 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital experience 2020, the virtual cube is coming at you, I'm Dave Vellante and with me are two great guests, my colleague and longtime business friend, Howard Elias, he's the chief customer officer and president of services and digital at Dell and also joining me is Shri Raj, aka Shri Kanthamnaini who is the managing director of digital insights at Cargo which is one of the world's largest privately held companies and a top maker and distributor of agricultural products and the things that we eat every day. Gentlemen, thanks so much for your time and coming on theCUBE, great to see you. Great to see you Dave and Shri, great to see you again as well. Good to be with you both. So I want to, Howard, I want to talk about, start by talking about digital transformation and I'm going to make you laugh. So I was talking to a customer every day or the other day and we all talk about digital transformation and I said, what's digital transformation to you? He said, Dave, my SAP system is 15 years old and I have to upgrade it. So I was like, okay, so there's a spectrum as you know but what are you seeing as digital transformation? What does that mean to your customers? Well, what we're seeing is a glimpse of the future and first of all, Dave, great to be with you again, Shri and all of you out there, hope everybody's safe and well. Thanks for joining us at Dell Technologies World today. But digital transformation from our customer's perspectives, the technology enablement of experiences with customers, partners and employees as well as automating processes to deliver value to all key stakeholders. And we've just seen a glimpse of the future. Customers are accelerating their adoption of technology. We see this through necessity, right? When everybody had to pivot to work from home, especially those professional workers. And for the most part, whether the companies plan forward or not, we all embraced and learned new ways of being productive remotely. And that was all enabled by technology but we've seen it in every walk of life. It's really an acceleration of trends that were already underway. Whether it was the remote experience for professional employees, whether it's e-commerce experience, whether it's telemedicine, distance learning. All of these things have been available for a while but we've seen them be embraced and accelerated tremendously due to what we've seen over the last six months in all industries. And Sri will talk about what's happening specifically in the agricultural industry. And what we've seen is customers that have made investments over the years have been able to move even faster in their specific industries. We've just done a survey of about 4,600 customers around the world and 80% have accelerated their investments in digital technology to improve the experience of their employees, of their customers and of their partners. Yeah, so thank you for that, Howard. Sri, I mean, a lot of people might think of Cargillio as physical business, but it's anything but. I mean, you've got such a huge data component to your business, but I wonder what you would add. I mean, we're maybe talk a little bit. I mean, it's such an amazingly rich and deep company, but maybe talk about your digital transformation journey and at least in your sphere of the world where you're at. Yeah, thanks, Dave. And Howard's absolutely right. What COVID has done is just accelerated the need for technology on farm and with our customers. And certainly in the last few months, we've seen that accelerate tremendously, right? At the end of the day, agriculture has been a technology first industry for hundreds of years. And so we're seeing that take fold in the form of digital adoption, the use of analytics, the use of really unique sensor technologies like cameras and computer vision sound. I liken it to the senses that we all have every day that we use to make decisions. Well, we're now seeing that adopted with our customers. And so it's a really interesting time and I think an opportunity for the industry to really move forward. I mean, in terms of the pandemic, we talked to a lot of customers. Howard just mentioned a survey. You certainly saw the pivot to work from home, increase in laptop momentum and Dell's business. We saw that you're seeing identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, even VDI. These were big tailwinds early on. What did the pandemic do to your business in just in terms of your priorities? Did you have to obviously shift to those things to support work from home? What happened to your digital transformation? Was anything put on hold and is restarting? Can you just, I don't know what you could tell us about that, but anything you could describe and add some color to that narrative would be really helpful to our audience. Certainly, yeah. I think overnight we had a workforce that went from being in the office to working from home and that just accelerated the need for collaboration tools. Things like teams and Skype and Zoom have just taken off. But also technologies that allow for virtual engagement like whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions that we used to do in the office with customers and suppliers, we're now having to do in a virtual setting. So that has just transformed how we do business. On the customer end, technologies like computer vision and sound really transform the need to leverage labor differently. One of the biggest challenges that COVID has placed is how labor interacts with animals and with food production. And we've just seen a significant adoption of technology to help alleviate some of those stresses. Now, you guys probably have seen the tongue-in-cheek cartoons, the COVID wrecking ball, the guys in the audience in the building saying, ah, digital transformation. None of my watching the COVID comes in. I've often joked, I guess we have to have a sense of humor in these times, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, COVID kind of broke everything. And Howard, when you think about digital transformation, yes, it was going on before COVID, but there are a lot of industries that hadn't been disrupted. I think about healthcare. I think about financial services. I think about defense. I mean, the list goes on. Unlike publishing, for instance, which got totally disrupted by the internet, but now it seems like if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. And so are you seeing like virtually every industry, adopting digital or are you seeing any trends that are different by industry? What are you seeing out there? We're absolutely seeing every company and every industry adopted in their own way, thinking through their business models. I mean, even think about what's happened in your local town, how technology has enabled restaurants to do, take out and delivery through digital tools, your local dry cleaner, your local butcher and your baker. I mean, everybody's having to be creative and reinvent. It's not just the large professional industrial financial services companies who are also reinventing, but I go back to what I said before, what we're seeing, these trends were already underway. They've just been put into hyperspeed. What folks were thinking about doing in two or three years, we're doing in two or three months, the pivot to work from home worldwide happened in two or three weeks. And it's not the crisis we plan for, but we're always preparing for the future. The groundwork was laid and now it's just been accelerated and we're seeing it everywhere, including inside of Dell. I think about all the processes and the way we serve our employees, our customers and partners, we've accelerated. We're adopting the product model within our own Dell digital organization as an example. That's been accelerated. The move to multi-cloud and having a cloud operating model no matter where the infrastructure has been accelerated. And everything we've talked about on the client experience, security models, networking models, software defined models, every industry, every company has had to embrace this. So Sree, I mean, I'm fascinated by your business. I mean, again, I think a lot of people think of it as a real physical business, but there's so much data. You're the head of digital insights, which is you've got data running through your entire operations. There's other things, there's double take words I see in your background, like aquaculture. So how are you re-imagining the future of your industry? That's a fascinating question, Dave. You know, imagine this. You could listen to a shrimp eat and then turn that into unique insights about the feeding patterns and behaviors of shrimp, right? Who would have imagined 10 years ago that we would have technology that enabled us to do things like that, right? And so from aquaculture to the dairy industry to grain origination, we're leveraging digital and data to really help our customers and producers make better, more informed decisions. Where in the past, it was really experience that allowed them to be good farmers and good stewards of our planet. Now we're using technology. So it's really an opportunity to harness the power of digital for our industry. Well, you know, and it's critical because we have people to feed and actually it's working. I mean, the yields that are coming out of the industry are amazing. I know there's a lot of discussion now about, hey, you know, we're actually getting a lot of food to people and now there's a discussion around nutrition. And that's front and center. And I presume technology and data fit in there as well, Sreeya, I wonder if you could comment. Yeah, you know, by 2050, Dave, there will be nearly 10 billion people on this planet. And to feed that growing population, we're gonna need 70% more protein. And so as you think about the impacts that that growing population has on the planet, there's also, you know, nutrition, but think about sustainability. How do we grow this food and get it from the place that it's produced to the place where it's consumed in a way that's resource-efficient and effective? So there's nutrition in just the middle class in Asia, you know, having a higher propensity to spend and dealing with that challenge on one end of the spectrum. And then on the other end of the spectrum, being able to really deal with sustainability. Howard, I've watched your career over the decades and you've had so many roles. And I always used to joke with you, they gave you the hardest problems. If you want to get stuff done, you give it to the busiest guy. It was always Howard, you know, help us with our own transformations, help us do the integrations, whether it was M&A or the largest industry. I love a good challenge, as you know. Yeah, I do know. And so I want to get the update on Dell's own transformation. I've been talking to a number of your executives this week and it looks like, you know, you guys are, you know, drinking your own champagne, dog-fooding, whatever you want to call it, but bring us up to date on what you guys are doing internally. We are, and we're no different than any of our customers in having to, you know, focus on our digital transformation agenda. I mentioned earlier the adoption of our product model, you know, moving from a project-based Dell Digital and IT organization to one that's a product model. So these are balanced teams with a product manager, a designer and developers working closely with the business and the function in an agile manner and the CIC pipeline manner. And all of this, again, has been accelerated. We have our own Dell Digital Cloud, which is our hybrid cloud that we leverage internally where software defining everything and it's really paying dividends because what we've seen literally in the last six to eight months is higher levels of security, higher levels of availability, higher levels of resiliency. We've been able to handle all of the increased transactions on our e-commerce engines, all at higher quality and lower cost. Now we, the groundwork for this with Jen Felch and the team over the last couple of years, but again by necessity had to accelerate and we've done that. And we're even moving faster now on data pipelines and really understanding all of our key processes and understanding the workflows and the data flows, working with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Again, exactly the way Cargill and other of our customers are doing in their businesses. I know you're talking or have talked to Doug Schmidt. You know, we've digitized and automated thousands of processes in our services organization, the ability on a remote basis to service our customers. We've invented new and innovative ways to service our customers remotely versus going on site, not just in break fix, deployment, remote change management, managed services, consulting. It's just great to see all this wonderful innovation come together serving our customers. Thank you for that Howard and you said something that triggered me in a good way. Data pipelines, I use that term a lot and Surya, I wonder if you could talk about this because you guys have been around since the 1800s. I think the largest privately held company in the United States, I think probably close to one of the largest in the world. And so you got a lot of data and a lot of different places. So a huge challenge for you is, okay, how do you manage those data pipelines, those data, the data life cycle? And I would think the company the size of Cargill to the extent that you can reduce the end to end time it takes to go from raw data to insights. I mean, that's got to be telephone numbers for your business and your bottom line that you can then reinvest and give back to customers, et cetera and be competitive. I wonder if you could talk about that whole concept of the data pipeline and how are you using data and some of the challenges of compressing that end to end cycle time and latency to get the insights. That day, Cargill is a 155 year old company and at our core, we're a supply chain company, right? Taking food from where it's produced, getting it through the manufacturing process to customers. And so at the end of the day, I joke that not only are we a physical supply chain company but we're also a data supply chain company. So the data value chain is really about taking all the different inputs and data that we have and turning that into unique insights. And I don't think there's a company on the planet in the food space that has the ability to connect those dots in the way that we do. And so our ability to create unique actionable insights for our customers is going to be really powerful, especially in the coming years. So let's talk about Dell a little bit. I always ask technology leaders, how are your vendors doing for you? How'd they help you through the pandemic? How would you grade Dell in terms of its support through the pandemic? Dell has been absolutely fantastic, right? I mean, I think it is really neat to have partners like Dell helping us achieve our mission for our customers. And I know they feel that way about us as their customers. So it's really wonderful to have the type of collaboration and partnership that we do. All right, Howard, same question for you. How would you grade Dell and how you guys have done through the pandemic with regard to supporting your customers? I mean, you're never one to overhype in my experience with you, but give us your take. Well, I would grade Dell by what our customers say. And we do it both through direct conversations as well as the data and telemetry we get. And the data and telemetry we have in terms of our NPS, our CSAT scores, our service level objectives that we're delivering, all have remained in profile. The team has really risen to the occasion. It's been super creative, passionate, full of grit. We heard Allison and Angela talk about that, that Dell Technologies World this morning. And our team has embodied that spirit and that grit to be able to deliver. But in the conversations we're having with customer Sri and his peers, you know, look, it's been a challenging time. But as you know, Dell has always focused on delivering value for the longterm. We're not in it for the short term. And that has served us well that philosophy, the objective we have with working with customers is always about what's in the best interest of our customers in the longterm. Because if we do that, it'll ultimately be in the best interest of Dell. Well, it's been amazing to just watch. I mean, it's ironic that we got hit with this at the beginning of this decade. It's obviously going to define what we do going forward. I think we've all talked about, it's funny, everybody in our business and the technology business, we've become COVID experts in some way, shape or form overnight, but we've talked a lot about the things that we see as permanent. And I think that, you know, clearly the two, your two companies are examples of agility, leaning into technology. And as you said, Howard, here for the longterm, 155 years old, I think Street said. So, well, here's to another 155 years, gentlemen. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, awesome guests. Thanks Dave, appreciate it. All right, and thank you for watching everybody, our continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. You're watching theCUBE.