 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back everyone, we are live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and my co-host here is Keith Townsend, CTO at Hashtag, I mean, AdSign, CTO advisor on Twitter. Our next guest is David Goulden, who's the president of Dell EMC, infrastructure business, great to see you. Our eighth consecutive year covering EMC World now, Dell EMC World, the first Dell EMC World, kind of a seminal moment, watershed event here. You've been to all of them, you've seen the movie with EMC now, through now eight months after the close. It's Dell EMC World, but it still feels like EMC World. What's your reaction? I mean, all the same? No, giant, it's very different to me. Maybe because it's in Vegas and it's in May, so those two things are common. But the content, the breadth of the message, you mentioned it, it's eight, nine months after the closing of the transaction, but of course, bear in mind, we had a year before our planning after we announced, so it's really quite some time into the concept of this transaction. And to a large extent, this week for us is the coming out party. It gives us a chance to demonstrate to the world what we spent the last nine months, a year before that planning and doing, and actually investing in, and you saw just from my remarks this morning, the breadth of technology we bring to our customers, the amount of innovation and the better together story coming real, I think it's exciting. You know, Dave and I are always complimenting you and talking behind your back when you're not around as well, but the compliment is, you're a great operational person, but you're also a strategic chess player as well in terms of the industry. The Dell EMC strategy is pretty clear on the existing traditional infrastructure, data center, whatever you want to call it, it's a mature market, it's consolidating, win that business, be the number one supplier in that market, we see that playing out. However, you got to have the growth strategy. That's the future revenues that are going to come down the pipe. Describe for a minute which the strategy, because pretty obvious the mature market on the data center is moving to hybrid cloud there's a pathway there. So you're locking and loaded on that being number one, fast 14 generation servers, we see that. Cool, growth strategy. What's the growth strategy for Dell EMC? Well, don't rule out growth in on-prem data centers, right? So let's not put that into pure and mature, a no growth. It's not hockey stick. Right, but the market is still a massive marketplace in on-prem data centers. It's true that all the infrastructure growth, so if you look at the infrastructure marketplace, $110 billion is served by service storage, networking, data protection, you look at that marketplace in total and you say, where's all the growth? The growth is in off-prem. We'll come back to that in a second. But the on-prem, i.e. the data center is still over 60% of that marketplace and in total that market isn't growing, but the consolidation opportunities that you talked about is huge. And segments of it, like moving to a private cloud, like hyperconverged infrastructure, there are rocket ships occurring inside of that big target adjustable market. That's $60 billion a data center IT spend. So there is growth for us in there and there is growth as being the largest, most capable player to consolidate, pick up, share, be stronger in the newer segments than we even were in the more mature segments. So I wouldn't rule off growth there. From an infrastructure point of view, of course there's a lot of growth off-prem. Now off-prem is a very fragmented marketplace. As soon as people think off-premises, they go immediately to the web scale public cloud providers and they're certainly a part of it. But there's the SaaS companies. There is the outsource integrators. The IT as a service companies. There's a huge opportunity there. I mean, everyone is a cloud service provider. Everyone will be, I mean, Riot Games, which does legal edges, they're a cloud company, right? Everyone's kind of a cloud company or a SaaS company these days. That's what they're trying to get there. That's because the whole IT industry is moving to cloud because cloud is an operating model, not a place. And cloud is about delivering IT at all levels, application, infrastructure, networking. Whatever you think about it, it's delivering IT as a service that can be monitored and meted and charged based upon use. That's a very simple definition of a cloud and everybody wants to do that. Whether you are an on-prem data center, whether you're a third party service provider, everybody wants to offer cloud. So we shouldn't get too confused about the cloud opportunity. It is the redefinition of the IT industry. So David, as we talk through the opportunity within the data center, one of the obvious things when you look at Dell EMC is the breadth of products, the depth of capability compared to your competitors. Traditional knowledge would tell us that, you know what, you guys have the potential to really dominate this thing. But when you're coming to customers, what's the clear message that you're bringing when it comes to specific products in the core of that growth? So the message to customers is we are investing for the long term, we're investing heavily. Our strategy is not to just be good enough. It's to be the number one. So we don't want to just be the number one market share player but always have the best technology. So message to customers is, hey, Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, you've got a lot of things to worry about in your IT world. Ultimately, you want to be providing IT services to your customers. You need an infrastructure partner. You want that company who can be that essential infrastructure company who can provide the vast, vast majority of all the things that you need to be able to equip your IT shop to provide services to your customers. That's the message and it's very powerful because it spans the client through the data center in and into the cloud and it encompasses security and all the elements of the infrastructure play. So it's a very, very powerful message and the final four I would tell you is relative to that is I haven't had a customer in the last two years who told me they want more IT suppliers. They want fewer and they want them to be strategic and more capable and that's all play. Well, great. I want to double down on that comment. They don't want more suppliers. I buy that. And I think end to end, you're seeing architectures. We saw Intel on stage. You're seeing 5G being end to end with IoT. They like the end to end. They like the supplier consolidation. But the other thing we're hearing in the hallways here at the event is and this is the question for you because you manage a product portfolio is I don't want more products. I want less products or SKUs, if you will, whatever you want to call it. So there's a product overlap. Certainly with the Dell EMC combination, there's been some overlap. People have been talking about that. So how do you guys are managed? How are you managing that? I know we talked about it a little bit last year. You know, just getting the roadmap cleaned up. But what specifically are you doing to manage the product overlap with respect to some of the products that kind of are overlapping between the two companies? Well, first of all, your earlier comment was right. Customers want outcomes and we'll come back to that. But specifically relative to your question on overlap, the beauty of this combination is we come with one of everything and two of almost nothing, which is most unusual in a large-scale tech merger. The only area we had any overlap was in the mid-tier of our storage family, where there was the Dell SC-Compellants and there was the EMC Unity family. Now, if they'd both been mature at the end of their product cycle, it could have been a longer issue. But the point is they've just gone through a full investment to create new versions of each one. So what do you do? You roll them out. You report your customers and you look for convergence opportunities down the road. So we didn't have to make any short-term, keep one kill one type choices because it was a very fortuitous stage that both have been through that cycle. But that's the only part of the entire portfolio, where there's any overlap. The rest is all about- And you're saying it's opportunistic for you because there's no real conflicting overlap. It's what you're saying basically. There's no conflict. We have two mid-range storage products, one from each family. Big deal. Most customers don't want to be confused. So if they were a Unity customer, we sell them Unity, if they're a component customer, we sell them Component, and we say, don't worry, we're going to bring you a converged solution in the future. It's really quite simple. Everywhere else, Dell came with their technology, EMC came with ours, and we can focus on how you create the power of more. Okay, so back to the end to end conversation because you mentioned they want less suppliers is the trend, I agree. And more partners. Multi-cloud, for technical reasons, latency on the things, I think it's not ready for prime time, but certainly the direction. Hybrid Clouds, Front and Center, I see that. Talking to CEO Oracle last week and his briefing with me, they want to be the supplier. Everyone wants to be the end to end supplier. So multi-cloud implies multiple vendors. So there is still a multi-vendor. Could you just share with us your vision on that because it's not a one-vendor take-all world, certainly in life cycles good, but how are you guys dealing with this multi-vendor, multi-cloud scenario, and how should customers look at that in dealing with Dell EMC? Well first of all, we didn't say we want to be any of those exclusive IT provider. We want to be their most strategic. Everybody has a number of IT vendors. And this is one of the challenges that most IT operations have. They have tens of vendors. In some cases they have tens of vendors for just one piece of the stack, like their management tools. So they're looking for fewer more capable partners. And what we want to do is to be position ourselves to be the most strategic amongst their handful of key partners. As it comes to multi-cloud, that all ties back to applications. So this whole conversation about cloud is often mixed up with a question around applications. So I was with a customer, a large financial services customer after lunch. We were having a conversation about cloud. I asked them how many applications they had. 6,900. And that by the way, that's after they've done two years of application rationalization. So what they now want to do is figure out a strategy for those applications. Well, they're not all going to sit on one cloud. They're going to sit on multiple places. They'll assemble, sit upon an internal cloud. They may have a couple of different flavors of internal cloud. They're going to have some SaaS vendors. They're going to have some public cloud. So multi-cloud is a reality of anybody with more than, let's say, 50 or 100 applications. It's just a way of life. Particularly when you take my definition of cloud or our definition of cloud as being an offering model and not a place. In the final minutes we have, I know Keith's got another question that Bud wants to ask, but I got to ask you. Because you've been on the EMC side. You've been running that business with the team there, Federation over the years. You've had a good treasure. You look at the roadmap. You've seen the growth rates. Now with the combination, I'd like you just to spend a minute and talk about what's different now and be specific because now you have so much more opportunity on the revenue side with the combination. So talk about, and Michael made a comment to me just now this morning, they're winning more business. So you're winning business. You're seeing some successes. NSX with VMware is doing great. They've converged this stuff. It's going great. We've got product announcements. What specific wins are you having to illustrate this new growth opportunity that wasn't there before the combination? We're having a number of wins. We're having a number of situations where in the data center, for example, a strong Dell server customer may not have much EMC storage and we're winning the storage footprint. Conversely, we're having a lot of wins where we've had a strong storage footprint in the data center with EMC strength and we're winning significant server deals on the back of that. So we're seeing this cross synergy occurring just on the back of having a number one position on both sides. We're also seeing our ability to bring brand new products to market like VxRail that includes a PowerEdge, that includes VMware, that includes EMC software. So we're winning because we have the broader portfolio and we're winning because we're creating new products that leverage the best of both. And of course, a big piece of what I talked about this morning was 14G servers. That is going to be the next generation bedrock of the data center. We'll incorporate that across all our entire portfolio. Why is that important? Quickly, what's the value proposition? What's the value proposition for 14G? It's been designed for the digital transformation of the future. It's been designed not only to host existing applications but to host those scale out, high performance applications of the future. And we can uniquely provide the scalability, the performance, the security those applications need. So it's built for the next generation. It's built thinking about things like machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence. It's the platform for those applications. And that's really powerful to have that inside the portfolio. So David, digital transformation, a lot of time to value, a lot of buzzwords I've heard this today that I've generally heard from my management because over the days. Dell EMC is now the leader in the infrastructure space. You guys are now having conversations with much different people. CMO, COO, CEO, CIO. What lends Dell technologies, Dell EMC, the credibility to come to these new contacts within enterprise? I say a couple of things. So first of all, we have the world's most advanced platform as a service tool with Pivotal. There are more cloud native applications being built on the Pivotal framework than any other single framework out there. I'm a big fan of Pivotal. So am I. And it lets customers become software businesses and everybody talks about becoming a software business and it creates not just a platform, but a tool kit and also through Pivotal labs, the ability to train people. So Pivotal gives us the credibility to have that software conversation. And then on the back of Pivotal and just on the back of what we're doing in the infrastructure business, we recognize that there's IT transformation and there's digital transformation. And we're building infrastructure that is aligned to support both of those. So we're building applications for big data Hadoop. We're building infrastructure for IoT. We're building applications for the next generation digital transformations. So the infrastructure side of the business is able to address IT transformation and digital transformation and infrastructure layer. And then we've got the best tool out there for the digital transformation applications. So I think that gives us a lot of credibility. So having that conversation. David, final question. Take your president of EMC hat off for a second with your personal David Goulden hat on. And I'd like to have you just reflect in your own words what surprised you about this combination. It's been historic. You got the entrepreneurial led CEO, Michael Dell, you're private. It feels good. We haven't heard really any horror stories about the integrations. There's been some bumps, but no major horror stories. So congratulations. But in your own words, what's the biggest surprise that you've seen given the history you have with EMC and as an executive at Dell EMC? What's the biggest surprise that folks might not know about in this massive combination? I think you've hit upon a couple of them, John. So one, we've planned for contingencies that didn't happen. You put a big merger together. I'd like you to expect some things to go wrong in the night. They didn't touch wood. So that perhaps is an attribute to the planning and the integration that went on. And then on the other side, it's just how quickly we've been able to bring things together. I thought it was going to take us another six to nine months before we could really have customers cheer around us and say, we are now viewing you as our most strategic partner. And that's happening to me today. And I really didn't think we'd be there within the first Dell EMC world. I thought it would be the Dell EMC world a year later when we could have those conversations. I think when you just look at the amount of innovation and the progress we've made in a short period of time, because I think what's happened here is we've hit a little bit of an inflection point. We are touching upon a real requirement those customers have. And maybe even more than we ever realized that they really want a technology innovator who's broadly based, who's not constrained by some of the conventional models out there who can push the envelope with them. You must have those moments where you kind of pinch yourself and say, wow, look where we are. I mean, kind of where the, how the industry's changed over the years. You guys have a nice pole position. Interesting times. We're excited about it. And we think also more importantly, we're playing a long-term game. We view that in three to five years time, the industry becomes even more consolidated. And we think that we have this unique position as this essential infrastructure, broad-based platform company that can just continue to grow from here. Michael Dell is the same thing. Jeff Bezos at Amazon, 10 years of innovation is what it pretty much takes to kind of make things happen. Congratulations on your success. Dave, great to see you inside theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for your kind comments. We really don't talk behind your back. I mentioned that earlier. We actually say good things about you. David Goulden, president of Dell EMC Instructure. Here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Keith Townsend live from Las Vegas. We'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us.