revenue, but 50% of the overall Dell gross margins, right? A very, very big, and outpacing the market roughly three to five times, right? You like to continue that momentum because then it becomes a very big part of the overall profitable growth of Dell as an enterprise going forward. And that'll then become more attractive for other constituents. Well, he was clear. He said, I'm the founder, he used the word I. He said, we first, we Dell. And he said, I will invest for the long, long haul, essentially intimating Wall Street, hey, settle down and really not focused on that. Obviously being on the deal side, you know the dynamics there, but that long-term end game for you is the data center, right? Software defined data center is a buzzword. People are kicking around. What does that mean to you? I mean, I see software defined networking is just kind of kicked off that wave. It's kind of been around for a while. You got virtualization. What are the key things for you to get that destination? There's no doubt. They're core components to the data center of the future. There is the need to have modular, scalable, flexible building blocks of server storage networking coming together. There is the need to have that kind of integrated view, integrated solutions that are optimized for delivering workloads, accelerating application performance and also application availability. Again, on-premise or off-premise. But then how do you do it and also protecting your data? Because the corporate data you will all know is a critical asset, a crown jewel of an organization. And now that you have assets either being on-prem or off-prem with customers expecting similar performance of applications, either doesn't matter if it comes from the cloud or managed internally, you're still going to have to manage that SLA consistently. You're still going to have to protect your data consistently. So who can bring that together to the customer? It's in a unique way that is both differentiated on giving them that operational efficiency but also still gives that price performance advantage that they're looking for. As far as I can tell, and I did a keynote last night and I asked the question in the audience, whose IT budget went up last year? And there was one person in an audience of seats of about 2,000. So you can imagine that it's still a very important criteria that people are managing. They're still expecting to deliver more but they're not giving a lot more capex or optics to do that. So how about that converged infrastructure piece? I mean, you obviously know a lot about it. When you were at HP, you guys were really pushing that. You kind of brought that mojo to Dell. What's the difference that Dell brings to the table? Help us understand that. No, absolutely. And I think you've already talked to one of my, gentlemen on my team, Dario. Yes. Who is managing a new organization that we established specific to accelerate the delivery of active systems integrated solutions to our customers? Key move, by the way. Key move. It was very important for us to say, look, it's not a buzzword. He was impressive. He was really good. It was not a buzzword for us. We're actually going to do what we say. So how do you now put together service stores networking, managed in the right way and optimized for specific workloads and present that to the customer in a very different way? So I'll give you an example. Large customer in the Northwest, they buy 20 to 50,000 servers at a time. They're telling me, Marius, I can save $75 million a year if I can reduce my deployment time from three months to one month. It's not that the products you give me isn't exactly what I'm asking for. It's the fact that I've got all these steps internally that I need to go through before I'm ready to actually put my box in my solution into production. So that becomes a great conversation for, okay, let's explore exactly what those process steps are. Let's explore exactly what your workloads are and then how can I proactively reintegrate, pre-install and deliver to you a solution that literally comes in a crate, you take it out of the crate, you put it on your floor and then you provision it on the fly in 20 minutes, not 90 days. The value to the customer of being able to do that is phenomenal. And then the difference that we bring to the table and part of it is the acquisition that we did with Gale Technologies is that we were going down a path of doing bare metal provisioning and orchestration, which is great because it's tied directly, management's tied directly to the hardware, but it's your hardware. What we've down done with Gale is brought the ability to do orchestration provisioning at the high provider level, which allows you to do that for multiple devices across the rest of your dataset. So it gives you flexibility to take advantage of investments you've already made, optimize that capability across the board and managing that data center, not just the Dell solutions that we bring to the table. So speed of deployment is one difference, right? You saw early on a lot of these converged infrastructure solutions really did take a long time to deploy. Now, they've started to compress those cycles, but you're saying out of the chute, you've delivered that on that promise. Well, and also I'm not delivering a converged infrastructure, an active infrastructure solution that is only optimized for me. All right, I'm not creating technology or architecture lock-in. What I'm doing is I'm delivering on a red stack, as an example. Just not to pick on Oracle, but. Well, it's not a Cisco user, it's not an AT&T, it's an AT&T dealer. We love Oracle. If we start, might as well roll on. So it really gives flexibility back to the customer to say, this has been optimized for the workflow that I'm running, but I can still leverage legacy investments I've made and I know going forward I can scale this out. And given that flexibility with the right economic value proposition and the tremendous performance enhancements that you've seen, it's a great story, right? You have the ability to 75 fewer steps to get it up and running, right? We have 367% more virtual machines per one URAC, right? You have 28% less power utilization. These are all compelling statistics in and of itself, but more importantly is, again, the ability to make that IT organization that much more efficient in how they deploy. Marius, so Dell's been stockpiling a lot of assets. You know, they got Quest, and Michael mentioned a little bit of a big data angle on that one. You got all these little acquisitions coming together. You got the stockpiling, those little Lego blocks, if you will. Some of them are not so little. Yeah, yeah, they're little big. Relevant, no, but it's a strategy. You guys have been acquiring, you've known, be integrating in that asset. But in the conference here at the show, the word Dell technology is a, the word organic is being kicked around. So, you know, obviously it's the basic question. Organic innovation and acquiring talent. Juniper just bought Kerrigan today for $141 million, software defined networking company. The market's moving fast, so you do have to make some moves on the acquisitions side. Is there any areas in particular that you're looking at saying, hey, you know, we don't need it right now because we're on our delivery, but it's on the radar. Hey, look, I am $28 million away, a quarter, from overtaking Juniper on an Ethernet switching market share leadership possession. So, clearly have them in my sights and clearly networking is a key priority for us, for sure. Well, I actually wrote a blog post, I actually used the word rearranging the deck chairs in response to that post, but go ahead on the Juniper front there. So, you're closely knocking down Juniper, you got them in your sights. No, that's a specific, you know, reference to what we're doing obviously on the networking side, but you can imagine, it's a strong combination of organic investments, organic growth with inorganic tuck-ins, if you will, especially on our side, in the areas where we can accelerate what we're doing. And, you know, one of the opportunities I have obviously coming in new to the Dell family is I can take a look and I can rearrange some of the priorities and try to accelerate some of the things we're doing and that's clearly what I'm embarking on. Yeah, so EMC has been coming, we're following, they had, trying to get in the flash business. So, Michael said you guys got your own flash going on there. That's been a big strategic change because that's now sitting more with the servers, it's less of a storage-specific solution. EMC is struggling with some of their technology, bought an Israeli company. Well, you mentioned RNA, you got a little mystery going on there. For my sources, there's some really interesting stuff going on there. There's fantastic stuff going on with RNA and you'll be hearing a lot more about it. So, how is flash changing the landscape in turn? Because the servers get more powerful. Obviously, in line is the focus. We're talking to people who are doing big data analytics who are also running a lot of backend hard and hardcore, multi-core systems. They want more horsepower, you got mobility, application security, but then you got big data. They need that in line. And they're spending rust as Dave calls it on the disk side. It's still around, but flash is the focus. Nah, where do you see that? If you look at our server portfolio and a key component of it is our tiering technology, right? Put the right data at the right place with the right cost structure, right? Gives an 80% lower TCL than the competitors out there because we know where to put the data so you have the right access. So imagine you have that, for example, in our compelling storage arrays. Imagine that at the same time, you now have a tier zero caching on a server side which accelerates application performance 50 times. At the same time, you have key access to data right there next to the server. The whole environment end to end is going to be operating that much more effectively and give you that much more return on your investment. And that's what's so keen about when you have all the piece parts, server storage network can come together very nicely, make the right investments on, where do you put flash? How do you create an all flash array in your stack? And how do you then make sure that from a tiering perspective, you put the right data there? Those are the pieces that we're working on extremely aggressively, so very exciting news to come. They're trying to figure out the data layer. I mean, that's another discussion. Hypervisor's kind of been discussed, okay, ignore the hypervisor, but that data layer, where does it fit in the stack? I'll see it's in between infrastructure and apps. So that's an interesting debate going on now. Where do you put the data layer? Where does it sit? So interesting and very, very interesting. How about IP strategy? So we weren't able to get into this with Michael yesterday, but my sense has been that you guys do like really core, hardcore R&D for IP by writing checks, bringing in acquisitions, and then you focus your internal organic IP on integration. First of all, is that a correct assessment? And is that changing? Are you doing more deeper R&D internally? No, I'll give you an example, right? So we bought compression and deduplication. Ocarina. Ocarina. Well, how do we get that across all our platforms as quickly as possible so that we do have a fluid data architecture strategy across all our platforms? So clearly was a key mandate for us. So same algorithm, so I don't have to, you know, rehydrate. And one of the key things that again, I didn't appreciate until I got here was, we don't have legacy platforms that we're protecting. And hence, every incremental dollar I can spend on R&D, I'm spending on developing that next capability that is going to deliver that incremental value to customers. Yeah, right. And you look at any competitor, they certainly have a few of those businesses that they're having to invest in and protect. Well, we're getting the call sign here to get hooked, but I want to ask one last question for you. Obviously, the culture of Dell is about can-do innovation, very customer-centric. They got a lot of tech, they got a lot of the pieces pulling together, but I want to ask you about, about you, you're what we call a tech athlete. You're in here, we call this the ESPN of tech, the Cube. Well, I get better sure to be called that. You came right in on the trade and taking reps with the first team right away. But, you know, coming in as a new executive, obviously, you're not a new executive, but the Dell culture, you see some new stuff and you see you get a lay of the land, you got to put your running shoes on and take care of business right away. I'm sure you probably got a long list of things to go get through, as you said, fresh perspective. What's the next tactical year look like for you? Obviously, get acclimated, but what's the Maris Haas? You know, where you're lining your sights up? Obviously, the share on the service side, but what tactically are you going to knock down this year that you're open to? You hit it right on the spot. I mean, the Dell can-do attitude. I want to win, attitude is pervasive. All right, doesn't matter if you're talking to an R&D engineer or you're talking to someone out in the field. And that's what's unique. I'd say, you know, give us a task, lead us, we'll drive it, we'll get it done. All right, so that's what's really exciting and coming on board here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at it holistically. I'm going to look at everything from R&D optimization all the way out to helping Steve Lees and the sales organization to more effectively position and sell our solutions and again, doing it in customer-centric way. And looking at that holistically enables us to accelerate what we do. We have what marketing team tells me, two billion conversations a year with customers. Well, that translates into a very good set of data as to what is it that we ought to be doing. And not all of that information is, I need the speeds of fields. It's more of a, this is how we'd like to do business with Dell. And that's how we're going to go around it. So next year when we have you on the Dell World Cube when we come back, we can look back on this year. What do you want to say? One thing you're going to knock down this year. We're going to be number one servers worldwide. And we want to have established active infrastructure as the core integrated systems approach on the planet. Okay, Marius Haas running shoes on, taking reps with the first team right away here, making moves, great executive. We admire him and follow him since his career at HP. Well-renowned, great, great pull for Dell. Congratulations on the move. President of the Enterprise Group by Marius Haas. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this break.