 Live from the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE at Dell World 2014. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, everybody we're live from Austin in the Austin Convention Center, just coming off the keynotes. Marius Haas is here, he's the president of Dell's Enterprise Solutions, Chief Commercial Officer, great to see you again Marius. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, that pleasure, always is. Yes, so coming off the keynotes, Michael looks sharp, really relaxed. He's been out, saw him on CNBC this morning. And so, private company, year in, how's it going? Things are going very well. When the boss is happy, we're happy. It's a, no, the business momentum is doing very, very well. We're seeing tremendous growth in every region and every line of business. Clearly the value proposition is resonating very well with both our customers and our partners. So, things are good. So, I want to, before we get into the business, I want to ask you about being private. You've worked for obviously some public companies in the past, some very large public companies. You know, you go public because you need the money and you want the recognition. You know, the customers need to feel comfortable. You got to be more transparent, all of that stuff. But, you know, we saw Mark Andreessen come out basically, you know, last year saying how bad it is to be a public company, how onerous it is. You see companies like, you know, you guys had Tom Riley up on stage at Cloudera. They raised a ton of dough, basically forestalling a public offering. You know, why do companies, why do more companies not do this? Actually, you're seeing some companies. BMC just did it. You expect to see more and, you know, what's the difference to you? Well, the biggest difference is there's a singular focus on creating customer partner value. That's it, right? So, we do not have distractions on having to look at and or provide rationale for why, for example, we're doing certain things in order to just create shareholder value. And an example of what might be happening in some other large companies today where a priority is set on creating shareholder value versus creating customer and partner value. When you're in our mindset today, everything we do starts from the customer on end. The innovation that we invest in, the coverage models that we expand on, singular focus around growing the business by presenting our value proposition in the best way to our customers, to a broadest range of customers as possible. And I think what you're starting to see now is us really coming together, getting that operational engine, executing extremely well. And that's why you see our growth being at a multiple of the market and we're outpacing any of our largest competitors. You think that's cause and effect. You think it's directly related to being private and more focused. There's certain market conditions, certainly very helpful. But the fact that we are outpacing the market at a three to four X certainly indicates that the model we have today, our ability to go extremely agile in decision making certainly helps. Michael was saying that about 20% of his time was freed up. How about you at the executive level? Do you see a meaningful time savings and not having to deal with the street? There absolutely has been. My core focus is obviously spend more time with customers, spend more time with partners and ensure that we're developing the technology that'll create more value. So that really certainly helps me focus my efforts and my attentions in those key focused areas. But our cadence around operational excellence, driving performance, growing at an excess of market but certainly driving profitable growth is still there. So we have our weekly cadence, our monthly cadence and our core focus on total business performance but always starting with a customer. And how about M&A, does that, I mean these days you use your cash to acquire a company. So is, but is there a change in M&A or no? We, because of our business velocity, our cash flow from operations has improved significantly and because of that we have a tremendous amount of flexibility in being able to say, well, what do we do with that cash? All right, do we accelerate our debt pay down? Do we look at potential inorganic moves to augment our portfolio? The nice part about it, we have that optionality and every part of my business, what we're doing today is looking at what is the right build partner buy strategy all with the intent of driving greater innovation out to the market quicker. So you're in no way restricted from an M&A standpoint being private. In fact, you'd argue that you've got more flexibility and freedom because you don't have to justify everything at every turn. All right, let's talk about the business. So walking the floor here last night, I made a note to Stu and I think I tweeted out he's got one of everything in the enterprise. If it's in the enterprise, you have it, right? So talk about the portfolio. What do you think about it? I mean, who would have guessed 10 years ago that Dell is going to be the only end to end solutions provider in the industry? Only one, very few people including myself would not have guessed that, right? The moves and or transitions that are happening in the market today is putting us in a position to be that single partner of choice in all aspects of technology for our customers. And that's an exciting position to be at and certainly resonating not just with a customer community but also with a partner community. We came out and made an announcement yesterday to enhance our partner programs, part of which is now, how do we invest more aggressively in enabling our partners to reach a broader audience? Partners are now in excess of 40% of our total revenue generated through a partner omni-channel strategy. It is growing in nine out of the top 10 markets by more than 10%, double digit growth. So clearly a big wave of momentum that we want to continue to foster and continue to drive. Can you explain to the audience why having a greater mix of channel partners is so important and number one and number two, where you want to take that percentage? Look real simple, what I focus on is what is the 100% of the total addressable market that I can reach? With an omni-channel strategy, you can do that. You can really look at, you take our resources, our partner resources and how do we synergistically go present our value proposition to as many customers as possible? The problem we had that I found when I first got here was we were not reaching enough customers. We had great technology, we were driving great innovation but what we're not doing is getting this message out, the story out about all of the capabilities that we had. Well now what we can do is leverage a much broader ecosystem, a very well educated ecosystem that loves what we're doing. Customers are extremely receptive to the message and the value proposition that we have. We just needed to go out and reach more and more customers in a much broader range around the world and this certainly has helped us do so. I know you're super busy, Stu, you want to jump in here. Yeah, so Marius, I want to dig into that a little bit more, so one of the challenges you've got is you're giving so much choice out there. I mean, on the private cloud environment, there's VMware, there's Microsoft, there's Red Hat, public cloud with Amazon, Google, Azure, Century, Link, Joyant, like 20 of them others. The channel is used to selling like a couple solutions and customers, when you put too much at them, it's the paradox of choice and if they go and they choose one of these, well there's lots of other people selling those so how do you solve the education problem? How do you help people to choose the right solution and I know you want to give them lots of choices so that the end choice is ultimately Dell but how do we help the marketplace where most channel guys, you know, they haven't figured out the cloud and they might sell VMware today and they haven't looked at the old solutions? Well think about it this way, I mean, so a clear part about what we have been doing over the last couple of years is aggressively driving engineered integrated solutions with the key ISVs. You got Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Oracle, Red Hat OpenStack, think about it, those are by far the bigger ones that most all customers are engaging with one way or another. So what have we done? We've aggressively gone down the path of deploying an appliance-based strategy to simplify the go-to-market motion, simplify the adoption and deployment of these solutions inside a customer ecosystem. All right, rapid time to deployment, greater TCO advantage and extremely simplifying that whole process. Partners love it because it's a bundled engineered solution that they're selling. They can spend more time focused on what are the incremental value-added services that they can bring to the table versus purely just doing the integration of those solutions. So that's the value we bring to them. So that helps on the acceleration path but it also helps on what should I be focused on in simplifying the message. On some of the other technologies, what we're finding is there isn't one software-defined storage strategy that is the winner of all. There isn't one software-defined networking strategy that everyone is saying, yep, that's it, we're going to embark on. In both those sections, there are at least three different ecosystems and each one of those that are emerging within the different sectors, different industries. And what we're telling the customers is we can take you down any one of those three paths and we will show you that journey and show you which one is best suited for the specific needs that you might have. For example, the academic environment is very different than a hardcore manufacturing environment. And one is more prone to be able to accept more risk than someone that really needs to make sure that their engine is humming at the most efficient rates possible. So that optionality but yet that guarantee, that warranty, that Dell stands behind the technology is able to support it around 160 countries in the world. That's the comfort level that we bring them but also that future-ready strategy so that we're bringing them through a journey together, not just a point solution and off you go. Very different. And also some of the exciting new announcements we've made today, for example, FX2. By far the industry's highest density converged infrastructure that can be applied to the broadest set of workloads that a customer might be looking at, you've got on a 2U configuration, you've got 16 servers, you got 224 CPU cores, 100 terabytes of storage, six terabytes of memory, you've got 16, 10 gig internal ports of networking and it is by far the industry's leading technology and innovation demonstration of how you bring dense integration into a converged architecture that will drive tremendous value to customers as well but also simplify the notion of what infrastructure do I need to deploy these workloads in a very effective manner? And at a cost that is comparable or lower than anything else there, is that a fair statement or I mean, Michael gave some stats on the all-flash array, less than 25,000, which is sort of a new watermark. There is no doubt that, that's what Dell's known for. Listen, I mean, there is no doubt that in the storage ecosystem, what was a year and a half ago, two years ago, most of the growth was sitting in the 250k and above price points, that has completely changed. The volume of price points sit between 15k and 50k, maybe 80k, and what you've seen Dell been able to do is completely fill out the portfolio. For all the different use cases that customers are looking for, with the latest and greatest technology, so for example, our latest 40, 20 announcement today in all-flash array, that starts at a 25k price point, no one's got it, no one's got anything even close. So absolutely, how do we bring new innovation? How do we take different forms of flash technology embedded into our overall architecture to provide more value to customers and do it so that a small customer, a mid-sized customer and even a large customer all can scale at the rate that they want but all with the fundamental and underlying core technologies that we enable them. You mentioned that Dell is the only end-to-end supplier. It's actually quite astounding. Talk about why that's important. Supply chain, is it, you know, customer touch points? Does that allow you leverage in cost and pricing models? Think about all the above, right? We will by definition will always be the low-cost provider just because of our economies of scale on the procurement side. We will by definition be the largest customer for every hard drive provider, for every memory provider, for every processor provider, and for most of all the components that sit within outside of our infrastructure just because of our size and scale, right? And, you know, you heard also Michael reference today in his keynote, Dell's number one in storage. Terabyte shipped, both internal and external, terabyte shipped in the world, Dell's number one by a long shot. A lot of it is because more and more servers are going out the door, fully configured, a lot of embedded memory technology in order to drive utilization and or application performance within those key workloads, right? That's just, you know, we ship more terrible, we ship a quarter of a million more terabytes than EMC in the first half and almost a million more terabytes than HP in the first half. The examples of how that size and scale and that breadth of our technology certainly provides us a competitive advantage that we then want to translate to customers as quickly as possible. Well, when IBM gave up its PC business years ago, it lost its supply chain leverage. HP was thinking about spinning off its PC business, now it's going to split, it's going to lose its supply chain leverage. Oracle sort of gave up on the low end which makes them a great partner for you. So, to me, it's to a huge advantage what Dell has from a supply chain standpoint. Yeah, Marius, a question I have for you is when we talk to enterprise CIOs, they're really looking to have, you know, strategic, fewer strategic partnerships and have deeper relationships. How's your relationship with enterprise users changed over the last years? Well, I think it's been the one, our engagement at the key ISV level and becoming the partner of choice as a core infrastructure provider for those key ISVs has significantly enhanced our conversations with our partners and with our customers. So, for example, typically the first dialogue almost at any level, but specifically, let's say with the CIO, it starts at the application level. It starts at the business challenges, the business problems they're trying to solve, starts around security, cloud, big data, and so forth. And how does that then translate into the application environment they have because that's what they're spending more time on is how do I deploy these applications to my internal constituents and my external constituents in a cloud-based manner, in a more secure manner, and how to drive better, greater insights from the information that I have within the applications that I have. That's the dialogue, right? And what we've been able to do is now integrate that dialogue very seamlessly with the infrastructure layer, with everything that we're doing, and hence changed it significantly. Hence, you see the great momentum that we now have in the market. Submaris, I want to end this, because we got out of time here, but there's a lot going on in the industry. IBM's given up on the X86 business, HP's splitting up, Symantec's splitting up, you got EMC pressures from the financial world. It's not just in enterprise IT, you got eBay and PayPal, all, every one of those, I think, driven from the financial community. You guys are private. What's happening, and where's it going, and what does it all mean for Dell and its customers? It goes back to your first question. It is beautiful when you don't have those distractions. And trust me, I came from an environment where literally probably took more than five years to optimize, but at that point in time, was a merger of two pretty large-size institutions. Imagine what it's going to take to disaggregate all that, and or the customer disruption that it's going to bring. So we're just ecstatic that we have a solid strategy, a great customer base that continues to expand, and momentum in the market that allows us to just keep going in the right direction, whereas others are going to have to do many different sidesteps here in trying to manage the chaos that has been brought by some of the strategic, or maybe not so strategic decisions they make. Maris Haas, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success, momentum, and we'll be watching for next several years, so appreciate it. We're very excited, thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. It's theCUBE Rely from Dell World 2014 in Austin. Be right back.