 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, you are live here on theCUBE as we're wrapping up our coverage here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are in the Sands, we're live in Las Vegas with 14,000 plus attendees, 4,000 I think in the Business Partner Summit. Really well attended, the solutions exposed for, still crowded and some really neat stuff inside there. Along with John Troyer, I'm John Walls and we're joined by Doug Schmidt who is the President of the Global Services at Dell EMC. Doug, thanks for joining us, we appreciate it. Thanks for having me John. Yeah, let's talk about global services. Yes. First off, I mean, Big Waterfront, right? That's pretty broad. Tell us about how you segment the responsibilities and what all that means. Well yeah, so the overall services family really has four groups in it. It has a consulting team and as you imagine, has an education services team. We have Virtue Stream for cloud, helps manage the cloud for our customers. And then my team and I have responsibility for support, deployment services, installations and also managed services. So, good size team in the sense of helping our customers around 60,000 direct and indirect team members in 180 countries. Just say 100 plus, right? Almost 200 countries. So, we had somebody on from the global side yesterday and we just barely necked into this a little bit. I thought it was interesting when you think about it on a global basis. At least we tend to think of the US, right? I mean, it was US centric. But you've got to deal with EU compliance and different kinds of governance and of course, different work cultures, different government, different governance, what have you. So complicated, right? I mean, this is not easy stuff to be able to bring the product to a different culture or different mindset, right? Well, that's that, yes. I mean, if you're asking, yes, the complexity is there, which is that really, but that's the value we bring to our customers. One is, believe it or not, the size and the scope helps us build better products. The feedback from our customers across multiple channels, whether it be through the data we get back through phone home and AI, helps us build better products globally, as well as help our customers. The calls we get in, social media, we're able to really aggregate that, take all that data and that information, build better products and custom build the solutions for the regions or the countries that we're in. So there's, yes, the complexity has some minuses, but it has actually more pluses in helping us build better services, solutions and products for our customers. Can you give me an idea of something you picked up from somewhere else that turned out to be useful across the board, or just maybe something that you hadn't thought of, whether it was some response from a customer in a different work environment, that you could apply across the board? Anything come to mind? Well, yeah, I think you look at things like WeChat in China and things like that that are occurring and how they're using both the social media, texting and all of these things about doing business and wanting services, and so that helps us build better social media platform to listen to our customers. We take those learnings and then apply them globally very, very quickly. Those would just be one example, but you can pick that up across the product and the solution side as well. Doug, a couple of things you said have already kind of sparked my imagination. I mean, support used to be, well, file a ticket and if you don't have a ticket, don't bug us, right? And it was a very reactive. And already you've talked about a lot of things that are proactive, both the phone home capabilities and other data collection and proactive capabilities. Can you talk a little bit about how your team, you need to be digitally transformed. Your customers, you've got to be more proactive. We can't just be sitting, we can't say have you filed a ticket, well then I can't talk to you. No, that's correct. No, that wouldn't work today. That's exactly right. But the customer's feedback to us, and we hear this resoundingly loud and clear is, look, it's got to be proactive, it's got to be predictive and it's got to be remote. And it's all about being fast, accurate and keeping that uptime in those environments running. So to your point, what we've really done is we use that data to predict when a hard drive is going to fail, right? So if you're a customer, whether it's a server, and by the way, we've taken that technology and put it into the consumer products as well. So hey, we get ahold of the customer and let them know that something's going to fail before it fails. And that's the proactive predictive. And we're really getting that quite frankly from the data we're getting back on that phone home, using that big data to then triangulate and build better products, better services. The other thing though that we've done, and we continue to do is not every customer on that proactive side wants to be contacted the same way. I'll use my family as an example. My daughter wants to be text, you know, she's got to use text. My wife likes email and my parents, by the way, still want to be called because they want it to be explained what's going on. And so we have to also build in the omnichannel with that predictive, that proactive capability. There's been an evolution in the acceptance of talking back to the vendor, you know, machines talking to machines on-prem over the years. Are people now at the, are most people now at the phase where they don't consider that a security risk or pride, people who didn't understand it in the early days were very careful, you know, everybody's still very careful about what goes through their firewall. Is there a, are we at a place now where that's just a- I think it's becoming more widely accepted. I wouldn't want to say that everybody's there yet. Perhaps not the three letter agencies, and you know, if you- That is correct. I mean, you know, look, it depends on the environment. By the way, when, and that's the key is using that information to customize the services for those environments, right? And a little bit of, that's a good point because that's how you want to contact them or how much you can do. But we can tailor that for the customer's needs and using that information to make sure we do that. It seems like there may also be a staffing, I'm interested in your staffing because, right, digital transformation. Let's make it real. The entire industry has an interesting competency issue in that, you know, we've got to be all made, we've got to all be current. There may be new sets of skills coming up. We certainly expect our, on the IT side of the house, their customer, your customers to become more skilled at new technologies. That's right. And, but you're in support and, you know, the support and installation side. How are you looking at training your people and upskilling your people to be able to deliver that kind of proactive support? Well, that's a great question. And I'll take it from two points, actually. One is, as the machine learning in the AI helps us solve what I call low complexity issues right now, moving up the stack every day to do more complex issues. Then what you find is, is that when customers do contact us or we do need to reach out to them, it's usually in complex situations, right? And so we spend a tremendous amount of resources continually upskilling our talent in the remote support deployment, as well as installation, so that they're able to handle that. So spend a lot of time with our education services team to make sure that we're out in front of all the new technologies and the capabilities. You've heard a lot about remote and virtual learning where we're on the cutting edge of that as well. That helps us stay abreast and up to date as well. But yes, it is going to take additional time and resources to stay ahead of that curve. We're there, but we want to make sure we stay there. And is that something that, I wouldn't say that the Cokes people are bringing them along, but help them understand that, you know, if we're on the cutting edge, you've got to be on the leading edge of the cutting edge, right? You've got to be the leader in this, right? In your workforce. How do you, I guess they're motivated professionally, motivated, right? But you do have to bring, it's culture. I mean, you've got to create a different kind of culture, don't you? Well, no, you're right on that. And what that, I think culturally, what we've always, always had at Dell Technologies is listening to the customer and all 60,000 get to hear every day from our customers multiple times. So that in and of itself helps us. I mean, we're listening, we hear what the customers want, what we need to be doing to help them. That pushes us to want to stay up on that. Look, you can't be in the services industry, as you well know, without having that natural desire to want to learn, want to help your customer. And so look, we have to have the resources and the capabilities inside that education, but culturally that's been built in because we listen to the customers. Yeah, and how different is it from the customer perspective then, maybe then five years ago, ten years ago in terms of expectation, in terms of what you, the kind of support they expect to get from you. Has that been altered as you give them new tools, you make them faster, you make them smarter, you make them more agile, but they also, are they turning you for different things or a different level of service now? Oh, yes, absolutely. And I think that starts with, if you look five years ago, it was the service was really, I'll call in when something, I have a problem. First, the expectation is, I want you to call us before we have an issue and let us know what we need to do to prevent it. And the second one is, if I do have to contact you via multiple omni-channels, then I got to have the best and the brightest now inside the organization. So routing and getting all of those to the right resources at the right time. As you're saying, the technical capabilities, the complex environments, the customers want to get to the right person, quickly and accurately now, the very first time they get ahold of us. Yeah, it's a dug, you mentioned Dell Technologies, right? This is the first Dell Technologies world. It's no longer, I think, I went to a few EMC worlds. I think I was on the first cube back in 2010 at EMC world. That was mostly storage folks, right? Now, you've got storage folks, you've got server folks, you've got VMware here as a big presence, Pivotal was doing some things. Systems are more complicated now. So maybe a two-part question, how is the show going for you? And also, but then this implication that, you know, Dell Technologies is a stack and there's a lot of IT people now that have to cover more of the stack. And how does that affect your job in terms of complicated cross-rack systems that are pinging back home and need help? That's about three questions in one. Yeah, I think there's a few in there, right? Well, first of all, I think when talking to the customers and being here at Dell Technology World, what we're hearing is actually confirmation on the proactive, predictive remote support and also getting to the correct talent very quickly, as you've mentioned, the education capabilities of the team. So that's good because that's kind of there, validating that. But more specifically to your question about how does that translate into the real world of how we're delivering? Well, you know, first of all, with that information coming back and being remote, we can get it to the correct people very quickly. So yes, it would be far more complex. Five years ago, if we didn't have that, that technology wasn't there for us. Now we know who we need to get it to and who the best person is to solve the problem. And that's really what we're using and transformed to is the technology helps us get it to the right place at the right time to solve the customer's issue. And where do you see yourselves going? As technology evolves, right? Demands change, expectations change, global services is going to change. I mean, can you make any kind of a, give me a little crystal ball prediction here about, I think this is where we're going to have to be in two or three years out in terms of meeting that customer demand and wherever they are and whenever they want it. Well, yes, and so, well look, we talk about transformation and making it real here at Dell Technology World, but we're living that every day as well, right? So we're helping our customers with it and hey, look, the transformation doesn't just, it's not just something we talk about externally. It's we doing that internally, as you're saying to stay ahead of the market, helping our customers with the transformation. And so as we look forward to that from a services perspective, what we realize is, is look that complexity and the speed is going to pick up. We know that we have to continue to use that big data, as Michael said, is the fuel. We know that's the fuel to provide better service, better products. We want no daylight between services, our engineering and product teams and sales and we're using that information to make sure we build better products, that we provide better solutions and better services, faster to our customers and we're also using that information and giving it to the sales teams so they can go out into our customers' environments and help them with their transformation. What's the challenge for you in making all that happen? You think everybody's got a nut to crack, right? Everybody says, okay, so for you, if there's a next hurdle or a next barrier for you to get over to be able to deliver on that, what would that be? Well, we're using the data today that we have which is very rich and we're transforming that into solutions for our customers. But look, that data is, we're getting more of it every day, making sure that we don't obsess about the data but that doesn't control us that we're using it, right? I mean, that's part of this, is you definitely want it to be the fuel, but you got to aim it the right way and I think that's the key is making sure that we get that point in the right direction. As you're doing this kind of thing, I'm kind of curious about hiring, right? What kinds of roles are you looking for to bring in that can do that? Because that's a very sophisticated data scientist, perhaps, that's working, that's pulling in people from engineering. I mean, are you able to pull on for the rest of the organization like that or who are you looking for? Yes, I talk about real-time questions, right? We could be talking about that one for hours. The answer is yes, and that is a good point. If you look at services now compared to five years ago, it's hiring data scientists, it's hiring the analytics and the deep analytics, folks that can help program, I mean, all of this comes together, right? And so we're working very closely with the schools globally to pull those scientists in, and that's a big hiring competency that we've been focused on for the last four years and we're going to continue that, we see that continuing down the road. Well, Doug, thank you for the time. We appreciate you telling the global service's story. Great show, and we wish you continued great success, and I assume it's been a really, really good way for you too, right? It has been an outstanding week, so thank you. You bet, appreciate having me. Joining us from Dell Technologies World 2018, you are watching us live from Las Vegas on theCUBE.