 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Las Vegas here at Dell EMC World, theCUBE's live coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We're joined by Don Norback. He is the senior director, customer experience engineering, architecture and product management here at Dell EMC. It's a mouth bubble. We got it in. We're trying to get the largest title ever. So, well done, good job. So, talk to, explain to our viewers a little bit about what you do as a customer experience engineer. Well, it's really breaking down into three things. The first thing that we do is really look at our customers through data analytics and then try and understand what makes them successful. That's looking at their initial C set. That's looking at their interactions with our services teams and our support teams. Looking at the configurations that they have. Looking for patterns of causality and correlation. Second thing we do is a lot of our customers have a lot of ideas on how to expand the platforms and portfolios that we put out there under CPSD. How to expand the VX blocks, the VX racks, the VX rails. We take those ideas as field innovation. We look for the ones that are repeatable and we bring them back into the general roadmap. The third thing that we do is, and this is a new program, is what we're calling a not-so-secret shopper. So we go out and we act as a customer. We buy it. We experience the sales cycle. We ask the questions to go and consolidate down to the need. We go and install it and we live with it for a while and we give that feedback from an end-to-end customer experience perspective. And so talk about that not-so-secret shopper program. I love it. What are you finding? What's the feedback? We're finding that you can only prepare for every question that you know. So we find a lot of times that customer experience have been great but there's those little things that we don't think are nits but that do come up when you switch your perspective and put it into their shoes. Literally and physically and sometimes. That you're not going to understand what a customer feels unless you're acting like that customer. You're walking a mile in the customer shoes. That goes a long way because when you're an engineer you tend to think of things within your own data center or within your own product development experience. You don't always have that perspective. Now I had a unique thing because I came from a customer. Seven years ago I bought one of the first V blocks. It took me about eight weeks to bring up. We had revenue flowing through it. We set it up as a cloud for a service provider and I continued to drive that experience of what I felt back into what we do every day. So how has the customer conversation changed from seven, eight years ago to now? Same conversation, different conversation? It's actually both. So this is my 10th EMC world, Dell EMC world. I've been as a customer and as a presenter and we tell the transformation story. We tell the transformation story that you have to stop doing certain things like playing around with cables to be able to do certain other greater things for your organization, for the line of business. We still tell that story and it surprises me every EMC world that there is a percentage of customers that have not heard that. That can benefit from that experience. Sometimes you get a little jaded saying this, you know, same things over and over again but it is impactful, it does hit. For those customers that have gone through that transformation it's talking about what's next for the platform. So what are the opportunities that you're seeing out there? What is next? I think this show itself is highlighting some of the opportunities. You go back two or three EMC worlds ago and it was all about the product line itself. There is a VMAX world, there is a VNX world. Now those things are still highlighted but they're highlighted in how you can use them to achieve an outcome. They're embedded in a system, they're embedded in a solution, they're embedded in a practice or an approach to an outcome for a customer and innovation. So I think a lot of customers are hearing that story and you're seeing kind of a switch from asking how many spinny drives does this have to how can this change my business, change the way that we approach a business problem. So I'm interested in this second phase, this story behind innovation as I've gotten whether it's a VX block, a VX rail, whatever the platform that I've gotten in. There's integration points and I need help figuring it out. What are some of the innovations that your team has helped when you're, or actually what's some of the more interesting use cases that's come to your team and they've customers have asked you to help extend the capability of the platform? That's an excellent question. We've heard our customers. Coming into last year we had five V block families by VX block and then have a VX block version. So 10 different model lines. Customers wanted to combine some of the model lines and we found and heard that you couldn't get from say a 300 which was a VNX based, add a VMAX to it, it wouldn't work. But if you started with the VMAX based and added a VNX to it, it would work. The reason was the size of the MDS switches in between. So that doesn't make sense. You should be able to enable that to have a customer to have two storage arrays based on the need that they have. So the two innovations that came out of a customer, one was a process innovation, which was listening to the customer tell us what they were going to become rather than just what they needed today. So asking that question helped us gear them to an infrastructure that can support both use cases. Second one was changing the architectural approach and moving from three or from five model lines that you had to take the new hottest component and try and jam it into each of them and do five different engineering approaches. Well maybe if we just did one engineering approach we may be able to apply it to all the model lines that are appropriate. So instead of having a system out approach it was infrastructure up and customer need in. So what I keep hearing is really understanding the customer's needs and it sounds like this requires a lot of empathy. So how does this work just from the developer side in terms of working so closely with the customer and knowing the great questions to ask? I mean is there any kinds of advice that you give to your team in terms of how to really get at the problems? Because sometimes the customer doesn't even understand what the problem is. They just know there's an issue. First thing is to get out of speeds and feeds. If you get out of just the technical bits we usually have the argument yeah green cables are better than blue cables. You know I put that part doesn't matter. The part that matters is what you're going to use it for. So getting past that into why and the outcome is the first approach. And then after you get out of it and get answers based on that you can go into what I call PACS. Performance Availability Cost Compliance Security. Those are the hows that you achieve the why. Then you can get down to blue cables and green cables. But engineers always want to start with the green cable. I had bad experience with blue cable so I needed green cable this time. Why did you have a bad experience? You asked a bunch of questions and I'll evade the discussion. So put your customer head back on. First V-Block that you bought was eight years ago. You're almost coming up on your second refresh. What excites you about the new portfolio products? Where the portfolio has moved? What excites you? What excites me is if you think about all the configurations that are possible. It's 10 by a really large number. But not all of them are good. You can do anything, you can't do anything but you can't do everything. What excites me is that we're spending more and more times narrowing down the prescription on what's appropriate for purpose. And that's interesting for me for a customer because if I can buy something that I know it is appropriate for purpose, I can worry about that purpose, not just the infrastructure that I put it on. So that really excites me. Other things that really excite me are we're going to that broader architectural approach but still maintaining the prescription that allows us to give the support experience. And how we're doing that is we're going to see some things later in the year around the refresh of the V-Block that allows a lot more interconnectivity from those purposes. And that architectural infrastructure allows us to package things for purpose rather than creating a system per purpose. That's really interesting. But what really gets me is the future. The next step after that is how do we bring the benefits of software definition that has really lit the HCI world on fire to the convergence world? How do we bring that back down? So we have an amazing portfolio from servers to storage to networking. Wouldn't it be nice for us to go out and scan what a customer has and tell them what their infrastructure could become? What purposes it could be used for? What configurations are known good? What configurations are known bad that you should go and remediate? And I think we're really at that point where the software investments that we're making are going to lead us to that type of experience. I'm sensing the theme of next year's Dell EMC world. Right here, right here. Don, thanks so much for joining us. It was great. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsend. We'll have more from Dell EMC world after this.