 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2016, brought to you by Dell EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Dell EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This place is rockin', the band is playin', we're here, wall-to-wall coverage. This is day two of theCUBE. Gaurav Chand is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell EMC. Gaurav, good to see you again. Good to see you. So go big or go home. Yep. And nobody left. That's exactly it, and nobody's going home. So, love it. So, the scope has expanded considerably. Give us the update. Yeah, so, pretty interesting event, right? We started this off, like I remember, four or five years ago, as a tiny event. Now it's grown to about 8,000 people. And the interesting part of it is, we've got a lot of events in the event, right? So you've got the main crack that's going on today and tomorrow. We've got three keynotes around that. Yesterday, we did our executive summit. So basically, CIOs, we had about 400 CIOs come from all across the globe, and we did an event for them. And then we've got a bunch of other smaller events going on simultaneously. We've got our channel partners here, and we've got a specialized breakout sessions for them and pieces like that. We've got our OEM customers here. So we've got a ton of other events going on simultaneously. But this is that one area. The Expo is the one area where it all comes together. It converges. You're going to see a lot of OEM solutions, IOT solutions, you know, and all of those pieces come together in this one area. What were some of the messages? You talked about the events within the events. You talked about the executive events. You obviously have an analyst track that you're running, partners, customers. What are you telling the executive audiences? What's the key message there? It's no different. The message is a singular message around this notion of, let the transformation begin. There's disruption in our industry as we see it today. It's been going on for some time, but it is occurring now at an unprecedented rate. One of the pieces David Goulden talked about earlier in his keynote was this notion that we interviewed 4,000 execs across the globe and we asked them, hey, how much disruption are you folks seeing in your respective industries? We're talking about 12 different industries and approximately 48%, half of the people said they did not know what their industry would look like three years from now. And that's a pretty stellar number. It's shocking, right? It's just shocking. Garghar, my little bit snarky remark back to them, and the other 52% are diluting themselves, you know, if they don't think that, if they think that they can understand what's happening. That's the whole message, right? Let the transformation begin. Now is the time. Start thinking about it. And when you think about transformation, it's this notion of digital transformation first and then to achieve digital transformation, you have to undergo IT transformation which is all around your data center and the cloud, the hybrid cloud, all of those pieces, workforce transformation which is all around this notion of productivity. The right device for the right employee and increasing their productivity, 10-4. And then finally, to be able to truly embrace these transformative technologies, do I have the right security in place? So customers have to undergo this notion of security transformation. So that's the core message. Irrespective of what part of the event that you're at at Dell EMC World 2016, the message is very consistent. Digital transformation, IT transformation, workforce transformation, security transformation. And let's begin now. So what I liked about this morning's keynotes, it wasn't a lot of power edge stuff, it wasn't a lot of storage. Give me a little bit, that J.V. Goulden talked about the announcement, that's kind of his role, but it was much more a vision for the future. And Dell EMC, what struck me the most about the keynote this morning, and I've seen this in other filings and activity, Jeffrey Immelt as a reference, not this morning, sorry. Yeah, Jeffrey Immelt from GE. Not this morning, but Jamie Dimon as a reference. This, the CIO of Ford, the CEO of AT&T. These are big names that you guys are bringing together and they're saying, we're customers, you know, good luck, we welcome you, we're supportive. It's a whole new way of thinking about how you market, how you position Dell as a company. Yeah, yeah, no, and I mean, that's the one piece that has transformed completely, right? With EMC coming on board now, instant enterprise credibility right there, right? And it's not that Dell did not have relationships with these customers, but one could argue, we might not have been as pervasive in those customers. Now you take the core infrastructure with Dell and EMC coming together and then you take a lot of the pieces that live above the core infrastructure, the virtualization layer, the orchestration layer, the PAS layer, and ultimately the native hybrid cloud development layer, right? Now you've got all of those pieces under one single roof and the biggest challenge we see for customers in the go forward model is pure complexity. If I have to take something simple as mobile app development and I have to think about the compute required, the storage required, the security required, the network required, the client required, client devices required, and I put all of those things together before you know it and then the whole mobile development piece to go on top of that, before you know it, customers are working in an ecosystem with 10, 12, 14, 16 different vendors. How do you expect a customer to be able to manage that ecosystem? It's impossible. It's impossible for the average customer to be able to truly manage that ecosystem. Their ecosystem is bad enough today with all the applications they have. Now imagine in this new world, in this digital world, managing that ecosystem, it's next to impossible. So one of the beauties of this Dell Technologies umbrella is now you have a lot of best of breed. Michael mentioned number one in so many areas, leaders in 20 Magic, Gartner Magic Quadrants. You have best of breed under one single roof so customers do not have to deal with this notion of vendor sprawl and having to manage this complex ecosystem to get some basic digital stuff done in their environments. Garv, I'm curious, how do you balance both for this show and just throughout the year that diversity of customer base that you have, everything from the executive track down to the admin, there's a hole in the IT space, kind of the generational shift that's happening as to kind of people that kind of held on to certain environments and certifications versus kind of younger generation might be kind of programming more. How do you address those various constituencies and bring them together? The way I would say it is you address them on two fronts, right? One, you stay on top of the innovation engine from a technology standpoint, that's critical. That's critical attracting, excuse me, new talent and all of those pieces, right? That's one angle. Then the other piece which not a lot of folks are aware of is our go-to-market angle which gives us an inherent advantage because nobody else operates from a go-to-market standpoint. We've got one account manager, one person, one single throat to choke that manages everything end-to-end for a customer and that's really important again in this complex ecosystem. Imagine a world in which, yes, I got one vendor that negates me having to go to 14 different vendors but what if in that vendor I was dealing with 15 different organizations? Did my life just become easier? No, it did not because instead of working with multiple vendors, you're working with multiple people within a single vendor. That's what makes our go-to-market also very unique. We've got that single account manager, we've got that quarterback that manages everything end-to-end, brings in the right folks for the customers to deal with and provides that single point of contact for our customers. So it's those notions, staying ahead on the innovation cycle from a technology standpoint and our unique go-to-market is I think our best way of keeping that entire ecosystem of our customers right from the mid-market, small business, mid-market, right to the biggest customers in the globe satisfied. There's also a complexity going on with the personas and as a marketer, I wonder if I could get your thoughts on this. In some respects it's simplifying with converged infrastructure but on the other hand, you think about big data, there's the chief data officer, the data scientist, the application developers becoming more data oriented, there's a data engineer. So the personas are shifting in terms of to whom you market. What are your thoughts on that and how are you addressing it? Well, I mean, it's definitely incredibly more complicated in the ecosystem, right? You mentioned a couple but just think about the simple notion of a business user, right? A business user, technology, marketing has never talked to a business user ever. We've talked to CIOs, in some cases we've talked to CIOs, in some cases we've talked to CMOs. We've never ever talked to a business user. Now we've got to think about how do you mine the right data? How do you get the right contacts? How do you work with the right companies that can get you that kind of information and then go reach out to the direct business owner? Because guess what, in a lot of places, the business owner becomes the decision maker. I run events for a certain company and I want a mobile app. If my IT can't deliver it, to be able to make that event experience really phenomenal, I go directly, whether it be the public cloud or some kind of third party app provider, and I go do that. How do you go talk to that person? Now we are in a completely more complicated state of who do you talk to in the organization around the right conversation? Take Pivotal Cloud Foundry, for example. We generally don't end up talking to the CIO around PCF. Native Hybrid Cloud Development, DevOps, and all of those pieces. The way we've seen customers doing it, for smaller organizations, you have the CEO in a lot of cases running. For larger organizations now, you've got actually a person in charge of DevOps that's since outside of IT, you know? So all of these have made it a lot more complicated. On the flip side, we are getting a lot more sophisticated around tracking. People search patterns and all of that. We're working with companies like Success to do a lot of that mining and we're getting this rich information. The onus then becomes very specifically on us is how do you produce the right set of content for those unique people and those unique assets and how do you reach out to them? We know all day long how CIOs like to be reached out to because we've been doing it for 20, 25 years. We're still figuring out how a business owner likes to be reached out to. We don't know. So Gaurav, so two years ago, the backdrop was the delgoing private. Yeah. The 90 day shot clock. We love that. Last year, we obviously knew about the acquisition. A lot of talk about that. Now the focus is on execution. And a lot of things that came together very quickly. Obviously the logos, the emails, you knew what the organization was going to look like because you had some time to think about it. But now as you begin to execute, you're talking about the richness of data that you have. Dell has always had a rich data set. You guys started early on, not always, but recently, you know, recent history, over the last five years, mining social data. You can see it when you walk the floor here. EMC, similar capabilities. Obviously you're using different tooling. You got different processes. I'm sure you've started to have discussions, but what can you tell us about how you're bringing those two capabilities together to be a single company? Yeah, no. I mean, CRM is a key part, right? And again, this goes back to, Michael talks about this a lot, the notion when you look at true overlap, right? True overlap between Dell and EMC was less than 20%. So what we quickly figured out, and I was part of the global integration team, I was the head for global integration marketing, right? What we quickly figured out, and this was pretty unique to this, was the notion that when it comes to high-touch accounts, right, EMC was phenomenal at those pieces. Belly to belly. I mean, best in class, right? So we're taking a lot of best practices that EMC did on the absolute high end. Dell was best in class in that mid-market space and the small business space and those pieces, because we've got a lot of heritage from a consumer business. We know how to run that engine all day long. We know the mining associated, we know the data, we have the databases, all of that pieces. Now it's just a question of getting, and both of them have to be kept in the go-forward model, because we're going to serve customers right from the SB space, at least on the enterprise side, right from the SB space, right up to some of the examples you saw in the keynote, GE4, there aren't companies larger than those folks, right? So now you're talking about how do you integrate the best of both those words and bring EMC's amazing high-touch model and Dell's incredible scale-out model and bring those together under one umbrella, and that's exactly the pieces that we're working on as we speak, which is part of the reason why the whole go-to-market consolidation happens on Feb 1. Yeah, because we needed that time to work through the details, you know? The whole channel partner piece, account coverage, you know, all of those pieces is work that's going on right now, which will come to fruition, come, Feb 1. Yeah, and doing that efficiently is going to be a critical factor in your success. And look, don't get me wrong, Dave, I mean, we got an amazing head start around this transaction, because for the last 10 months, we were dedicated, solely focused on all the conversations we could have from a legal standpoint, but getting that, things around branding, advertising, events, and all of those pieces, we already kicked off a series of Dell EMC roadshows. I was personally the one in London, we've done in Dallas, we've done all major cities now across the globe, you'll see that going on. So from an execution standpoint, we were pretty, pretty far out ahead of the game, and it was just amazing that on day one, literally, I kid you not, on day one of the announcement, we got the calls from IDC and Gartner to say, hey, you just became number one globally in service shipment. So it was just a great starting point for us, for what we believe is going to be a historical move around the whole tech industry. Okay, good, so what do we look for in the next near term, six, 12, 18 months? What should we be focused on? You'll see a lot of execution, execution around innovation, around product roadmaps. You'll see the whole go-to-market organization evolve, and the whole thing comes to play. You'll see the whole channel partner programs, what are we doing about it? Bringing the best of all the worlds together, and you're going to just continue to see a lot of messaging around this notion, this compelling factor around, let the transformation begin. Gaurav, it's great to see the excitement. Great to be here. The energy, thanks so much for having us here. Great hospitality, the music's playing in Austin, it's awesome. That's awesome, thank you guys. Congratulations on all the success, and we'll be watching, all right man. Absolutely, thank you. Keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Austin, Dell EMC World, right back.