 Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. And welcome here on the Cube to Dell EMC World 2017, live from the Sands Expo, along with Keith Alston. I'm John Walls, and good to have you with us here on day three of what has been a fantastic show here for Dell EMC. Mega show, 13,000 plus attendees, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of great guests we've had here on the Cube, one of them joining us now, John Byrne, who's the president of Dell EMC Global Channels, and a cover boy, I might add, this month's edition of CRN, John, you should have been in pictures, man, you look great on the cover, so congratulations on that big news. Good to have you with us here on the Cube, and tell us about your journey here in the past couple of months, you launched the Partners Program, you bring Dell in one hand, you bring EMC on the other, you bring it all together, how's it going so far? Look, it's the reaction who's being spectacular, you know, almost extraordinary. When you think of our channel business now, our channel business is some 35 billion dollars. When you frame that as bigger than Facebook, bigger than Starbucks, bigger than Nike, growing faster than the market, the broadest portfolio and everything you hear is talking about, we want to be number one of everything all in one place, and we have this wonderful partner ecosystem that is primed and ready to take advantage of this opportunity. So, you know, we stood up a brand new team, a new strategy, new program, and our partners couldn't be more excited. The program is launched based on three tenets, it's been simple, predictable, profitable, and you know, we're very, very pleased and very humbled with the momentum we've had, and look at, this has been built for our partner, but actually it's been built with our partner community in mind, and they can feel this, and we're on a tremendous journey. Super exciting. Yeah, I like the fact too, that I mean, you make no bones about it. Profitable is not a dirty word, right? It's a very good word and a very real word, but back up to me, it's a new strategy. So, you've been a channel guy, basically your whole professional life. What experiences did you bring from that into this endeavor that you think have given it its own stamp or its own unique distinction? Yeah, look, I remember running my own channel companies as if it was yesterday, and I remember I always had choices, and I wanted to work with people who were going to win, and people who you wanted to work with. So, when we traveled the world to find out what are the partners like about Heritage Dell, Heritage EMC, what did they not like? What was, I'm more importantly, what was the best of breeding the planet? They were very consistent on three things. They wanted the program to be very simple, an annual program, take advantage of EMC's world-class training capability, take cost and friction out of my selling motion, i.e. one portal, one deal registration, automation of rebates, so I can see every week what have I sold, what am I earning? Because I remember when I ran my own company, I wanted to continually invest in the skill sets and the certification, but more importantly, on the people. So, having that consistency was something that came through loud and clear. Predictability of engagement. Ultimately, where do we want our channel partners to play? And how will we protect their investment, knowing that they have choices? And we spend a lot of time on our deal registration. The third thing is, you're talking to a Scotsman, and profit is important. So, you know- Scotsman, I thought it was a Texas accent. I wasn't sure they were talking about it. Honestly, you sound like my father talking about my accent, John and Keith. But we invest significantly in marketing development funds. We invest significantly in the rebate program, and our partners now can make anywhere between 1.5x to eight times what they made historically based on the right behavior. So, bringing my background, the knowledge, those three things are critical, what we're doing, and of course, look, our differentiation is going to be an execution, and the team is making great progress. So, John, a lot of the angst and excitement, rather, between the merger of Dell UNC was with the channel. What was going to happen with the channel? What was going to happen with the channel? You guys have seemingly executed seamlessly, rather. But a question around the relationship with the channel, one throat to choke versus the competition. The competition is shrinking, get it smaller, getting less complex is the marketing term. How has the channel reacted to the new size of Dell EMC versus the competition shrinking? Yeah, that's a great question to ask them. That's the biggest endorsement that we could possibly have. Of course, I was concerned at the very beginning. They didn't know what was going to be the strategy. Both companies have done phenomenally well in the channel, but whilst the strategies look similar, they're actually very different in detail. When you think Dell had many thousands of partners, EMC had hundreds of partners, the criteria on EMC's program, from a revenue perspective, is significantly more than it was in Dell. Sort of a lot of concern, but the first thing we did, Keith, is I prayed ourselves and we prayed ourselves on having big ears and we traveled the world. We traveled the world and we listened. And then we came together very quickly. I think we only were born in September 16. Four weeks later, we announced, here's our vision, here's our strategy, here's the team, here's the program. We're going to be implementing in February and we over-communicated with our partners. As we were building this, they were tweaking this and tweaking this. And it's amazing. You think now we came together as one go-to-market motion in February. We've had 90 days under our belt. Look, when I look at the leading indicators, how's the numbers? How's pipeline? How's our training? How's our certifications? How's our services capability? How's our acquisition? And when I started to see those scoreboards light up green, the partners can see line of sight to it. The feedback from the partners is, look, they cannot believe that at a 35 billion channel business, moving at this speed together and executing the way we are as one team, is taking a lot of the noise out of the system and they can see line of sight to money. So, wait, I wanted to drill down on that a bit. 35 billion dollar channel business. Next big competitor is, I think a company called HPE. Their market cap is only 30 billion compared to your revenues. What's the significance of that from a customer and channel perspective? Look, it's not for me to talk about the competition. You know, I think when I look at the hand that we have, I think Michael taking us private, allowing us to invest significantly in the future, has helped us greatly. I think spending 4.5 billion dollars on R&D, which is double the competitor you just mentioned, to allow us to have a product portfolio that dominates Gantner's Magic Quadrants, to allow us to invest in the business. Look, this is only going to go one way. However, I want to be very clear. We're the dark horse. Don't let a 35 billion scare people. Like we only have low double digit share, but with the portfolio, with the partner community, with the program, like this is going to be like a skyrocket and the partner's going to feel it. So on that, yeah, I mean, you bring dark horse. We all know that the conventional definition of dark horse, right, long shot, no shot. But 35 billion, it's pretty hard to fly under the radar, honestly, right, John? And, yes it is. It is. But I also want to put it, look, we have big visions. We have big dreams. We want to be the number one channel player in the industry. We want to be the number one, the biggest and the best. Not the best, not the biggest, not the biggest, not the best. We want to be the biggest and the best. When we're talking to our partners right now, like we've had them here, would you believe there's been four and a half thousand partners here this week? We had a global partner summit. It was standing room only, with the four and a half thousand. Actually, we had to go overflow rooms to get our partners coming in here. And those partners are feeding back to us. I almost scared to mention the number, how big this could be. But a discussion we're having with the partners is not how do we grow up market or how do we grow a little bit above market. The discussion with the partners is how do we double? So with that said, Michael has talked an awful lot about the small overlap between Dell and EMC. Only 20% overlap has the channel realized new opportunity because of that limited overlap. Look, again, the leading indicator is look, we asked our partners for four things as we build this program. And it's a rich program and intentionally done some. We asked them for four things. We want you to grow your top line. We want to be aggressive and attack the market. However, I also wanted to make a lot of money. Profit is important from our company to the partner community to the distributors. The second thing is we want them to sell much more of our portfolio. You've heard, I'm sure of the past couple of days, the four transformations building out the modern data center. Our partners have the capability to sell much more lines of business than they are today. The third thing is we want to be aggressive and acquire new customers, acquire new lines of business. And then also look, attach services. Like we spent a lot of time talking about hardware you're also hearing us talking about our services capability. That is a pot of gold for our partners. If they do this, it's going to light up. So does our partners see this opportunity? Are they leaning in? Are they getting more training, more certifications? Oh, absolutely. So let's talk about training because that's the critical part. Dell EMC is mind-boggling huge. So when I'm a channel, if I'm a channel engineer and I look at the portfolio and I go into a customer side, how do I wrap my arms around just the size of it? I'm not in the mothership of Dell EMC. I don't have all of the, well, in theory, I don't have all of the back channels to the solutions. How do we keep the, how do you keep the channel up to speed? Yeah, great question. Actually, I'll give you some data points. Would you believe that at Dell Technologies we have 40,000 sales makers who are trained and certified to sell our portfolio? That's quite a staff only number, right? Yes. However, when you look at our partner community we also do the same training and certification. We have 129,000 people trained at our partner community. That is a sales army of 169,000 people trained and certified to go and attack, not only today, but attack the future transformations. So what we've done is we basically, the training that our own team does, our partners do. We've also centralized all of our training. It's all in one portal. Clearly articulating, if you want to go by product, here's a by-product that you want to go by transformation, here's a by-transformation you want to do by services, here's the services. And look, I think the other thing they're finding is, look, it has real equity to the person doing the training. You know, it's developing their career. You go to the LinkedIn, they're like summation. We are Dell EMC certified trainers. That is exciting to sell the broadest portfolio in the planet. So this is the program you launched early February, right? Yeah. So you said 90 days in, with any new program though, you're going to hit speed bumps a long way, right? You're going to find some wrinkles. You're going to find some things you need to go on. What would that be in your mind? You said, okay, this is something, it's all going well in one respect and it sounds great, but there is some polish that we still need. Where would that be right now? It sounds great. You can mean 90 days in, look at what the team in the partner community have done in 90 days is extraordinary. I mean truly, truly extraordinary. However, they recognize we're going at tectonic speeds, but we have to. The channel is nimble, it's agile, it's got a different pulse, it's got a different heart beat and we're being very authentic on the journey. So when we brought the 4,500, we spoke about, look at some of the wins that are already in the board. And I'm telling you, we could have spent the full 90 minutes just talking about the wins that we found in the first 90 days. The program has launched fantastically well, but we put bumps in the road. And our partner, but our partners understand that because we're being very authentic. And you know, they're part of the team. They're part of the family. What will define us is not that we're going to make mistakes. We will make mistakes. In life, you make mistakes. In business, you make mistakes. What will define us is how we react to those mistakes. Are we always there? Are we being true to our commitment? Are we staying very consistent? And the feedback from the partner community has been yes. And the progress we're making. And look, we're by, we're definitely not done. I mean, you think 90 days in, then fast forward. We announced purchase stream coming into the program. We spoke about consumption models coming in, flex on demand, cloud flex, PC as a service, VDI complete. Like they also asked us to simplify our MDF gate lanes. Done. So, you know, we're moving at the speed of light and it is a lot of fun. Well, it makes sense. I mean, these are simple, predictable, profitable. And I think you've certainly hit a home run with that mantra. And obviously with the program as well. So congratulations on that. Thank you. Thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. My pleasure, Joe. It's always nice to add a different accent. Wish you thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm Global Channels Dell EMC and we'll be back with more from Dell EMC World 2017. Live in Las Vegas, right after this.