 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are joined by Karen Kintos. She is the Chief Customer Officer at Dell, and Ben Clayton, who is the President of VMware User Group. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. I want to start with you, Karen, and talking about the job of the CIO, which has just gotten exponentially harder over the years, because there's so many technology decisions to make, investment decisions to make. What do you see as what is keeping them up at night, and then how do you advise them? Well, I do think your job is getting more and more complex, and I also think that technology is accelerating at such a rate now that their jobs are bigger, they're global, they're fast-changing, and so many of them are at the epicenter of the transformations that they're leading for their companies. So what I see from them is, and what we hear from them all the time, is they really want the full value proposition of Dell Technologies, so we can help simplify their worlds. They want less partners, they don't want more. They want a company that can help them integrate and bring integrated solutions to solve some of their most pressing problems, and they have a really, really tough job, but I think it's a great time to be a CIO because of the role that technology is playing in so many ways to change their businesses. Do you see these companies in being far along in the digital transformation process? Where are most companies in your estimation? I think it depends, honestly. I mean, there's some companies that you, they are on the forefront of it. You see a lot of that in financial services, candidly, where they've moved everything to an app. They think about the customer experience. They're leveraging technology. They're thinking about how to secure every single aspect of it. Then you hear from other CIOs that, wow, they just feel like they're playing catch-up. And I think it's a world that's changing so quickly now that I think these CIOs are just living paranoid in that I want to be on the forefront of change. The change is happening very, very quickly. There's not a day that goes by, there's not a new technology solution that they're hearing, and that's when they're looking to a company like Dell Technologies to really help them make sense out of their journey, what makes sense for their business, and how we can help them along the way. So tell us about your role at V-Mug. My role at V-Mug is that I'm the president of the board of directors. So V-Mug's an independent customer-driven organization. We have 130,000 people worldwide. And as such, we have a board of directors and we have 130 leaders worldwide. And then like I said, I'm the president of the board that provides oversight to that organization. So that's a massive user group goes to the popularity of V-Mug. I'm a huge fan, spending my client in the past. Let's talk about the inverse. From V-Mug is about the practitioners, so the ground up. What has been I think the excitement or the tone around the new Dell Technologies and Dell EMC? Yeah, I think it still is about the ground up. The Dell Technologies community just provides us a bigger face of people to interact with and users to interact with. Ultimately, we're all about community. V-Mug started as a handful of technology enthusiasts that were just really passionate about the product. And that's not going to change. And nothing about the agreement with Dell Technologies user community is changing as far as that's concerned. The real opportunity I see is it just gives us a bigger base of users to work with and it really evangelize the different products. As a personally, I'm a customer of four out of the seven technologies. So it's nice to be able to know that there's going to be kind of a common thread among the user groups. I can hop between one or the other or as many as I want and really get to interact. So I think ultimately it's just going to be about growing the community. So a lot of the messaging from the, and this question is for both of you, a lot of the messaging from this week's conference has been digital transformation, a lot of buzzwords, but from a pure user perspective, we might, you know, Chad earlier talked about not turning the nerve knobs and messing with settings. V-Mug is all about nerve knobs and v-spear and installing ACLs, et cetera. How is the user community adjusting to this new digital transformation in the industry? Well, I'll let them talk about it from a V-Mug perspective, but you know, the announcement that we made here today was largely taking the great role model that we have and then and V-Mug and taking this user community to other parts of the Dell technology portfolio. I personally was part of the magic that V-Mug demonstrates when I was at VMworld back in the late August, kind of early September period of time. And it's magical what 130,000 of these end users can do and how we can help them with their digital transformation. So, you know, we announced here today that we're going to take this framework, we're going to take it to other parts of Dell technology, so our precision users are hyper-converged, our high-performance compute solutions, our boomy user groups, in addition to what we're doing with VMware is really incredible. And we see bringing these communities together and really helping with their digital transformation. Yeah, and as V-Mug, what you said is exactly right. I mean, we are a group of people that like to get their hands dirty and play with the knobs. I think, you know, what this agreement or arrangement does is just gives us a lot more knobs to play with. We like knobs. What do you hope to achieve as president? Give me your strategy, your platform. I would like, I mean, ultimately, I just want to keep growing the organization. I think the partnership that we have right now is a wonderful opportunity to do that. I think we have, the industry's changing, so obviously the user group has to change as well. And I think this just gives us a lot more opportunities to evolve and ultimately come out stronger than before. And so, you know, by the time I've done with the other presidents, that's what I hope to look back on is just, you know, I want to see the Dell Technologies user community be as successful as V-Mug's been. Karen, I want to talk to you about the technology gender gap. I mean, this is a problem that has gotten a lot of ink, particularly in recent years. You are a passionate advocate for getting more women into this business, particularly in leadership positions. What, first, if you can break it down, what you see are the single biggest contributors to the problem, and then also what companies like Dell EMC can do to get more women in the pipeline? Do you know what I think if there was one answer, I think it would have been solved a long time ago. I mean, at Dell, we think about our commitment to diversity and inclusion in really three areas. Communities, culture, and commitment. So from a community perspective, you have to show up at some of the events, you have to partner with some of the leading organizations. We've been doing that with organizations like Catalyst, in the case of women and, you know, lots of other organizations for other affinity groups. Secondly, you have to have commitment. And at Dell, the commitment starts with Michael, and it starts with his executive leadership team. Michael runs our Global Diversity Council. We meet many, several times a year. We talk about goals, we talk about priorities, we talk about the things that we want to drive across the company. And then the third piece, which in my opinion has really been the game changer at Dell, is around culture. You have to create a culture where individuals of different ages, ethnicity, races, gender, I don't, you know, across the board, we live in this all global world, have to feel like they can come to work every single day and be themselves. We trained a number of our executives, we're gonna be rolling that out over the course of the next year or two, around unconscious social biases, and we all have them. Every single one of us have them. To be, it's to be human. It's to have biases. I mean, you're raised with them, you're socialized, you see it in the media, but it's how you respond to those. It's how you lead your teams through those. It's how you call out the bad behavior that is not making a certain individual feel like he or she can be, you know, themselves. And then I think the biggest opportunity candidly in the area of technology is, we just, we need pipeline. We need more girls, we need more minorities graduating in the area of science and technology and engineering, so-called STEM. Go and look at the numbers around the percentage of women that are graduating with computer science degrees. It's on a downward slope. We gotta change that, and we gotta make it exciting for these girls who wanna go to college and get a degree in technology, because technology is everywhere. And we gotta change some of the paradigms and some of the stereotypes of what they thought were the traditional computer science jobs. So Ben, one of the things I'm really excited about with V-Mug, we talked about just diversity and inclusion in computer science. V-Mug is providing access through the V-Mug Advantage program. Can you talk about V-Mug Advantage for a minute? Yeah, absolutely. One of the nice things about being partnered with VMware is they provide us opportunities to, you know, pass along values to our community. And one of that is a V-Mug Advantage. And with the V-Mug Advantage, people that purchase it can get user licenses, you know, for lab licenses to test out, you know, get their hands on the technology and really play with it in a hands-on way. Most recently we got NSX, which is a big win for us, because people are curious about the technology, but a lot of the users are having a hard time getting the companies to adopt it. So by being able to get the license and playing with it, put it in installing it in their hands-on labs and really getting down and dirty with it, it really helps. I think it helps not everybody. It helps the individual broaden their technical skillset, but it also helps VMware get their product out and get the technologies familiar with it. So they're comfortable going to the decision makers and saying, hey, I've installed this in my home lab. It works great. We should really take a deeper look. So I think ultimately it benefits everyone. We should all get our hands dirty with it. Exactly. It does not. Ben, Karen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. This has been really a lot of fun. Absolutely, thanks for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight for my co-host Keith Townsend. We'll be back with more from Dell EMC World after this.