 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas with the CUBE coverage of Dell Technology World. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're here at CUBE Alumni Marriott's house as the President and Chief Commercial Officer Dell Technologies. Great to see you again. Always great to be here, sir. So the movie just gets better and sequels Dell three into the year three of the acquisition. Oh, I love the script and we're going to keep going. You guys are executing. This is a game of thrones that's not going to end. It's going to end. And you guys got all three dragons. So one of the themes I want to get your thoughts on, first of all, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. What's going on right now. Give us an update, Mars. You've seen the chessboard of M&A, big firms on the private equity side. You worked at HP. during those days, you came to Dell with Michael early on partnering on the going private and then looking at the overall plan which is now in full execution mode at the integration part of integrating it all together. It's working really good, mill the fairway, revenues at 90 plus billion, where are we right now? Well I'll tell ya, I think you and I were just discussing it a second ago, scale does matter, but if you can align scale with actually a portfolio that is so well aligned to the trends in the industry and you're representing an opportunity for a customer to select a partner like Dell Technologies to help them solve their key business challenges, not just for today, we're into the future. And then if you can do at scale right portfolio at the velocity we're doing, it's a trifecta that we love. It's a, you know, you recently talked to Tom, Tom Sweet, we grew the business $11 billion on an already big number just last year alone. So, and we're gaining share in all of our key lines of business. So, portfolios are lining really well, customers have been extraordinary and obviously building those big trusted relationships, not just now, but into the future. That's a very nice thing. And you guys got a great team, the ability to attract, the talent's been phenomenal, we'll give you guys props on that. But I keep coming back to the consciousness we had a few years ago, which is, okay, the big waves coming, everyone kind of got cloud, they saw the scale of Amazon, great tell sign that continues to do great for AWS, now it's multi-cloud, now IT, the original consolidation of IT that you guys were going after, had good growth and value creation just out of the box. And now the tailwinds, as you mentioned. So, I got to ask you about this end-to-end, this is a land grab, this end-to-end operational consistency thing, because it's very unique, it's hard to copy, it's inimitable. If you can continue to pull that off, that's going to be a great opportunity that's going to feed up the stack, if you will. Talk about the challenges and why you guys are going this end-to-end and the benefits to customers. There is no doubt that the customers are getting smarter every day, in understanding what workloads, what applications, what data sets ought to reside in which ecosystems to better serve them. And to better align to their overall economic needs and desires that they want, and their flexibility and agility to be able to move those workloads and that data seamlessly to best address their particular needs. The beauty of what we've been able to do is integrate the VMware architecture into the public cloud ecosystems, and we've got many others that are already knocking on the door to the beat, want to be part of it. So now what a customer can have is that true agility, that true flexibility of moving applications and data seamlessly, but all controlled through one mechanism, because at the end of the day, what's going to happen is they're going to have their data reside on multiple different sources, but they want to be able to see it, they want to be able to access it, they want to be able to analyze it. And once you're able to analyze it, regardless of where it resides, and then draw the conclusions from it, that's what enables them to then create a predictive model at almost a cost of zero. So on day one of the keynotes, Michael said, he showed the B of A video, he said, if you're a bank with two trillion in assets or you're a two-story farmhouse, we care about you. So that's kind of music to your ears, obviously you're a big part of that. What's different about the commercial customers and what's going on in that base in terms of their transformation, their trends, and how is that different from the big ones? I mean, commercial customers, at least in my patch, I've got the biggest of the biggest public sector accounts, so I've got them of all different sizes and shapes and different stages of the journey. And that's what we're finding everywhere, even if you're a big account, small account, medium account, everyone is on this digital transformation journey, and there's an intersection that we can play a very big part of, and then enabling them to create a playbook as to how do I go through this journey effectively. But what we're finding is when we took the overall architecture, kind of R&D tenants, if you will, around making sure that we have a scale-out architecture model, it does enable to have our customers adopt things and then be able to scale it out as their economic or as their business grows, as an example. So you can jump into having leading edge capabilities and technology to help you drive your company today, but know that we're there with you all the way to then scale at whatever rate you want to scale at. Marius, I got to ask you, we had Tom Sweet on, as you just mentioned, CFO. He talked about the multiple levers you guys are pulling to create shareholder value, which ultimately comes from free cash flow, which is happy customers. Great, to pay down the debt, that's his job. Margin expansion, get good product development. Increase go-to-market efficiencies, okay, and then obviously supply chain. Go-to-market efficiencies. This is your wheelhouse. As you guys go talk to the customers and go to the market now with the sets of partnerships, one of the changes that we're seeing is, in IT, it shifted, the conversations shifted from not just cost reduction, but revenue-generating. So with these new tailwinds, it's creating a business model opportunity for your customers. This is not the old-school best-in-bree, it got great storage, low cost, high low cost per storage, gigabyte. This is about, I don't want to deal with infrastructure anymore, you guys handle that. This is what you're going after. How are you guys going to market under the new reality that customers are, first of all, do you agree with that, and how are you going to market with this new shift in the customer's mindset? I think the mindset is now that, change or die. If I don't drive the digital transformation within my company, someone else will do it, and more than likely, it'll be a competitor. So you see it happen on the Uber front, Airbnb front, you can go down the list. Every single one of these industries are figuring out, I better drive this aggressively, and make sure that I take advantage of what's happening in the technology landscape in order to progress and grow my business to be more relevant and more differentiated. So instead of IT being a, let me lower my cost structure model, IT is now the enabler of changing the business model, the enabler of us scaling at a much faster rate to take advantage of the opportunity. And how does that change the customer's selection on vendor, supplier? Because obviously, this is obviously you can publicly say one supplier gel, but that's going to change how they evaluate, for cure, consume, and their partnering. How is that going to change their selection? They want to move more and more towards having the conversation around, what do we need to do to scale our business, and again, create a differentiated advantage, right? Well, last thing they want to be is a systems integrator of all of the different IT suppliers. So when you have a partner like Dell Technologies that truly does have the broadest and what I'd say best capabilities on the planet to then become that partner of choice for them to move them in this direction faster, that's a very simple decision for them to make. And how is that dynamic translating into public sector? Where there's a lot of turnover in terms of administrations, you might have edicts in terms of multi-vendor, what are you seeing there? Well, I think this is consistent. We have a built a practice, what we call smart digital cities, that we're seeing the need everywhere. At the end of the day, regardless what public sector entity you go to, what country you go to, whatever mean it's about, you go to, every single one of them are thinking about, how can I create more jobs? How can I create, build, and grow the economic engine of my city, my state, my country? And guess what, they're leaning on technology to do that. So everywhere we go, it's a conversation about, how can we drive efficiencies and productivity improvements across all the things you do and provide a greater level of service to every one of your constituencies through technology. Anything from securing the environment, driving, protecting our citizens, to providing better healthcare services, to providing better traffic management, to providing better education and reach, waste management, you just go down the list, every single city, every single enterprise, and he's a public sector entity around the globe is thinking about it. And what's, again, the beautiful thing is, we can come in, we can bring in our overall partner ecosystem because it is a broader ecosystem that is needed in order to be able to deliver those end-to-end capabilities. But very much on demand everywhere. I got to ask you about, first of all, on the IT side, those public sector entities have a huge job ahead of them and they're not IT huge, the staffs. They need nimbleness and they need horsepower basically out of the gate. Well, I mean, and the beauty of what we're able to do is, we share the best practices of what we see around the world. You can imagine that a city of Dubai very progressive, right? Clearly have the budget, clearly have less restrictions on data privacy, clearly have less restrictions on legacy integrations into past solutions. So they can move pretty quickly with a pretty broad base view as to where they want to go. So you take those ideas, take those best practices and then you showcase that to the rest of the world as to, okay, what can we use, what can they use to move their agenda forward quickly? I want to switch gears, talk about competition. I saw the Tom Sweet's presentation of the analyst briefing around competition. I didn't see any cloud vendors on there. Obviously you're going multi-cloud with your own cloud. I'd see that, but just in the traditional IT space, the numbers are great on your end. You've got bigger, bigger is better. So HPE went smaller. They thought that focus would be better for them. Maybe it is, but now you have existing competitors from the classic IT market to new ground you're going after. You've got Alienware here, it's a gaming world. You're partnering with, yeah, it's a beautiful setup. So that's the future of PCs. So you're in all these markets. What's the competitive view? How did you talk about your company's competitive strategy? It goes back to what we first talked about. If you've got scale and you have a broad portfolio that can address the core trends that are emerging for the next decade or two and you can do it at speed, that's a very nice formula. And that's what we're starting to really operate at that kind of cadence with the strategically aligned businesses like VM or like Pivotal, like Secureworks that are all coming together very nicely to be able to drive these transformations collectively as one portfolio. Where's the partner, co-opetition kind of thing going on because you think Cisco for instance, you guys partner with Cisco in some level but also at the same time NSX on the VM where family side looking like it's competing directly with Cisco. So you're going to have direct competition and then other ones that are co-opetitioned where you're working as a partner or maybe, and then it's evolving. So how do you guys have those balanced conversations? It's been like that for decades, right? There's, you've got big players in the market at the end of the day as long as you service your customer and deliver to them what they want and how they want it. At the end of the day, we need to collaborate to make that happen. Just same exact reason why we announced our partnership with Microsoft and Azure earlier this week, customer draw was there. They said, we want you to be that single broker that enables me to move my data and my application seamlessly and securely containerized to any public cloud. Well, guess what? Azure needs to be part of that equation. So when the customer drives it and it's clearly aligned to their particular needs, the IT ecosystem comes together to best serve them. When you meet with the top customers and the top senior people, what's the pitch, Marius? When you go in and say, hey, you know, here's, we're just Dell Technologies. We've got all the puzzle pieces that'll be successful. What's your pitch when you go in? What's the main message that you guys say to those customers? Well, I like for the last couple of years, we've been talking about that the transformations that are happening, right? At the highest level, it's this digital transformation journey that people are on, the workforce transformation they're doing, the overall IT transformation that enables that, then of course, how do you secure the whole environment? On top of that, they're having the conversation about, okay, let's go build the blueprint as to what that looks like for me as a customer. And then show me how I'm gonna, you're gonna deliver to me the platforms that enables me to grow and make sure that I'm making the right bets long term, right? I don't want a solution that's just there for today. I wanna make sure that I've got a solution that will take me into the future and that makes me ultra competitive. So when you think about it, if I wanted an app development platform that clearly needs to be cloud native in mind, I need to have agile development capabilities and I need to be able to, the time to value needs to continue to shrink. Well, guess what we got that with Pivotal, right? You want to be able to now do your data management ecosystem seamlessly and across multiple platforms. Clearly we have assets like Boomi that enable that to happen very, very well. And then you want to virtualize your overall infrastructure layers as much as possible so you truly can scale up or scale down any of your infrastructure capabilities in order to meet the needs of that particular workload seamlessly. When you have the data platform, when you have the app platform, when you have the virtualization platform and you have all of the infrastructure platform so well aligned to the overall trends and transformations our customers are doing, it's almost a no brainer. I mean, it is an IQ test that all of our customers are clearly passing. And okay, and what you just laid out is probably like a 10 year, he's going to play out over the next 10 years and there's still a lot of invention to be required. You guys aren't doing a lot of M&A right now, paying down the debt, Tom was clear on that. But as an M&A person, I wonder if we could pick your brain. And I'm more familiar with the tech M&A, that's my space, but most M&A much of it anyway fails. And from your perspective, why is that? And why are some successful? Why are some not? I think it is a, how do you, when you add a new entity into the broader entity, what are the synergies that you're aligning to to make sure that that new entity has the opportunity to scale and grow, right? And that's why you have, you have sometimes smaller deals are interesting from an IP perspective, but if you don't tie it back into how do you going to go scale the go to market to make it available to your broader set of customer base, or it gets lost in the equation, that's a problem. And I think what we've done is a very good job, making sure that we understand how each piece of the IP portfolio comes together and is aligned to our overall approach and how we help have the conversation with a customer that we've been able to see what we call our cross synergies of all the acquisitions we've made significantly exceed any and all of our expectations. And that's an important part to do ahead of time before you make the acquisition. No, not just how it fits into the IP stack, but how it fits into your overall go to market stack and how it fits in your overall value proposition to the customer. Maris, thanks for spending the time. I know you're really busy coming on theCUBE. I got to ask you one final question of this show here Dell Technology World over three days. What are the three top highlights that happen here that give a tell sign of the next 10 years of Dell technology? I tell you, we've always said that we do what we say. So I think, and I've had many of analysts tell us that my God, you guys consistently have delivered what you said you would deliver. So the early skepticism of, hey, this is a big company. There's multiple cultures. Not sure that operationally you will execute. Well, guess what? I think it's fair to say the teams are executing. And then when you see the results of taking share in every line of business, you see the results where the customer satisfaction is higher than it's ever been. Our partner satisfaction is higher than it's ever been. Our partner growth is higher, is the fastest growing route to market for us. All of that is just a testament that we are operating in all cylinders, but what's more exciting is the yet to come part. And the opportunity is so big, right? The market is what, three and a half trillion, 90 billion is a fraction of that. So this is what our team members see. It's what our customers see, our partners see. So that momentum is just a tsunami that's just going to keep on growing. Well, the cube barometer is certainly showing activity. Two sets. When we get four, you know you're doing well. So we're going to keep an eye on the pulse of the cube cannon we got here. Marius, great to see you. Always a pleasure. Great insight. Thanks for sharing. John, awesome. Great to be here, David. Thanks, Marius. Awesome. Thank you so much. Commercial officer at Dell Technologies, friends of the cube, great executive, tech athlete, as we say, live coverage, day three here at the cube coverage of Dell Technologies. We'll be right back with more after this short break.