 As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies, has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone, pending of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau who's the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's going to talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott is the senior vice president of marketing, he's going to come in the program and give us the update on Apex which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also cybersecurity awareness month and we're going to see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jen Savidra who's Dell's chief human resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're going to geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first let's talk wallet, Tom Sweet, CFO and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to theCUBE. Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me today. Yeah, you bet. Tom, it's been a pretty incredible past 18 months, not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky. I was kidding. And of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company of your size, you've had some success at the top line which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey, if you think all the way back, maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but stepping into the last 18 months, it's, I think I remember talking with you and saying, hey, the scenario playing we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was 30 different scenarios roughly and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story. As we think about how we help customers, dry workforce productivity, enable their business model during the all remote work environment that was the pandemic created. And a couple of that with the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the pandemic coupled with the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November as we've completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade, which then unlocked quite frankly, shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable 18, 24 months. It's never dulled at Dell Technologies. Let me put it that way. Well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with Fed tightening and you're combating inflation. You got this recession looming. There's a bear market. But you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar. It's very confusing, but IT spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in, Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 750 billion dollars or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to 1.5 trillion dollar market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low 30s and maybe in the high end of storage or at the upper end of 30s or 40%, but the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and continue to take share and up perform the market is truly extraordinary. So you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as you highlighted. We actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about is you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was holding quite frankly. And so we gave a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a result of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlighted continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and constrain growth and push down inflation. You couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the energy crisis that's created and particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the longterm, but I do think that there is, you know, there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters who knows quite how long, you know, to make sure the business is properly positioned and you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're going to talk to some of the team later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. So the opportunities there, there's some short-term navigation that we're going to need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right now. Yeah, and as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways that allow them to kind of come out the other side stronger. So I want to talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the business growth, you mentioned the TAM, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if you can penetrate that big of a TAM, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn and potentially acquisitions and software. But so ultimately, what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? Yeah, look, I think it comes down to, we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term. Digital transformation continues. I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's been a slow or pause or maybe they're not going to invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term, the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the growth opportunities that we see not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what have previously been closed ecosystems to open architecture. You think about what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data, gravity and latency matters. And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us. Yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you heard Jeff Boudreau talk about that, I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability. We are in normal times a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so. We've got a negative CCC in terms of how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our capital allocation strategy which has now returned somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so there's lots of reasons to think about why this, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and over the long-term that the long-term trends are with us and I expect them to continue to be so. Yeah, and you guys, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put $46 billion on the balance sheet in terms of debt that's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarkable. And that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long-term play but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. Hey, Dave, yeah, look, I just think if you look at the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, if you look at say, we're a $100 billion revenue company which we were last year that is where you reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client and PC space roughly 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive cash flow, drive share gain is clearly there. You couple that with what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, and you put that together with the long-term trends around data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in the technology space, we have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. Well, Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us, good to see you again. Nice seeing you, thanks, Dave. All right, you're watching theCUBE's exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022 in a moment. I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group, he's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell and we're excited to get his thoughts. Keep it right there. Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit, I'm Dave Vellante. We're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're going to dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross-cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. With me now is friend of theCUBE, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you, welcome. You too, thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on theCUBE. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. We talk all the time about operating in a data-driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? Sure, hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind in everything we do. My leadership team and I spent a lot of time with our customers, we're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points. And we want to get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both current and future offerings. Really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data, so no surprise, going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'll say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first, the data, as we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. And you can just think of that in its every wing. And so as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time, environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud, which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds, running across multiple locations, that's on-prem and off-prem. It's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately for most of our customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed, it's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I'm talking to them all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth in the ground. You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized IT. You think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts. That all creates operational complexity for their teams or on their processes and their tools. And then you think about security complexity, but that drives with just the increased attack service. And the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? What they really want from us and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really want to simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile IT. And they want more control of their data, right? And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious. And we probably all heard it a bunch but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe and we believe as Dell that it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of IT. We're already doing this today just a couple of quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported, recently we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We'll go back to that complexity. It was across a very distributed environment including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level objective, things like cost, complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer is a big New England Patriot fan and Dave, I know you are as well. This one's near and dear to my heart. It's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create a more, I'd say data driven immersive secure experience which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a Patriot fan like I am Dave, they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats, on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time we're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make IT simple for our customers to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're going to do this is it through a multi-cloud by design approach which we've talked a lot about with you and others at Dell Tech World earlier this year. Right, and we had Salesforce on actually at Dell Tech Group. The craft group is interesting because when you get to the stadium everybody's trying to get out to the internet but then the experience is so much better if you can actually deal with that edge. So I want to talk about complexity though. You've got data, you've got the edge, you've got multiple clouds, you've got a different operating model across, security model is different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I want to talk to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long-term strategy. Sure, I'd love to. So first I'd like to state the obvious which our investments in our innovations really focus on advancing our customer's needs. All right, so really our investments are going to be targeted where we believe customers can have the most value and some of that's going to be around how we create strategic partnerships as well. Connected to what we just spoke about much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is an orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity really enabling those developers to do what they do best which is creating more value for their customers and for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere data lives. And we're focused on also focused on consumption-based solutions which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to find common storage layer. That common storage layer, you can think about this Dave as our IaaS if you will. It underpins our data access and mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, Colo, Edge and it's delivered in a secure holistic and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress so that should just be clear. We made headway in things like Project Alpine which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announced this back in January which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. Really delivering the best of both worlds allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services in storage software such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, their on-demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're on our way to win at the Edge as well with Project Frontier which reduces complexity at the Edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their Edge operations, optimize their Edge environments and investments, secure that Edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Brokott in the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex which you know well shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as-a-service transitions by modernizing the consumption experience and providing that flexible as-a-service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify IT and unlock the power of their data. So some good examples there. I like to talk about the SuperCloud as you know. You're building on top of the hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer. You call it your IaaS and that's an ingredient in what we call the SuperCloud. Out to the Edge, you have to have a common platform there. And one of the hallmarks of a cloud company and as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company, ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero sum game and I think SuperCloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? For me, it's pretty clear, it's critical. I can't say that enough about having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed and I agree with your SuperCloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you. I would assert no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these closed stacks that discharges interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of each of our teams. We, Dell, I guess, have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first and to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. I mean, just thinking what we're doing with VMware, we continue to build on our first investment alliances with them in August at their VMware Explorer which I know you were at. We announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strengthened our relationship with VMware and with Tanzu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago, we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multi-cloud platform. So that's kind of our path there, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long-standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft. And I'd say, stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multi-cloud space. Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for, the Edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics. In data management, using your super cloud analogy, Dave, the SaaS, right? This is our SaaS there. We've announced that we're collaborating and partnering with folks like Snowflake and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers' choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we're expanding our COLO partnerships as well with folks like Equinix. And they're allowing us to broaden our availability of APEX, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical, not only for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's critical for the entire industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem. As we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions, really to meet their needs, we'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. So it's been an interesting three years for you, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the ISG. And so you had to dig in and it was obviously strange time around the world, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it cloud-first? You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize? Sure, so I'd say first that we've discussed we're working in a very fast-paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multi-cloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're going to help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default as we've discussed before to multi-cloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of IT and what they're trying to accomplish. Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go, Pat, and we'll see you on the block. Thanks, Dave. All right, you're watching exclusive Insight Insights from Dell Technology Summit on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and we're watching theCUBE's coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews, featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're going to explore Apex, which is Dell's as-a-service offering, Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here and don't forget it's Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Sam Grocott is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? Always great to be here, Dave. All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud, Apex, multi-cloud. What's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? Yeah, yeah. Look, Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud has become a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally, the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design where essentially organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell, we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multi-cloud by default, rather it's multi-cloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multi-cloud. And how we deliver multi-cloud by design is through Apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that beginning of this year, we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SaaS-based backup service. We've introduced or announced Project Alpine which is bringing our storage software intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, I'm sorry, Amazon AWS, Azure or Google. And then we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announced key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake where you can now access our information, our data from on-prem through the Snowflake cloud or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem of SaaS providers. And then finally, I would say, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announced a strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the recent VMware Explorer. We announced new Tanzu integration. So Dave, I think in a nutshell, we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies World first time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus to the default, which is great. Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting. Red Hat, so seeing that expand. Now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's got to be new, speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type of ecosystem, telcos. And what's this new frontier platform all about? Yeah, yeah, so we've talked a lot about clouds and multi-clouds. We're talking about private and hybrid clouds. We've talked about public clouds, clouds and colos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives and that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We've seen upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years, delivering edge solutions. 81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge, healthcare and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a deep understanding of how our customers are using edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has got to change with that growth that we talked about the new use cases that are emerging. We've got to unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing project frontier. And project frontier in its most simplest form is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. With project frontier, organizations are really gonna be able to manage and operate their edge infrastructure and application securely, efficiently and at scale. Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name. It is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capability integration. Is there hardware involved? Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And really there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with project frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of them. Freedom of choice, we definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the edge than any other part of the IT stack. Being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or IoT frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with project frontier is being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment. And of course backed by an end secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with essentialized management through project frontier and zero touch deployments. One of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources. And do you know how the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation to help streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think project frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certainly, excuse me, certainly into the future. Yeah, Sam, no truck rolls, I like it. And you mentioned zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day, the kids always ask when's kids day? And we of course, we say every day is kids day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and how are you responding? Yeah, yeah, no, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company has really been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. Every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly positively, hopefully impacted, but also can negatively impacted as well. So data security is really not a new area of focus for Dell, it's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cybersecurity and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system and having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together that coexist together in the right way. To truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment, we are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute, all correct security architectures assume that there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've got to be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation. Now with cloud, you've got shared responsibility models, multi-cloud, you got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their R&D and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell technology summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. Yeah, look, I think we're at a transformative point in IT, you know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume IT in different ways, such as as a service. A lot of customers, Edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course, there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers, when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell, we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio. We are the trusted partner of choice to help them lead their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in IT and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Dave. All right, a Dell tech world in Vegas this past year. One of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Sevadra and we're going to speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Sevadra who's the chief human resource officer of Dell and we're going to discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post-isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time so excited to share some of our learnings with you. I mean, I'll bet there has. I mean, post-pandemic companies they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and what it looks like. Last May, there was really a theme of flexibility but depending and we talked about, well, millennial or not, young, old and it's just really was mixed. But so how have you approached the topic? What are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? What's working? What's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? Yeah. Well, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell Technology. So we've been doing hybrid before hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade, we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is we're such a data-driven company. There's so many headlines out there about all these things that people think could happen, will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, how do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. We asked them, do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance, right? Behind that macro level. So we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth-busting journey. And we decided to test some of those things we're hearing about culture will erode or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection to be productive and to have a really healthy business. Well, I like that you were data-driven around it in the data business here. So, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get promoted. And so I'm curious, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, hey, we want you guys to work the way you want to work, but then I've seen them adjust and say, well, yeah, but we also want you in the office so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange new ever changing world? Yeah, well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. They tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best and not every individual role has the same requirements, not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. So for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid. But just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, work out with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. So that's what we... You were talking before about myths and I want to talk about team member performance because there's a lot of people believe that if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage because they get FaceTime. Is that a myth? Is there some truth to that? What do you think about that? Well, for us, we look again, we just looked at the data. So we said, we don't want to create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really want to have an inclusive culture. We want to be outcome-driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre-pandemic, we looked at things like performance. We looked at rewards and recognition. We looked at attrition rates. We looked at sentiment. Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who work fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. And it's personal too, I think. I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office because the dog's in our parking. I have less distractions. Yeah, we think and I think the takeaway that just in talking to you, Jen and folks at Dell is whatever works for you, we're going to support. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and very specifically, empathic leadership has been said to have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds of the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I asked myself, I'm like, hmm, what am I missing with our folks? So especially as it relates to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? I think empathy has always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the value that you bring to the company, then you're not going to get very far. So I think empathic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say, you want your team members to see you as credible and confident that you can take us forward, but also that you know and understand me as a human being. And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders, we've probably been thinking about a decision or a transformation for months or weeks. And we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am, let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth-busting, I mean, I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation, a post-isolation economy as they could pre-COVID. But I notice there's an announcement today that came across my desk. I think it's from Newsweek. Yes, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation, satisfaction. It was really interesting because you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, but this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model and in doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. Number one on the list is Dell SAP. So congratulations, SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists like, oh, yeah, okay, that's cool, top 100, whatever. But top one in an industry where there's only two in the top is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations. You know, how'd you do it and how are you succeeding in this new world? Well, thanks, it does feel great to be number one, but, you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a culture and espoused values, we have ours called the culture code, but it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, the whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything so it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. Don't you think too that repetition, and well, first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do you want to others as others? You know, you don't have others do it to you. Don't make this, you're gonna do some dumb things, but don't do the same dumb things twice. And you sort of fluff it up, but then as you mature, you say, wow, actually those were values were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and paying it forward. But so I guess my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time. And as an HR professional, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture. It's our business leaders. It's our CEO, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're going to get. And so it is something that we talk about, that we embed into everything that we do. And I think it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done because that's not how things really work. Well, it's a culture of respect, high performance, high expectations, accountability and having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. Always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time, Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of theCUBE inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand at thecube.net and you can check out siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of Breaking Analysis. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.