 from the Silicon Valley Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome everybody to this special presentation. This is CUBE Conversations. We're talking about digital platforms and how IT is transforming in this digital age. Peter Kutze is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Dell EMC. Peter, good to see you again. Good to see you as well. So you guys got big announcement coming up around sort of powering data-driven organizations, Dell EMC world, bringing together these two technology powerhouses. So set the table for us. What's going on in your world? A lot. So the good news is it's been incredibly exciting and a lot of just opportunities and things closing together. Obviously we're now one company, Dell EMC, that makes things incredibly easy and the opening up of customer bases and being able to talk about some of this transformation that we're doing. The key for our organization is really to focus on delivering Hybrid Cloud Platforms, which is really the change and shift you're seeing in IT buying and IT experience. They're really looking for that business-driven outcome. They're looking for turnkey operations. They want to spend a lot less time in actually building stuff and a lot more time in focusing on their customer, focusing on their digital transformation, focusing on getting that data-driven app out there as well as automating their legacy infrastructure and getting it quick and agile. So those are really the key things that we're focused on and that's what we're talking about today. Well, what's behind some of those drivers? Are companies on offense or defense? Are they fearful of getting disrupted? Are they trying to disrupt? What are you seeing in the customers? I'd say both, right? So the market today is about the disruptors who are actually going into the market and kind of changing the way either that you, easy ones, you call a car to go to the airport or other disruptive technologies like sensors being in pretty much a refrigerator to track, give people the ability to understand if it's full or if it's empty, that those things are disrupting everything. And so the need for the business to be able to have better insight into their customer, the need for the business to be able to use IT infrastructure and capabilities and software and all these things is a turnkey offering with single call support to deliver an experience has gotten greater and that's what we're seeing from all of our customers is they're really coming to that realization. Now there are customers who are still focusing on build and that's great, but any of those who really want to make that shift, focus on the IT transformation and focus on their customer, we're here to help. So this notion of digital transformation in large part, you could say in the full part is all about data, if it's digital it's data. What are some of the challenges that organizations face in becoming so-called data driven, everybody talks about data is the new oil but people are executive certainly are buying into it, they see it as an imperative but they're challenged in how to get there. What are some of those challenges? Yeah, so I mean if you think about it, the chief data officer or the data scientist is really a kind of a new thing for some folks but it's really kind of core to others of these disruptors business. And the reason that I think that's so important is that customers overall, and again this is nothing to do with IT, this is just customers out in the landscape, they're expecting a more personalized experience, they're expecting you, when you go look at your bill or when you call into a call center or when you go to purchase something at a place, you're getting a personalized experience no matter what you do. And whether that's banking, whether that's manufacturing, tracking IoT, whether those things are all associated, oil doing better, oil and gas as an industry looking at their, let's call it assets better and extracting more value, the end customer is really the key here. And so when you tie that all together, data-driven analysis and being able to understand your customer's actions and how you can improve their experience is a focal point and that's where this digital transformation really impacts everybody. So it seems like a reasonable starting point is for customers is how can data enhance the way in which I make money? I've been talking about for-profit companies obviously, for non-profit it's how can I produce better outcomes whether it's for patients or citizens, et cetera, but let's stick with the profit example for a minute. A lot of organizations early on in this big data movement thought, okay, how can I sell my data? And that's hard, right, competing with data sources but increasingly companies are learning, well they know how they make money. They're learning how data can enhance the way they make money or produce new opportunities. Do you see that in the customer base and are we sort of moving now very quickly in that direction where organizations are understanding the value of their data? Yeah, so if you look at kind of our spectrum of offerings and this is one of the unique things Dell EMC can actually bring to the table for customers, you look at the enterprise hybrid cloud, it's all about automating your legacy or traditional applications, making them have their own life cycle, they're managed better, your database administrators don't spend a lot of time doing the things they used to, they spend more time focused on getting those apps more efficient and running better. Then you look at the native hybrid cloud which is really all about pulling together that cloud native experience, get them to transform, build new applications. The kind of third pillar of that is the analytics insight module which we're announcing, obviously a Dell EMC world and really that ties it all together by allowing those kind of what I would call traditional data sources, new data sources of course in the more cloud native world, all into a single platform that allows you to ingest it, source it, put lineage on it, tie it together with security and give the data scientist a tool to take the data that you're saying that they'd be collecting and actually pull into a source and whether that's on public cloud or private, they can actually analyze it and provide a better experience to their customers. Now whether that's, give some examples of once we have financial institutions looking to solicit or looking to really focus offers to pull customers away from their competitors but they're using big data to do that, they're using the analytics, they're using the capabilities of the platform. Same thing could be said for kind of some of the entertainment companies. We have entertainment company that's looking at targeting offers by geolocation, by specific where they are at a time, where they've purchased in the past. Same thing could be said for a healthcare customer which again you'll have on the cube which is awesome, really looking at how they change the experience for people's healthcare. That personalized experience is what the data allows and it's unique and it's going to be that thing that builds that trusted relationship with a customer and an end user as opposed to just trying to blanket offers out there or experiences for them that aren't more tailored or custom. You know what's interesting about this discussion and others we've had talking about the Dell EMC hybrid cloud solutions is we're not talking about hardcore infrastructure. We're not talking about VMs or flash storage or ports, et cetera. We're talking about organizations, analytic insights, personas. We finally at the stage, Peter, where the infrastructure is invisible as Chad Sackett predicted all those years ago. Well, so I think we're not quite there yet but I would say it's getting close and the one thing I would say that's still there is from a standpoint of a hybrid cloud platform our goal is to make it invisible. But still if you're in the build category you're going to spend a lot of time and effort and you're going to build that out and you're going to have to make all of these automation pieces and you're going to have to pull together the toolkit to allow a data scientist to achieve the same things that they get turnkey out of a hybrid cloud platform from Dell EMC. And so I'd say that in the hybrid cloud platforms world our goal is to actually hit that and I think we are almost there with across all of the spectrums whether that's P2 or traditional cloud, cloud native and now of course analytics. This really closes the trifecta off and so I think we'll close that gap in the next six months to a year. What are you finding in terms of, I mean you're offering both. You want to build it? We'll say the parts to do it. If you want to buy it as a solution we've got that too. What's the decision point for customers? I think it depends, right? It's different for every customer. I think there's a lot of customers who are still building, still have great teams that do that and we want to support them in any way we can. I think those customers who maybe have that experience that maybe didn't go so well or they've spent a lot of time and effort and potentially a lot of money on building something out and it hasn't necessarily reaped the rewards that they've been looking for. Those customers are now looking for that turnkey offering, looking for that experience and I can tell you again with the combination of whether it's enterprise hybrid cloud, native hybrid cloud, now the analytics insight module and of course we also have something called DHCS for the Microsoft stack. Dell EMC is one stop shopping for turnkey offerings across all cloud spectrums, completely hybrid enabled and it allows them that really quick time to value. Just the example I gave you on enterprise hybrid cloud about life cycling databases, like do you really want DBAs to have to be patching those things or can you use an automation tool to life cycle them and take care of that for you? That's a simple example, but one that effectively can return a lot of time and value and money back to the company. So let's talk strategy for a minute. I'm hearing choice is a fundamental part of the strategy but specifically around cloud, what's the cloud strategy? So the cloud strategy is really the pillars that we've talked about. So focus on those traditional applications, automate them, make them self-service. The real focus and what I would say for hybrid cloud platforms is the persona that end user. We want to get the database administrator, the application owner and basically the business owner to be able to manage their application, steer their life cycle and automate a significant amount of the tasks so that they get what they need and that's a traditional application automation that you would get out of cloud. Perfect, great. But there's those other kind of pillars that you need which actually come out of it which is the cloud native development. You need to go create, even if you just start, customers realize they need to go create a small cloud native initiative or larger ones if you're looking at companies like GE, et cetera and they need to go start and actually focus on some type of app that they want to transform into this new experience and then you wrap that all up with the data-driven analytics insight module and you kind of tie that all together with the data sources being not only your traditional but also your net new and cloud native. Tie that all together into a data scientist self-service portal where the app dev and the data scientist can work together on changing that experience. That's really the strategy. It's to tie those things together, take out costs in one area and automate, focus on net new development and different experience and allow that analytics insight to be able to take action for a business owner. So it's about empowering the business to be able to actually do something with that data and of course make money and engage with their customer better. The other thing that's changing in these conversations is the personas, right? Earlier we were talking about DBAs, we used to talk about and still do storage admins and UNIX admins, VMware admins, et cetera but increasingly we're talking about personas of data scientists, data engineers, business analysts, the data quality folks. Talk about how the persona is changing and what that means from a product and marketing standpoint. Well, I think there's still, of course, there's storage admins, VM admins, those things are absolutely still there for customers who are still managing applications in a traditional way and they're going to continue. That's not the majority I would say of the current landscape, what you're seeing is that transition to your point of the persona and what they're looking to do. As an example, when you talk about a cloud administrator, a cloud administrator is really looking at the infrastructure health and capacity planning and literally kind of managing the workflows and automation, they're not necessarily doing any provisioning or manual operations, right? So that changes the persona of inside IT of the people who manage, right? The operations team who keep those cloud native applications running, those teams need to have toolkits and insights to be able to see into that. And again, we provide that, whereas if you're doing this kind of on your own, you've got to go build a toolkit to be able to see between the cloud native app and the actual infrastructure that it's running on. And so that sounds like a simple thing, but it's very important for people who are really trying to make this simple and get turnkey results. And so persona-wise, now we're focused on the developer experience, it's seamless and they can talk to the operator. Then the last piece is, to your point, data scientists need a self-service portal. They need the ability to publish lineage, secure data, allow to share it where they need to, and have that all running on a scalable infrastructure that they don't have to think about, right? So they don't want to think about the pieces below, but they want to know that it's going to be there and then they get a seamless experience. So absolutely changes the way you approach our customers and the way that we approach building platforms, right? So we used to, to your point, focus just on the CI or HCI or components. We're now also able to give those turnkey experiences with all the software and components in a single solution. Well, and the value equation is shifting. John Furrier likes to say that data is the new development kit. So you've got data scientists and application developers now, clearly they're different roles, but the developer is working a lot more than with data in a different way, thinking about business outcomes in a different way. Whereas it used to be the data warehouse was sort of the place where the insights lived for a few. Eventually they'd get out to the organization. We all complained that it's too late. Now it's the business outcome that the data is serving. Do you see that? So absolutely confirm that, right? So it goes back to the examples I gave of customers before. They didn't come to Dell EMC and say, I want to go, you know, to buy some infrastructure. They came to us and said, we have a data, data scientists need. We want to be able to be more competitive and potentially take customers away from our competitive banks. What can you do to help us do that? Analytics Insight module with native hybrid cloud that allows the developers and the data scientists to work together to analyze their data and tailor offerings and be able to compete in the market, right? The same thing can be said for the healthcare example where they're out there looking at, how do I serve my customer better by delivering them a differentiated experience that makes them feel more connected and that we're delivering the right healthcare at the right time? That's a totally different starting point for the business than I need some infrastructure to run an app on. And that's like game changing. That is the difference that we're seeing. And the good news is again, Dell EMC with the portfolio we have and the services support, it's a great partnership that we can build with these customers. The chief data officer role has emerged as well in this whole big data marketplace and obviously started out in regulated businesses. Many of us thought that the chief information officer, it was, here's her role to really be the data steward. In many respects that CDO emerged because the CIO was sort of too busy doing other stuff, making sure the infrastructure worked, serving the business in other ways, not necessarily in a data and certainly in a governance role. But what are you seeing is terms of how CIOs are embracing or adjusting to this new reality. Well, and again, they are and they have to. It's changes is necessary for these particular modern cloud native applications that approaches, right? You can't continue to do everything the same way that was done before. What I see from CIOs specifically is a huge embrace of these data scientists and the chief data officers, that role because they work together, they can deliver business transformation. The thing I always like to talk about when you look at any of the cloud offerings or analytics insight module, it's about IT literally becoming a value center, not a cost center. When you can deliver that where the marketing and the sales department feels like you are transforming the way they engage with a customer. When a healthcare end user rates you really high because you're giving them a personalized experience. When in the oil and gas world where you're extracting more value out of one of your assets. That's like game changing, right? That's not just saving the company money. That's making companies significant amount of money by extracting value and delivering better experience. So that's the difference I see is they're embracing it in a big way. And again, we can help those customers who want to do it very quickly with turnkey offerings across the board. Well, I like to say that we're entering sort of the third wave of value creation with big data first was like, what is Hadoop? Can I get it to work? Again, it didn't create a lot of initial business value. And then a lot of the value as I'm sure you saw came from cutting my costs. I can store a bunch of data here cheaper than I can in my enterprise data warehouse. Okay, check, but that's not transformative. And now we're entering this transformative phase, the digital era. How can I drive monetization strategies and create substantially more value on one of the other premises that we've had is that the consumers of technology, the practitioners, are going to create more value than the vendors. And that's playing out, isn't it? It is. And you nailed it. You nailed it. It is that third step or however you paraphrase that it really is that next wave of what's happening is because the data that people have been keeping or corralling or kind of leaving stagnant in different places and even just letting it sit, now they can actually use it for insights to look at customer trends, look at some natural resources they have that it might need to analyze differently, look at the way they deliver an experience to their end customer, change the way they market or deliver services. Those are all things that they can now achieve by having the data, storing the data, analyzing it and creating apps that actually provide value to not only them but to the customer. So it's the next wave and it's a huge shift for customers but it's a powerful one and it's happening. Why Dell EMC? I mean, you've got these two hugely successful companies, EMC, the best at storage, which was again, transforming with what was then known as the Federation. You've got Dell best PC company, great server company, bringing those together. You don't want to just be a great PC and server company and a great storage company. You want to be something more. So what's happening within Dell EMC? Why Dell EMC? Well, so there's a couple of different things. When you pull together the EMC, legacy EMC services organization with the Dell services organization, you just get world-class. So that's one thing that really helps us and again gives us a differentiated experience. Same thing for support. When you take that support experience and it's critical and I'll get to why it's so important with the hybrid cloud platforms as you get that single turnkey system with a single call support. But I think it's really starting at the main part about choice and about really combining together two entities that both were missing pieces. We have a lot of storage assets. We were really doing well in the HCI market and the CI market. But again, I think that many have said this, but having that server really be an option as part of that HCI experience gives us an opportunity to offer transformative solutions and offerings and just transformative day-to-day transactions for our customers all in a single place. And specifically, if we kind of focus in on the hybrid cloud platforms, we can offer any of the cloud variants. So we've got to, whether you're focused on the Microsoft flavor, VMware, OpenStack, cloud native with Pivotal, and again the analytics insight module across the board, we offer those all in turnkey systems with single call support and full service coverage. So when you look at kind of that experience, I think Dell EMC really brings to the table a complete solution. And again, our customer's response has been very positive in seeing that combination. How's the integration going? They're not a ton of overlap. People have noted that between the two companies. You don't get, when you call people from Dell, you call people from EMC, they're still responsive. You don't get a lot of, well, we're bogged down and merger stuff. But I'm on the outside, as an insider, what's happening there with the integration? Well, I think the cool part is that it's happening very fast. And to your point, there's not a ton of overlap where you're really crossing wires. It's more of literally the running parallel and it's how do we make sure we optimize and connect. And the great part is the culture is really aligned. And so what that's allowed is people to really kind of move together, move to the right answer, and actually move forward very quickly. And again, the teams are running full force on delivering the best experience we can. And to your point, making sure our customers feel that and don't see any lapse in coverage. So that's what we're hearing from our customers. Things are going well and that's the way it feels internally. Yeah, I mean, it points to the culture. I mean, I know EMC very well. I've watched the company for decades and it's a culture of accountability and winning. And Michael Dell obviously is a winner. So I guess blending those together is a pretty powerful combination. All right, I'll give you the last word. We're going to be obviously at Dell EMC world. What's the future hold? Give us the bumper sticker. The future is literally to take these hybrid cloud platforms by storm into the market. The opportunity is great for customers to transform and we want to be there and help them as a partner. Because that's the real key is making our customers successful is our number one goal to your point of culture for both EMC and Dell and now Dell EMC. So huge opportunity and look forward to the partnerships. Peter, thanks for coming inside the cube as a little preview for what's coming the rest of the year, really appreciate it. No, thank you. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This has been Cube Conversations from headquarters at Wikibon, we'll see you next time.