 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technology World. Dell Tech World 2020, Jeff Clark is here. He's the Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman of Dell Technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me today, I appreciate it. Yeah, you're very welcome. Well, my first question is, why do you have time to be Vice Chairman? Well, you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries unless you establish some boundaries. So I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally, but also allows me to look after the company and kind of keep things moving and making progress at Dell. So pretty exciting times. It's certainly been a challenge finding new ways to break through, new ways to get things done, but our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. Well, you know, as you know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew you were obviously, but you know, I've been able to see how you operate and the decision-making and how you rally the troops. You're several years now into the new Dell. You had to do a lot of tactical things, you know, including product portfolio rationalizations, but I wanted to start with the macro picture. Sure. And in particular, can you share some of the acceleration points and the levers that you're really pulling in the operation? Well, clearly if you look back at the company strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform, if you think about the first tenant of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our core marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the core server market and the core storage market. And clearly what we've been able to do and certainly been at this now for, gosh, I think it's three years now, that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the ISG side. And to the point you referenced earlier, we've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all the power brand. It now represents new, fresh, modern architecture, modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire ISG portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy, which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell Technologies portfolio, we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years, particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our ISG portfolio with VMware. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side real quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace one, our leading services and our leading PC products to be able to bring a differentiated experience for end users on the PC side. On the ISG side, this all started with getting again this competitive portfolio. It started with Dell Technology Cloud a little over a year ago. It now is in joint collaboration around the edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around 5G going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out, we now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VMware right now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. So it sounds like, I mean COVID's changed so many things but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed. You're thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is going to pre COVID post COVID you kind of sort of approaching the same playbook if you will. Well, COVID in many levels while it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world which we shouldn't that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and many parts of the world. If you step back and what I tried to mention the keynote what COVID has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote, learning remote the world as we look at it going forward, data driven it's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade in many cases the first three years. This nomenclature that I talk about is the future is now. And what it's really done is actually reinforced the points that we thought were going to happen brought them sooner and has made us believe more double down if you will that the path we were on is the right path and we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting, if you look at customers who embrace digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders they are actually breaking away from the pack sort of speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector. We think that's a great, obviously proof point of digital transformation but what all companies will have to go through to compete. Well, it's interesting, we saw early on in the US lockdown, worldwide lockdown you have such a broad portfolio that yeah, maybe some parts of the portfolio were directly negatively affected certainly for instance, your airline customers or your hospitality customers, et cetera but the work from home was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio somewhat, one part of the business that cushioned you maybe the other part of the business you felt it but on balance, you're able to get through that and part of that was your supply chain and some of your competitors struggled for instance with laptop supplies but you guys really have done a good job sort of navigating through that almost like you've been through it before but nobody's been through this before. No, you know, Dave thanks for recognizing it one of the benefits of the end end portfolio we have which no one else has the end end portfolio that we do we're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors whether it's different parts of the business and we've been able to do that and our supply chain has performed well it's been unbelievably resilient we think it's appointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace the couple that with our global service footprint the two of them working together we designated those capabilities as essential very early in the pandemic we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers in a pretty non-disruptive way now behind the scenes our teams were doing all sorts of things to bring that continuity supply and those expectations we set to our customers to the forefront but I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded and it set us up to where things are going to go when we think about the future and migrating to more integrated solutions I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed with that services in the supply chain play a key role I guess so much to talk to you about but I want to come back to digital transformation for a minute I was talking to CIO the other day and I asked them what does digital transformation mean to you? He said Dave I got a 15 year old SAP system digital transformation means to me my business has changed in the last 15 years but my SAP system hasn't I got to bring it up to speed I have to modernize so there's a spectrum on the other hand if you're not digital today and you're say a restaurant you can't do business so what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? Well, I think your examples were very good I mean our industries as a long reputation of over hyping different constructs the fact is the world is rapidly digitizing it's undeniable if you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors are now being placed in everything and all of the data that's being collected as a result that's certainly the forefront of what's happening and every business has to deal with that I mean you can't we talked about hospitality you got hotel rooms that have sensors in them for lights, for water, for a temperature you think about what's happening in the finance sector and the amount of data that's being created on the edge that has to be processed on the edge you think about smart factories, smart hospitals and the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront so in my mind digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going we know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world and as that acceleration goes faster and faster and faster which I absolutely, we absolutely believe is happening companies have to change their business they have to change their models they have to figure out how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes we tend to get into this digital transformation and everyone wants to talk about this piece of gear or this piece of gear or this piece of gear I actually don't spend any time on that it's where customers are going what are they doing to really instrument if you will the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors that's where we come in, we help them help them with certainly the gear part of it but more importantly the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them to help them get to where they want to go does that help? Yes and it does and it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud to me it's edge is all part of that and it's critical for your customers digital transformations what I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on whether you're on-prem, whether you're in a public cloud whether you're at the edge so multi-cloud is part of that you know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational it seems to be coming more and more real where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? Well, I love the way you described it what we see is the notion of cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about earlier on when I got this job was the public cloud No, there's public cloud there's private clouds and clearly the edge is going to be a cloud operating model in fact, we see the world of 5G edge and cloud those three circles intersecting to a high degree so we're going to bring a cloud operating model to the edge we're going to bring new advanced connectivity data-driven connectivity to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created that will have to have real-time analytics done at the edge we think is this opportunity to really step back and go well, those cloud things can't be separate they have to be a set of systems in fact, it has to become an integrated system and we think that integrated system has to be able to move data be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrate and consistently drive operations across those three cloud environments I think we have gone probably the best characterization is early innings we're certainly not in the first inning we're not in the ninth inning but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multi-cloud hybrid cloud environment if you think about what we've done with VMware's enablement or interaction with the public domains the work that we've done from our private area we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us as this spends very quickly and the edge evolves we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself we have to bring it together or bring it into the public and private cloud domains that we have today and I definitely want to hit on as a service but since we're on this topic I want to talk about 5G and telco a little bit let me just spiel for a bit and then you can respond so I mean there seems to be a lot of confusion around 5G there's very high expectations there's a lot of talk but it's hard to sort of identify the true impact that's tangible today anyway and then you got the telco transformation going on and we've been hearing this for a long long time meanwhile you got the over the top providers they're living off the infrastructure the telcos price per bit is declining but the usage is exploding and so what do you make of all this? You know the telcos are reinventing themselves 5G is a part of that consumers are waiting for that there's a lot of mixed marketing messages going on what's your take on this and what's Dell's role? Well I tend to try to break it down into things that at least I can understand if I look at 5G as the next generation cellular which I believe it's far more than that I mean I think it's the next data fabric for the data era I think it's going to be this intersection as I mentioned moments ago of 5G, cloud and edge all coming together but I think about it from the infrastructure side that you described what we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before and I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector and this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster so now if you bring a cloud operating model to this which I believe 5G enables there's now the opportunity to bring I think a more standard based infrastructure rather than the proprietary ones of the past we now can bring a industry standard set of architectures with softer to fine layers in the stack and for the first time in the telco space you have the ran going through significant transformation and on my mind the ran is one of the significant control points in the telco or 5G stack and that is going to be more open and then we have to think of 5G as just more than a cellular network I mean, we're going to have private 5G so to the degree that it displaces Wi-Fi will be interesting to see and unfold but there's a huge opportunity now as those sensors that I talked about and the digitization of hospitals and factories and cities all interconnected by a bunch of private 5G networks all working in an interactive and combined system way I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation a standardizations orientation a cloud model and that's sort of what we do so I get excited all of what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point you've been hearing this discussion for some time but the opportunity is large for us it's one of the single biggest opportunity that we see for Dell and VMware and we're going to pursue it together and we think we can take our at scale technologies that we've brought to the Enterprise data center and bring those to the telco providers and the private 5G build out. Yeah, it's amazing, Jeff when you think about the when you and I started in this business and how far we've come it's just mind boggling, isn't it? It really is we've been at this a while and things have changed but again it's been on this consistent technology curve this consistent standardization curve and it's now applying to new sectors. I want to end with as a service you mentioned that before and so you've got actually a really growing business in subscriptions you got a lot of options for customers which is good but sometimes it's confusing what's the strategy around as a service what can we expect there? Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right, we've made a lot of progress we launched Dell technology and demand last year we have 2000 plus customers of $1.3 billion revenue run rate it's growing at 30% so we're pleased but at the same time all the data suggests customers are gonna want to deploy even at a greater rate so I think I made reference to our keynote today about 75% of the world's data is gonna be created outside of the data center 75% of the edge build out is going to be done as a service as is half of the infrastructure so we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level we announced Project Apex Project Apex for us is to take all of the properties that we have across the company all of the different activities and to unify them a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward for our entire portfolio we think the timing is right we think we have to be able to if you will Project Apex should be translated as the easy button for our customers it's a way to make things simpler it's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model and that's the path wrong we're pretty excited about this unification if you will galvanizing across the entire organization with Project Apex Awesome, listen I know you're super busy I appreciate all the time you've given us you're a fun executive to hang around with I miss you man, I wish we were together but hopefully sometime soon we can see each other face to face I would like that very much I miss the interactions themselves I appreciate the time of day, thank you Dave All right, we'll see you Jeff, thanks again All right, and thank you for watching everybody keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest at Dell Technology World 2020 you're watching theCUBE