 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got two returning guests from Dell Technologies joining me back on theCUBE today. We've got Doug Schmidt, President of Dell Technology Services. Doug, welcome back to the virtualCube. Well, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for having Alex and I back again. And Alex is here. This is Alex Borreau, SVP of Planning and Technology for Dell Technologies. Alex, welcome back. Thanks Lisa, happy to be here. So guys, a lot has happened since we last got to sit together about 18 months ago at Dell Technologies World 2019. But think back. Thank you for that. Right, we could think back pre-pandemic, when we could actually be not socially distanced. Talk to us Doug about what's going on with Dell Technologies Services. You gave us a great update then. What's going on now? I know you guys have 60,000 services in IT. Folks, you're delivering services in 170 countries. Give us an update. Well, yeah, so look, it's really about Dell Technology Services enabling our customers to effectively adopt and leverage and sustain their IT investment. Bottom line, helping our customers get the most out of what they're looking for out of their IT solutions and making sure we deliver that form. And as you stated, the size of the organization, I have the privilege of leading that team of 60,000 of both direct and partners in 170 countries. We provide that service in over 55 languages. And really we cover services from the edge to the core. So everything in between. And it's an end-to-end service meaning we can help with consulting, deployment, managed services, education services right down to the support side of it. And that really gives us a lot of flexibility to help our customers deliver what they need. And it's really about helping them navigate the digital journey, right? It really is helping them pivot just to the new business model we're seeing out there. Especially today, considering that's what we said last time we were sitting down together, now we're doing this virtually. Everyone's going through this transformation in addition to moving more to the edge and high-break cloud. So it's as important as ever for services to be there for our customers and that's what we're doing every single day. And we'll unpack a bit more some of the things that you've been doing since 2020 has started and made all these changes. But Alex, let's go to you for a little bit. Services strategy, services technology. What's going on there? Yeah, so really responsible for both those areas, right, strategy and technology. On the strategy side, really believe we're differentiated across three factors. You think about our physical footprint, right? Quite massive. We operate it in quite a few countries as you pointed out. And if you look at our portfolio graph, we have everything from consumer all the way to the large enterprise. So big, big scale from a portfolio perspective. And then if you look from our digital reach, we have massive digital reach which is really quite unmatched. And actually that's where the technology piece really comes to shine. Do you think about it? We have 200 million assets in the field today. Those assets are generating 22 terabytes of data per day. That's a massive set of amount of data that we're able to use our AI engines to generate valuable customer insight. Last year alone we were able to predict 3.7 million issues before they occurred and then take proactive action on those issues. And that's just one example but we're really investing in our software engineering capabilities building tools that enable our customers to drive their own actual digital transformation. And as Doug alluded to, we do this across the entire services life cycle. So everything from consulting to deployment to support to manage services. Excellent, thanks for that, Alex. So Doug, now let's kind of dig into what's been going on in the year of 2020, the year of what's next. A lot of changes and big challenges for customers in every industry, seven months ago, trying to figure out how do we survive in this mode? The massive shift to working home, the remote devices everywhere. Talk to us about how Dell Technologies has responded and helped your customers to survive and get to that thrive state in this crazy time. Yeah, well, no, you're right. And it was something that happened very, very quickly, obviously to all of us globally. And these events in 2020 really brought us even closer to our customers. We've always listened very closely, made sure we were in tune with that. Obviously, when all of this hit, we were there for them. And we had to rapidly challenge and change how we delivered our service in this dynamic environment. We were able to do that. We have an incredible team that obviously went to full work remote. You can imagine that with 60,000 folks changing our service offerings. So where we may have gone on site for a customer, we then set up a depot so that we're able to do that safely. We were able to get the PPE equipment out to the field service agents that needed to be in a data center and make sure we were following all the protocol. We leveraged our five integrated global command centers. These are strategic hubs that we have around the world to really monitor and help and track all of this. So we were able to do that. That had been digitized years before. So we were able to do all that safely. Really this was about going in then and helping our customers mitigate the impacts that they may have had, help them through that, whether it was through deployments being virtual, getting them the systems that they needed and just helping them through their critical environments and changes. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Because we talked about this massive pivot for everyone and the breadth of services that you cover from consulting to management services to education. What were some of the things that were really the highest need that you saw from customers, especially when this first happened? Well, when it first happened, it was clearly the working remote, right? And helping everybody do that and doing it virtually, making sure that, like I talked about, making sure they had the systems, making sure connections were okay, data centers were able to handle all of that and doing all that in a fashion in a safe way for our team members and our customers' team members. That was first and foremost priority with the safety of everyone. Once we had gotten through that, I'm going to say, you know, look, no dates exact, but I would say starting beginning of summer, maybe May, what we started seeing then is the people really actually pivoting even more into their transformations that they were doing, their digital transformations our customers were. And they were really looking for strategic guidance in on their planning. And so we set up where our consultants were delivering a half day accelerator workshops virtually to help them solve their IT challenges that they may have had. We also helped them understand what we had in the space of unified workspace as a complete solution that helps them deploy, support, manage all of their end user devices so that they could achieve full productivity in this new environment. And they were asking for IT to be simple. How do we simplify a lot of this? And how do they simplify that via our managed service capabilities? And so we were working through that again, setting up the virtual workshops and having them understand what those capabilities were and how we could help them through that. And then look, they were also, as you know, financing at some point with, you know, financing options, how can we do this as a service? All these different methods that we were helping with as well. It was really a great, in the sense of us stepping up to help our customers and we were there for them. And we talked about the digital transformation guys last year at Dell Technologies World that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Let's talk to us about what is going on with that digital transformation that Dell has undergone and how technology services or rather services technology is helping to play a role in that, especially the last six, seven months. Yeah, it's amazing to answer your question. We actually do digital transformation every day for our customers. But as you pointed out, we're actually undergoing our own digital transformation. And that's actually quite interesting to see comparing contrasts with everything that's happening with our customers. And we're able to actually take some of the insights that we learn in-house and expose that to customers. So we actually, if you look at services, we invested quite heavily on software engineering. The number of software engineers that we have now we're inside the services business units at an all-time high. If you look at the number of data scientists and PhDs that we have brought in, again, all-time high, it really focused on developing our AI engines that we use both internally and externally driving digital transformation. A couple of examples of that, if you look at something called PCI, which is an extensible proactive, the proactive case intelligence, it actually looks at the entire services journey that our customer has. And we're able to detect and put information in front of agents at the right time, the right information that actually enables them to deliver a better customer experience. We've actually seen through the implementation of PCI a 10% reduction in the time that we spent engaging with customers. And at the same time, an improvement in CISAC the tune of approximately 130 basis points. So we're off a productivity improvement which helps us internally as well as obviously benefit for the customers. Another thing we're doing is actually digitizing our entire services processes. That means everything from consulting to the point of support. So we have a digital variant of what processes should look like. And then real-time, we're able to actually measure active processes versus what they should be. And when we detect anomalies, we're able to correct those real-time. That again, gives us efficiencies internally, but more importantly, enables us to deliver a better customer experience. And that customer experience is critical, not just for Dell technologies to deliver to its customers, but for your customers to deliver to their customers. You talked about improving the customer experience and some of the impact there, Alex. And you think about in the last, in the year of 2020, how we suddenly went from this expectation that we can order anything on Amazon and it shows up tomorrow to having things be delayed that we were not anticipating. Talk to me about the transformation you guys are on. And we've heard a lot of Dell folks talk about the acceleration in the digital transformation that your customers are undergoing. But if you can walk us through from a strategic vision perspective, you've got the digitization going of the services. We know that a good amount of remote workforce will stay that way for quite some time. But give us a vision into the year 2021. Yeah, let's talk about the future because to your point, look, we have AI today and we plan to continue augmenting and investing in AI. We're going to continue developing software applications that have our customers to drive the transformation. But if you look forward to exciting areas, let me leave you three specifically that are very interesting. The first is as a service. We're actually taking our complete services portfolio and transitioning all of it to be available as a service. That's what customers are looking for. A very simple way to consume, buy and consume our services and we're doing that transformation and taking everything and transitioning to be available as a service. Second, 5G and telco, the telco transformation that's going to occur as part of 5G. We're fully embracing that so that we can have and deliver the set of services in a differentiated way, leveraging the power of 5G. You see that come about when you fast forward 2021, 2022. And then we have cloud services. Cloud services team we're very, very interested and excited about. So we actually have our hybrid cloud solutions dug allude to this. But on top of that hybrid cloud solutions, we're developing and building a set of cloud services that's going to enable our customers to be able to consume our solutions in a very simple and easy way and get the value out that they're looking for, again in a super simple manner. And Doug, wrap us up here with the vision overall from Dell Technology Services, the demand coming in from customers globally, all of the changing demands and this uncertainty in which we're living in. What does the future of the next year or so look like from Dell Technologies Services level? Well, yeah, as we talked about, like the demand for exceptional customer and employee experiences through all this is really driving these business models, disruptions across the board. And look, we understand customers need to thrive during all this and it's rapidly evolving and changing. So we're building our portfolio quickly to stay ahead of that. Being able to listen to customers and build those services out is what we're doing now. As we mentioned earlier, both Alex and I we've talked about the disruption we're seeing with 5G, the Edge, cloud, as a service and this is driving a massive change in the industry, right? And therefore you have us having all the services to help our customers manage through that. And it's really about this convergence we're seeing of capabilities that we provide. The lines between, like I call these traditional silos, inside support, consulting, managed services, all of that's being blurred. Our customers are really looking for an outcome. They're looking for flexibility and for things to be simple. We're helping them achieve that. And like I talked about earlier, our customers want outcomes and they really want to select Dell for the comprehensive portfolio that we have that could be everything from PC as a service, storage as a service right into hybrid cloud. So, you know, look, moving forward, we work very closely, obviously integrated with our product teams, hand in hand. We see that blurring as well. The product as a service, the service as a product. We think Dell Technologies is in their ideal position to pull all this together. And we have a clear vision with a world-class team or really to help our customers through their transformation and deliver the outcomes they're looking for. Doug, Alex, thank you so much. It's nice to see you again, albeit virtually. Maybe someday soon we'll get to be sitting down on a cube desk together again, I hope. Look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you for Doug Schmidt and Alex Beretto. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual edition. Thanks for watching.