 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And welcome back as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Dell Technologies 2018. Big show going on here at Las Vegas. We're in the stands right now. 14,000 people strong in attendance. And this is day two of three of live coverage right here on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I am John Walls. And we're now joined by Matt Leibowitz, who's the global lead of multi-cloud infrastructure at Dell EMC Consulting. Matt, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. Happy to be here, long-time listener, first-time caller. All right. All right, you're on the phone, Matt, go. And Vijay Kanchi, who is the global innovation lead of IT transformation at Dell EMC. First-time listeners, well, Vijay? Yes, absolutely, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Or long-time listeners. Long-time caller, right, right, right. Get the terminals. Matt, and Jersey, you're up, go. Let's talk to Jersey Devils. Let's talk first off about the way you're to you that's intertwined. I mean, just so we set the table here a little bit and understand how the two of you and the people with whom you work, how you interact. That maybe makes sense if you start Vijay and then all. Yeah, so we're part of Dell EMC's consulting organization. And within that consulting organization, Matt and I work together to focus on IT transformation programs, right? We design and develop services for our consulting services organization to go deliver IT transformation programs. Okay, so, I mean, digital transformation, you know, thrown around quite a bit these days. When you look at it from the macro picture, from an organizational standpoint, from their perspective now, what does that mean, if you will, how do you get organizations to buy in? Because I'm sure the IT professionals with whom you work, they're in large part, they're there, I would guess, but they've got to bring along an entire organization with them and that's a tall task, Matt. Yeah, and there's no doubt that when it comes to cloud and especially multi-cloud, like you said, the whole organization needs to come along for the ride. It's just not something that IT can do in a vacuum. And we've seen when they try to do it in a vacuum, they're often unsuccessful. So get those stakeholders involved outside of IT, executive level, bring them in, show them, share with them your KPIs for success. Show them what success looks like and then bring them along for the ride. And that's ultimately how you get success with cloud. So let's talk progression. What are the most successful projects, at least what are the data points you see out of the most successful projects when the C-suite says, you know what, we're going to do digital transformation, IT, go execute. What are the critical points of information IT needs to collect so that it can come to a Dell EMC consulting to help execute on that strategy? Well, it's a long list. I mean, how much time do we have? You know, again, I think success criteria, what success looks like is really important because I think what you said is what often happens. You know, IT leaders or leaders of the organization say we need to transform. We need to change our business to adapt. Yeah, what is transformation? What does that even mean? Right, well, you have, that's up to the business to define what the next stage looks like, right? And so that could be anything from just being able to operate like a public cloud, provision quickly, iterate quickly on new software, you know, new development tools, or it could be a major transformation of the whole business where they're entering a new market and they need to operate in a little different way. So what? I mean, just add to what Matt just said, you know, from a digital transformation perspective, it's all about getting velocity of application functionality out to customers, users, and stakeholders, right? When a C-suite leadership comes and says we need to go transform our business, then they really look to IT as a significant player to enable that, right? And one of the biggest issues that you have in driving capability to market fast is being able to go build infrastructure or environment pretty quickly, right? And most IT organizations are, you know, dealing with technical debt that's been around for at least 25, 30 years. It starts with, you know, legacy critical systems that are potentially mainframe, client server, all the way through, you know, digital platforms that they've built out. And so in order to be able to go make that work, I think the one key important thing that we always talk about is you need to go get automation of your code delivery process and then you need to go in and build infrastructure and environment so that you don't have as much queue time versus runtime, right? Because IT's have historically been in the request response business. I'm sure in your world as well, if you need to, you know, fix to your computer, first thing you have to do, call up or send a request that goes to somewhere, somebody is sitting behind the queue and they're processing it. And so the whole objective to make digital transformation is to be able to reduce and eliminate the queue time eventually and enable the runtime. So that's kind of the first thing from an operational perspective and then from an outcomes perspective, it's about sitting down and bringing a cross-functional team of folks from marketing, business units, IT, security and compliance and bringing them together to figure out what sort of outcomes they're looking to achieve. What does that journey look like timing-wise from an outcomes perspective and then work to bring everybody together to establish a shared purpose and a shared objective. So those are some of the key things that we find that almost every single time you engage with customers, you've got to have those conversations first in order to be able to go dig under the covers to figure out where the issues are and then start to unclog the jams where they exist in the plumbing of IT. This is part of that people transformation Michael talked about on stage three again was brought yesterday and then was brought up again on stage today. Having that conversation for someone who's usually heads down, maintaining AIX, maintaining new infrastructure for a digital, we're not equipped to normally have that conversation. Where are you seeing the gaps in skill and how do organizations close that gap? So they can even come to you guys and say, you know what, we want, we can see clearly we need to automate our CI, CD process, help us through that, which is where you guys exhale. So go ahead, Matt. Well, I think that it's a challenge because sometimes they don't even know what they don't know. Yeah, don't know what we don't know. Right, and so they'll come to us and they'll give us a request like that. We need to modernize our infrastructure. We need to automate and deliver IT as a service. They don't really know what that means. And so they're going to need to, excuse me, they need to reskill some of their folks. And I think that's operationally very scary for individuals who work in IT, but the reality is, and you know, we see this over and over again, if you want to attract the best and the brightest in IT, you need to be working with the latest technology. And so folks shouldn't be afraid of that change. They should embrace it because ultimately it's going to drive their career forward. And when they're working on the latest and the greatest, they're going to deliver value for the business instead of just keeping the lights on. And that's kind of the challenge to us is that I just figured this out, right? And all of a sudden, that cycle exponentially, I mean capabilities increase, your skill set is lagging. And now you've got to play catch-up as an IT professional. I just learned how to spell Kubernetes yesterday. If you can teach me that, be good. Capital K. I mean, it's true though. I've been working with virtualization for a long time and it's funny to see the progression back in 2001, 2002, where everyone just thought this thing is crazy. Nobody's going to do this. We get to the point where we're having conversations around virtualization first policies. And now we're talking about cloud first policies. So technology and the pace of change waits for nobody. And so we have to help organizations be ready without that change. What is it right now? What's the big leap you think that on that side, on the client side, that their teams have to make? So there's probably three areas that I see that they have to make some changes, right? So from a business perspective and IT, they need to trust IT and integrate their needs and requirements into a process where business really oftentimes don't know what specifically they want from IT. They know and they have some vision of what they want to achieve. And so they need to go sit with, in a collaborative way, with the IT teams and oftentimes the security teams, the CISO teams, to build together this, we'll call it cross-functional team that can really come together to tease out and brainstorm their way through to figure out what are the outcomes that they're trying to achieve? What is the strategy and what do they need to look like in three years from now, right? And then work their way back. So that's one piece, is cultural shift in how IT engages with business. The second part is around how do organizations get better? We've been hearing about the DevOps changes that drive, but DevOps is as much a tools and technologies conversations as it is a cultural shift to get the people that were authors and critics, coders and operations folks, problem creators versus problem managers and maintainers. So those roles have been very contankerous for the last 20 years because the operations folks are responsible and driving for stability, reliability and availability, whereas coders are focused on driving new innovation to fundamentally different objectives. So in order to make that shift, you need to go in and create another environment and culture of shared pain and shared objectives and shared rewards. So that's another key chain. And then from a skills perspective, what we're finding is that when we get to the technology and infrastructure part, the folks who used to be storage administrators, network administrators, compute administrators, et cetera, they now have to go broader, not as much deep in silos and they need to look at converged, for example, infrastructure. They need to be thinking about stitching that together with security and DevOps and cloud sec ops, right? And so those are the key differences. From an administrative perspective, you need to go in and take your existing skills and expand to be more broader versus silo, right? So that's, and then there are some new skills that are needed to enable all this, right? So I kind of look at the third part being the new skills are, you need folks that never did this type of stuff before to go start doing cloud administrative, multi-cloud management and operations. You need to be able to go do what Google calls site reliability engineering and what cloud foundry calls platform operations and platform engineering. So those are- Even before we get there. From a breath of capability for the Dell organization, consulting organization, the requirement demand on the organization has changed. It went from helping install and design install and operationalize a VMAX and VMware infrastructure to help me enable a DevOps practice, which is two completely different sets of skill. From a practical perspective, two years ago, you looked at Comcast's DevOps team, that whole team is now at Walmart. How do you guys create and nurture the skillset needed to even deliver the capability from a services side? Well, I mean, that's a great question because we have to transform too. Right. Because we have to transform and meet the needs of our customers. So that's primarily a responsibility of the consulting organization to stay on top of technology and move into those new areas of skill. And so if you look back just a couple of years ago and you saw the kind of work that our consulting organization was doing, a lot of things like helping customers migrate exchange servers and SQL servers, we don't do a lot of that anymore. We're helping them design and create a transformation roadmap for multicloud. So it's really important for us to keep our folks as skilled and looking 6, 12, 18 months in advance so that we don't have the problem you just described where our entire team moves from one organization to another, our customers need something from us and we can't deliver it. So that's a high importance for us. And from a consulting organization perspective, as Matt said, we are having to reinvent ourself probably at least two or three times in the last five years, right? That's because of the pace of change in the marketplace. And so, we have a shared responsibility to help drive some of our thinking around this transformation internally ourself. One is to be able to go figure out what are the types of services we need to go build to deliver transformational programs to our customers. So define the what and then I work, that's primarily my responsibility and then I work very closely with Matt to figure out what are the skills we have in our organization today? What are the next new skills that we need to go build? And then what are the skills that we have today that we can extend to support these new things that we see coming, right? Such as taking infrastructure, administration and management to providing and transforming that into and providing it in the context of microservices, for example, right? Or infrastructure as code, storage as code, security as code, et cetera, right? So those are some of the things that we try to make. And then from a business perspective, we're trying to build out skills to look at what types of organizational changes do we need to make? What are the types of transformational programs and transformational metrics that you need to track? So if you have a 18 month transformation program or a nine month transformation program that you're not going to go wait for 18 months to see if you've achieved your outcomes, we've identified KPIs for the transformation program where you look every 90 days to say, are you achieving that? So we have two teams. We have a team of what we call Discipline Leads, folks like Matt, who are championing and evangelizing our organization to say, here are the things that you guys need to change to and find training and enablement to go drive that globally around the world as part of our consulting organization. And then there are going to be skills that we don't have that we go and acquire in the marketplace. But to your point, it's not like they're sitting around waiting to be plucked off the marketplace. So part of it is finding the right people who have a little bit of the aptitude that can make the pivot and then learn fast, right? So it's a little bit of everything and as much an art as it is to science. It's funny too, again, if you look back at our organization just a few years ago, we didn't have a focus on public cloud. And now we've got folks that are trained and certified and some of the best in the world at public cloud technologies because we have to change and we have to transform just like our customers. Yeah, we're talking about being nimble on agility and you do too, right? You have to walk that walk as well. I'm less nimble the older and older I get, but. And then the other. Are we all mad? Are we all? Organizationally, you're absolutely right. Well, listen, gentlemen, thanks for being here. We appreciate the time. No longer first time callers. That's right. We'll be back soon. You're now CUBE veterans. Thanks for being with us. Thanks, thanks for the time. Back with more here from Las Vegas. You're watching the CUBE coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018.