 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. We have our coverage this year at Dell EMC World 2017. Huge show, record number of attendees here in Las Vegas, 13,000 plus, three days of non-stop Q&A just for you here on theCUBE, which of course is the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. I'm John Walls along with Keith Townsend, who is the principal of CTO Advisors. Keep good to see you, sir. Good to work with you again, John. Looking forward to a big week, and I know a lot of excitement about Dell EMC and this new Converge company, if you will, and what they're bringing to the marketplace now. 13,500 attendees, has to be a lot of great stories to hear, I'm looking forward to it. And to help us tell a lot of that story is Bob Wambach, who's the vice president of marketing at Dell EMC, and Bob, thanks for being on theCUBE. Good to see you, sir. My pleasure, it's great to be back again, John. Yeah, tell us about maybe the vibe you got right now. I know it's early, but the keynote's just now wrapping up here. We've had David Blaine out on stage, talking about this magical transformation that Dell EMC is facilitating. Yeah, and I think that, to me, that's like the excitement is all about, everybody recognizes that we are on to a new era now. It's the, IT has really changed. Business is demanding transformation, and there's so much technology innovations that people can take advantage of. And our job really is to help them along that journey and to allow them to transform digital transformation for new applications, new ways of doing business, but the IT transformation to support that through infrastructure, and then workforce transformation and security transformation. So it's really, really exciting, and it's all here this week. So you have your customers looking at this and then thinking that, all right, we feel like we had modernized, and now you're telling us that we need to take it up a step, or they know themselves, they've got to ratchet it up a little bit. What are you hearing from people about maybe the headaches or the considerations that they have as this process or evolution continues? Well, I think there's a realization from almost all customers now that the old way of doing IT, where you select your server, you select your storage, networking, and then you put it together yourself, they spend most of their time trying to keep those things up and running. How do I validate new stuff coming into the infrastructure and test for interoperability? How do I patch and upgrade this? And that is a way of the past now. I think people see within public cloud has helped this along great. With public cloud, you are paying a fee and you have access to IT that is pretty much just there. So this idea of there's a different way of doing things is really brought itself into the on-premise infrastructure right now with the concept of private cloud. And hybrid cloud is both public and private on-premise. So customers have frequently seen the value of public cloud and they're saying I can't run everything in the cloud. In fact, what I've heard is there's a lot of stuff that I have in public cloud that I could run much more cost effectively if I had a productive on-premise cloud. And that's really what we've been focused on. So it's not the speeds and feeds focus, it's really how do you transform yourself so that you get out of this siloed environment and start thinking more in terms of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure and then developing hybrid cloud platforms on top of that? So Bob, as a customer, I understand speeds and feeds. Latest storage array comes out the VMAX 950X with the biggest IOPS. I understand that and I can translate that. How do you help your IT customers extract the value of IOPS to transformation? It's connecting what you're doing in the data center to what is happening in the business. That's really what it amounts to. And what has held people back is the day-to-day drudgery of doing everything in these siloed environments. So it's helping customers to assess where they are right now, how do you do things? How might things have to look like? How would you like things to run? And then how do we help you get there? So it's more of a focus on what does the business need and do you really need to worry so much about the speeds and feeds? Or is it more about how do I operate as a company? And really what we've seen with the converged platforms and solutions division is by offering customers pre-engineered turnkey systems that are fully engineered where the burden of the life cycle assurance is really taken out of their hands. There's a prescriptive way that these things can be managed, supported and sustained as a single system. And this really frees customers up to focus more on business priorities. So that's a different conversation than we're accustomed to in the infrastructure space. And as a vendor, you guys have to be challenged with that transformation internally. What changes have happened inside of Dell EMC to help make that conversation inside the converged group? I think the first is a realization that this is in a sense a challenger situation for customers is that rather than asking the customers what they want, we're trying to offer guidance on we know you're in this predicament, you have to think about changing yourself. And it's not even so much a total cost of ownership of all this infrastructure. It's what is the value that you're getting out of it. So we've had a two year old initiative now called the customer value program that helps customers assess where you are and chart really a business value assessment of what you want to get out of it and then really create these, it's transformation plans for them. It's here's what you can do with your infrastructure, here's what you can do with your cloud plans and then here's how your operations and your organizations can change. There's certification programs that people can get, there's professional services that people can choose. And then we also, one of the things that I'm really a big fan of is the residency services where you get an expert who's done all this stuff before, they've done it at different customers, helped them transform. You can have this person come in and work with your team three months, six months and really become experts yourselves through this. So this is what we're really, really finding is, is that these programs that are set up to help customers help themselves have a tremendous amount of potential to help customers get along that journey. Any specific victories you want to share, customer stories? You know, I think when I look at it and there's a lot of victories, you know, I've been, I started out, you know, EMC long time veteran and then was in the VCE joint venture and as we go through and we look at what the customer experiences have been, there are customers that if you bought a V block and you treated it like all of your old infrastructure, you quickly turn it into not a V block and you don't realize a lot of value, like the V block didn't really help you and then there are customers that went in and transformed themselves, got tremendous amount of value out of it. What I find interesting are the stories of customers who either are very happy with their infrastructure but they haven't gotten value and showing them there's much, much more or customers that have bought it and then didn't realize all the value we got. One of our customers, a large industry customer, two years after they had their V block, we were looking at a refresh opportunity and they said, well you guys are definitely in the game but we're looking around at other options too and we were like, you know, why are you not happy with it? And they were like, well, we're happy but it didn't give us everything we wanted and we said, well, what did it give you? And they said, we use a lot less people to manage the infrastructure now. But that saved us money and we started, we applied this program methodology to it and as we dug into what were the changes now from what you had, they had millions of dollars a year and less downtime, right? So you think about the resources and the loss business, everything associated with downtime, their downtime had gone to zero, that was a million dollars a year benefit and they're like, wow, you don't think about downtime when you don't have downtime, you think about downtime when you're down. When you actually have downtime, right? So that was one thing and then the other is he said these people that no longer had to work on the V block, what did you do? Did they get laid off or what? And they said, no, we repurposed them and they started some new initiatives and we asked them what became of those new initiatives and it turned out these people, several people went off and they were working on new services for the company and they had a return of a million and a half dollars a year out of this new thing they had started. So it ends up, you can take customers just from understanding how you're supporting the business, how your infrastructure is supporting your attempts to support the business. Customers can really become their own champions of what they do. Like this IT team didn't realize how good they were compared to what they had been in the past and these are things that's very valuable for them to take to the customer. So those are the things, those are the examples I really, really like because you're showing customers that what you do actually matters to the business. It matters a lot. You're helping your company be more successful. Well, customer value is what it's all about and obviously you're bringing that home at Dell EMC. Thanks for being with us Bob. We appreciate the time and wish you a great show. Okay, John, thank you very much. Off to a super start. Keith, good to see you again. Bob Lomback, continuing here on theCUBE from Dell EMC World with more in just a moment. See you in about two minutes or so.