 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas, theCUBE, covering Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier, my coach Dave Vellante. Dave, a lot of strategy being discussed, a lot of new product introductions, availability of things, things in beta. Michael Dell, on stage with Pat Gelsinger, Satya Natal, a lot of great things. Jeff Clark, Nassaros ceremonies. And here with us is Matt Baker, who's the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Planning, works for Jeff Clark. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. So you're the man behind the curtain for Jeff, right? You give him all his- He's sort of boss. You send in all the plays. He's Tom Brady, you're Bill Belichick. I don't have my hoodie, I need a hoodie. Cut off. So pretty strategic couple years for Dell. Sure. So take a step back because, you know, one of the luxuries of doing theCUBE for 10 years is we get some one-on-ones with Michael. We see him in the hallways. We get to chat with him. He's very approachable. We talked to him before he went private, when he went private, pre-Dell EMC, buying EMC, and then when he bought EMC. So series of conversations, but it's always had that vision of scale, benefits of that. And the numbers were off the charts. People's eyes were popping out of their head. So a lot of strategy coming in there with the founder, with the team, pretty impressive. Take us through the pieces on the board and what happened, what didn't happen, what could have happened and how it all transpired. That's a long journey and it could take a little more than the time. You got 10 seconds to go. We got 10 seconds to go. I think, you know, Michael is a visionary. He's always had a vision for something bigger. And certainly the history of Dell shows that scale matters. And, you know, we saw this play out with our competitors and our strategy versus their strategy. They got smaller, we got bigger. And, you know, so we're sitting here today following all of those moves was a vision to become that, as Michael would say, essential infrastructure provider. And in addition to that, not just the physical infrastructure, but the logical infrastructure, the management of all that. So the vision that Michael saw through to, you know, the acquisition of EMC along with the constituent parts that were the Federation, inside of there being VMware, an opportunity to really bring forward a solutions powerhouse that was able to address this broad challenge that our customers were having, which is how do you manage all of this stuff? And, you know, putting a lasso around that and figuring out how to help our customers with what is becoming increasingly complicated, it's not becoming simpler. The individual components are becoming simpler. And that's our job to make each of those elements more automated, more, you know, easy to use, more approachable for more people. But ultimately people are trying to achieve so much with technology today that you got to drain away the complexity of that and bring a higher order platform and a higher order operating environment to allow people to really realize their goals. And one of the things that you got to do in your job is you also got to not only look at that, but also cut through the hype. Sure. I mean, how many times have we heard the PC is dead? How many times have we heard that if you're not here or there, you're out of business? Somewhat true when you have transformational markets, but then in the day, the value activities that are involved in a company is pretty simple. They have operations, they sell a product, good or service, they give it to a customer, they collect cash, at the end of the day there's workloads. So if you look at everything, all things being equal, this is a developer operational and a workload kind of challenge to do something. Certainly. Pretty much it. So operationally, it's a big advantage. Well, I think that's what our customers are struggling with is that there are very good reasons to choose different operating environments. I mean, to have things in different localities. Simply, you might want to pre-position content like you guys do. I'm sure somewhere behind the cube is a CDN, right? For distributing content. And so that service benefits from geographic distribution, but you shouldn't have to create a diverse operating environment in order to operate a geographically diverse environment. What we are creating is this singular operational hub for your entire IT environment. You can run workloads in Azure, you can run workloads in AWS, you can run workloads in the 4,000 VCPP partners that Pat mentioned during the keynote, and you can do that all through a single operational framework. I don't want to say single pane of glass, but in essence, a single operational framework that allows you to orchestrate and manage your entirety of your operations, which allows you to choose the best course for the given course. So strategy guy, dial back a few years, even maybe before the acquisition. How clear was it to you and what gave you the confidence that acquiring, because you guys were acquisitive, Dell was acquisitive, and I would say a lot of them, yeah, it didn't really pan out the way you had hoped. Then you're going to bring in this giant EMC, clean up VMware's cloud strategy, leverage it across the portfolio, really drive scale, become that sort of arms dealer, if you will. What gave you confidence at the time? Or was it more, hey, this is a great asset, we'll figure it out. Can you share with us? You're taking back. No, no, I think you'd need to roll the clock back much further to the fact that we were partners for a long time with EMC, and we were certainly one of the largest and year by year, the largest or second largest partner to VMware. So we were incredibly familiar with one another and incredibly familiar with our capabilities. We were the early company that worked on, I can't remember what it was called, it might've been, I can't even remember the name of it. Guy integration. No, no, I'm talking about the early vSAN implementations that went to market with Dell, right? So we had been collaborating on hyperconverge, we'd been collaborating on cloud management, we'd been working with EMC years prior. In fact, some of the folks that are appearing on your show today are people that were my partners 10 years ago at Dell. So I think we had the confidence, and Michael certainly had a long history with the organization, and I think he saw an opportunity that there was sort of a confluence of opportunities around the markets, our ability to pull a deal like that off. But I think ultimately, Michael had the confidence that this was going to create a powerhouse, and those assets were undeniable. And to some degree, what you were saying about the sort of these zero sum assumptions is like, okay, well, software defined is going to disrupt traditional arrays to the extent that it's gonna, there are no zero sum outcomes in IT. We continue on, and those markets continue to be robust. In fact, the storage market has been growing quite robustly. So sort of like, this is a set of capabilities that people need, we need to get bigger, not smaller. I buy that, I buy that it's not a zero sum. I heard Bill Clinton at Adele World years ago talk about how it's not a zero sum game, and that I thought was pretty credible. However, historically, the IT business has been a winner take most. The leader gets most of the profit, the second makes, does okay, and the third kind of barely breaks even, and there is no fourth, fifth, and sixth. So it is sort of a winner take all or winner take most market, isn't it? I think to some degree, but it depends on how you define markets, and we all tend to participate and find opportunities to move and cross into new market areas. Market extension is a basic of strategy, right? Like, look for adjacencies, extend. So there's plenty of room in this three plus trillion dollar IT market for us all to really participate. The job of strategists and business leaders is what are those best opportunities and how do we get after them? And certainly, Michael has proven to be the strategist to figure this out. Like, what, you know, Dell's acquiring EMC? It's like, yeah, we are. Oh, no, that, 90 billion, you grew 14% last year? What? Yeah. It's always good to have the founder around. It's always great to have that leadership in the history. But one of the things I really like about the strategy that you guys are taking is, one, I love the bigger scale leverage. I think that's right on the money. We call that right out of the gate. I'm here on theCUBE right when it happened. But the other thing that's emerging, I want to get your thoughts on it. I see this clearly with Google. Google has a SRE, site reliable engineer, and they run massive infrastructure for themselves. Their cloud's not yet translating because no one's like Google, right? There's no enterprise that actually matches Google. So it's like a tailored suit for one person, Google. Operational consistency is a huge message here this year. It's been for a while. This is really important. I want you to take a minute to explain why, that strategy, and what the impact will be for customers. Yeah, well, I think that you just sort of, it's the analog within our customers to what you just described with our business, achieving scale allows you to accelerate growth. Achieving scale in IT operations allows you to achieve scale and accelerate your digital transformation as a customer. So if you're able to create the equivalent of these site reliability, in other words, creating a highly scalable IT environment, there is no lack of demand for IT fueled innovation in any business anywhere today. That's why we're so bullish on the future that we're in the middle of this massive investment cycle of digitizing, codifying business process into applications and growing the footprint and sort of surface area of all businesses. So if you're able to create this consistent operating level, rather than spending all day down in the plumbing of it all, automate that layer and then focus on the business value. That's if you go look through our studies around digital transformation and what our customers are doing, it shows that to some degree they face digit transformation stall, right? They're like, how do I get everybody aligned to this IT? I've got the business increasingly, we're like, you all need to come together as an organization and focus up and helping our IT people free up and scale themselves to get closer to the business and really be a part of that sort of strategic discussion for the company. That's the same thing. It's achieve scale works everywhere. Achieve scale in IT operations, freeze up time and investment dollars to help the devs, to help the business figure out. There's right revenue. It's not just a cost issue. You take away that cost, which is a cost consolidation, cost leverage, efficiency, et cetera. But the flip side is like Bank of America was saying on the keynote, they got to run their business and make money. So the app developers are critical. And IT could be a part of the revenue stream. And I think the sort of basics of it all is that we keep throwing around the term digital transformation. But at the end of the day, people are codifying business process and their customer experiences and all of that into technology. And that's how they're delivering new business products, new experiences for their customers. I have a branchless bank that I use. I have, I adopted them because the technology was great, right? Because their experience of banking through them is amazing. And I'll never... They know you, it's the data model that actually is not an account number. Absolutely, so I think that the point you're asking, why is a consistent operating model important? It helps IT achieve scale. And some people say, well, it's all about development. It's like, look, it's the interplay between ops and dev. There's two words there. It's not no ops. It's dev and ops. And to achieve scale, you need operators who can achieve scale. To achieve scale, you need consistent capabilities, tooling, et cetera. I think what you were saying about revenue scale is really important because most big acquisitions, they talk about synergies. That's a code word for cut. You guys grew 14% last year. So I'm sure you have cost synergies, but there are revenue synergies as well to your point. Yeah, and for the customers as well. I think we've just been successful showing the power of the full portfolio and that's turned into, we'll make a bigger and bigger bets with you. And during the post keynote press briefing, it was stated, look, people don't necessarily want more and more and more vendors. They want fewer, more strategic vendors for certain elements and then they want to look for new innovation in other areas. And so I think that it's sort of, we're benefiting from the fact that we are the company that you can turn to to solve this broad challenge of IT. And then you can work with others around your specific vertical, what you might do. We've got a huge network of partners that we work with that can help customers with bespoke applications for their specific vertical, healthcare, retail, so on and so forth. So yeah, I think we've found- Up the value chain. Up the value chain. Not 20 infrastructure suppliers. So your point about the zero sum thesis is not being zero sum is infrastructure loves automation. Automation loves data. So if you have an end-to-end architecture, you have better data. Correct. You have opportunities to innovate around automation, machine learning to set the standard for the next layer up. Well, and that consistency extends all the way across. So if I can create a consistent model, that model is also pour out in the data and then I can create a consistent engine to consume that data to drive automation that continues to add value and value and value. So putting that loop around it is hugely important to driving value for our customers. Do your kids play, would you rather? You know, they say, would you rather like this really be in a hot desert or freezing cold, right? So Matt, would you rather be a fighter test pilot or a college professor? You know, you must have read something from my Twitter feed. You got an answer. Definitely fighter pilot. Fighter pilot, okay. How about would you rather be a professional hunting and fishing guide or a professional ocean racing skipper? Probably the ocean racing skipper. Although I'd like to be closer to my family. Both of those, you're out of the woods. You're sweet with your top five jobs, right? Those are my theoretical jobs. I love my job. I don't want a new job. I love my job. I don't want to go anywhere. But if that was purely theoretical. Love it. Matt, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I'll give you the final word. In short, what's the core strategy for Dell Technologies? Well, I think it's to continue to drive value across the totality of this entity that has so much power. And I hope that's on display and obvious to you both that we're really pulling together to create solutions that deliver a massive amount of value to our customers. And I think that's unmatched in the industry. So I appreciate you having me on to talk through this and give me a little, rip me a little about my tweets about my critical jobs. Give a quick point for your video blog, The Baker's Dozen. Yeah, The Baker's Half Dozen. The Baker's Half Dozen. What's it about? What's the focus? Yeah, it's basically a six minute spot that I go through six and a half things. Baker's Dozen's 13, it's hard to divide it by two. So we end up with a half thing. It's sort of funny. But I just take people through a basic rundown of, hey, what's going on in the marketplace? And I try to make it simple, funny, and just sort of poke fun at myself. So, it's fun. Matt Baker, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Planning for Dell Technologies. I'm chef of worry, Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more live coverage. Day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two Cube sets, a lot of content. The Cube Canon blowing out the content here at Dell Technologies World. Stay with us, we'll be right back.