 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live. This is theCUBE coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I got to get used to that. I'm used to saying EMC World, but this is Dell EMC World. The first year officially as the Dell EMC World, a continuation of our eight years of live coverage, proud coverage with theCUBE. And I'm joining with Paul Gill and Mike Coho, this week for three wall-to-wall coverage days. And our next guest has been on every year. theCUBE has been in existence. Howard Elias is the president of Dell Services of 90. Good friend of theCUBE and senior executive at Dell Technologies and Dell EMC. Howard, great to see you. Hey, great to be back. You've seen every corner of EMC over the years. You've so much experience and you've been really the captain and holding the wheel on the transaction that closed eight months ago. In September of the Dell Technologies, now Dell EMC company, really smooth. Considering what could have gone wrong, you kind of stayed away from all the icebergs, but yet it feels good. I haven't heard any real horror stories at all. I heard all positive things. The story is great. I just tweeted pretty much my take on the story, win, consolidate the pre-existing traditional IT and then have a growth strategy around cloud native conversion for structure. Good story. Okay, how's it going? You know what, and thank you for that. First of all, great to be with both of you and it's just going great. And I do want to make sure I co-capped in the integration together with my great friend and colleague, Rory Reed. And, but really we had the great benefit of Joe and Michael kind of setting the stage. We've talked before on theCUBE about the industrial logic of the deal, but frankly the team has come together in a phenomenal way. We are aligned, we are operating as one company. You heard Michael and David both talk about better together today. You'll hear more about that from Jeff and Pat and others over the next couple of days. And look, for all of the things that could've gone wrong in a very large combination like this, they went right instead. And the best proof of that is our customers. Our customers are buying more from us. The conversations are richer, they're more strategic, they're more in depth, and they're rooting for us and we're rooting for them. Yeah, Dave and I would sometimes be critical of EMC, but you guys never really had a bad strategy. You never really stayed out, never went outside your swim lane with respect to services and what you do, pure storage, getting the arrays, get the software to find data center in there. But now with the acquisition, I got to ask you the question is, the portfolio of deliverables that you guys now have and kind of Michael kind of strutting on stage, kind of proud of his new families, he says, the brotherhood or however he puts it, you got a lot more in your disposal, more in your bag if you will, for services, especially with VMware and NSX, doing extremely well, we're going to have Pat Gelsinger on tomorrow, not a lot of pressure yet to have that cloud story completely baked, multi-clouds a nice placeholder, but you have a lot more. Talk about what you guys are, where that new growth is coming from on the services. Well specifically on cloud, I would say by the way, and we've talked about this a lot, cloud is not a place of computing, it's a style of computing, it's the new way all computing is done. And I would say we're a great leader in providing all of that capability in a hybrid fashion, a multi-cloud world, look much more on that later, but look, you said it, we've always believed that where we've been, technology and IT is a means to an end, and we're now all about helping our customers with the broadest portfolio in the industry across those four main transformations, digital, IT, workplace, and security. And it's really the story about helping a customer become more digital, become more agile, become more flexible, and really in addition to those systems of record that they've been working on for a number of years, and we've been helping them, it's really those systems of engagement, and the systems of insight that really give that end-to-end view in this new world. To Howard, I want to ask you, I want to go back to the acquisition briefly, because I'm a Massachusetts guy, as are you, you went through, you were a digital during the compact acquisition, compact during the HP acquisition, both deals that I think we would say generously did not go very well. What did you learn from that experience that you've brought to this integration? Well, so I'll tell you, and this is really one of the things about what went right, a lot of it is based on experience. You know, what you learn to do right is learning what not to do wrong the next time, and I was engaged in some of those, certainly didn't lead those, but I was engaged with them, but look, we had a lot of things going for us. Joe and Michael completely aligned, business colleagues, respectful friendship over a number of years. Dell and EMC had a strong partnership for a better on of a decade, so we already learned how to work well together in the cultures and we understood the way each other worked. The industrial logic of the deal, the complimentary technology portfolio, complimentary market and customer segments, the ability to now have scale in a world where scale matters, where customers are looking to drive out costs, efficiency and agility. And look, what Rory and I did was we applied all of those lessons learned, we picked our best people, pulled them out and put them full time on the job. We had rigorous cadence, regular face to face, meetings with Michael and Joe all the way throughout, kept everybody informed, and it's just come together extremely well. Howard, talk about the services you're doing. First, talk about the hard news you're announcing at the show, and then specifically talk about the digital transformation, not to put a damper on your messaging, but we're kind of bored with digital transformation. We want to get some meat on the bone. And I like to quote on stage, digital transformation about IT transformation. I think that's where your bull's eye is. So, hard news, and then where's the meat on the bone with respect to the IT transformation as part of that digital transformation? Well, first of all, hopefully you won't get too tired because digital transformation is the mantra for a long time to come, because we're in the early days. And by the way, to us, digital transformation is really business transformation. It's becoming more software-defined. It's becoming closer to your customers. It's understanding your customers' needs many times before they even know they need it. And that's that whole real-time insights, analytic, AI, machine learning, all of that's going to be happening. So, we're on that mission big time. And in terms of services, so we've been on a, and we've described a three-phase journey that will take a couple of years. Phase one, we talked about collaboration where, look, the teams were coming together, learning each other, systems, processes, tools being different. So, collaborate, operate as one in front of the customer. We're in phase two right now, integration. We're starting to bring the, we've already brought the teams together. But for example, at this show, we're announcing bringing all of our services under the marketing umbrella of pro support and pro deploy. There are still different systems and tools and entitlement, but we're going to start to bring together that integration where, ultimately, systems, processes, and tools come together, and that gets to the third phase of unification, and so it's a journey. But throughout that journey, we are protecting the value we deliver our customers. Those customers that are used to the service that they get today, the way it's delivered, the people that are delivering it, we are not changing that as we bring our customers along the journey. You've mentioned a number of times analytics and the importance of understanding the customer better. Dell EMC does not really have a play in that area. There's no software component that addresses that market. Is that a market that you think you would like to address directly, or do that through partners? We actually do that today, both directly and through partners, really pivotal being a key part of the overall Dell Technologies portfolio. We actually have a big data digital transformation practice as part of our consulting. If you think about our consulting organization, where we help in IT transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation. We work with our customers and partners on security as well. Pivotal is a key partner, but we also work with many others. And in fact, one of the offerings we're announcing here at the show today is an IoT assessment service. So something to really work again from base infrastructure, because you think about edge to core to cloud, how to make sure you aggregate the data, do the real-time analytics close to the edge, and then the trend data more in the core and long-time archival in the cloud. So at that point, I want to ask you about the cloud strategy, because everyone in the press, oh, what's your cloud strategy? What's your cloud? I think you guys have a good play. I think the cloud strategy, multi-cloud is legit, and hybrid cloud is real, 100% real. Multi-cloud's still not ready for prime time for a lot of other reasons. But you guys are doing some stuff in the cloud with disaster recovery and some storage stuff. Take us through the sequence of, because as you said, it's early innings, I would agree, what are the sequence of order of operations in terms of the kinds of services that go to the cloud first? Well, in terms of what application or services? You guys are working with customers on, what are the customers doing with respect to, what are they going to the cloud for first with respect to Dell EMC? So again, it gets back to cloud is not a place. We're not moving things to a cloud. We're actually, all applications, all workloads, all services and processes are becoming cloud enabled, whether that's helping the customer in their data center with a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, hosted by a partner, or on public cloud. And you said it, we actually, with our services organization, we'll actually sit down with the customer, we'll look at their entire application and workload portfolio. We run it through filters of economics, service level, security, and performance. And then from there, we build a roadmap with the customer. Which types of workloads makes sense in your own private cloud? Which do you want to host in a virtue stream cloud or a partner's cloud? Or which do you want to do in the public cloud? How about data protection? Do you want to protect the data in the cloud, to the cloud, from the cloud? All of those are the conversations we take our customers through. And we have many, many, many, like, not just dozens now, hundreds of examples where we are working with customers on implementing their hybrid cloud strategy. Paul, before you go, I know he's got a question, but I got a question from the crowd. Crowd's watching, thank you for sending the questions on crowdchat.net slash delimcworld. Can they deliver integrated services for on-prem question mark? Dat.dot reasons people go to the cloud. So one of the reasons is the integration end-to-end. How are you guys delivering some of those integrated services on-prem? Because that's where it's starting. It is starting there. And we actually do both operational services, residency-based services, but also managed services. Again, both directly and with partners, based on where we've got capabilities and skills and geography and verticals. So we work with our customers to deliver, again, that continuum. Many customers have the skills to do it themselves. Most customers do not. And they want us to augment their skills. Again, whether it's operational or residency services or a full-fledged managed service for cloud. As the head of services, I want to ask you about the kind of odd timing. You came on in September and in November, Dell sold off a large part of its services business. Business is the former pro-systems to NTT. What was the thinking there? Should we think of that part of the services business as being completely different from that which you- Extremely different. So, and I know we get some questions on this, so thanks for asking it, it's great to clarify it. The Dell Services Organization, the old former pro-business that Dell had acquired, was really more outsourcing, IT outsourcing, some BPO, some APO. Work that we really did not want to continue doing in the new company going forward. Our services are closer to the technology, technology enablement services to help the adoption and consumption of our technology. And we really work with a broad ecosystem of partners to deliver the more outsourced services, APO and BPO. So it's very clean from that set. We actually did not divest any of our technology services at all, in fact, we're investing more. That's consistent with what HP did with Pointnext. Similar kind of, they had that EDS kind of thing. Completely orthogonal to the operations, what you're saying? Right, and we've got such a phenomenal partner ecosystem that do this very well each and every day in all kinds of customer verticals and all kinds of geographies. They really have scale, and we do this together with them. Okay, tough question, put you on the spot, Howard, but I know you can handle it. If you can go back and get a mulligan from last year at the integration, what mulligan would you tweak and change with the integration? You know, I tell you, I'm actually asked that question a lot, and I'm not sure I would change anything. Look, let's face it, did everything go perfect? Nothing ever does. Are there some things that go bumping the night occasionally? But you know, all the big stuff, if I focus on the major stuff, right, in terms of the company structure, the operating model, the organizational structure of the company, the alignment of the go-to-market, the alignment of the services, the product roadmaps in the portfolio, all of that went about as well as could be expected. Talk about the momentum. VMware, obviously, I was commenting on my opening, has a bigger market cap than actually HPE, just by on a standalone basis. VMware is central in your services. I mentioned Cloud, they've got a great Cloud Play, recent deal with Amazon Web Services. How are you guys looking forward now? And if you can add some color to the conversations you're having with customers. So you get a lot of things that you're disposable. I'm trying to understand the top areas that customers are engaging you guys are, with respect to the VMware and this Cloud-native shift and NSX and all that good stuff. So actually, the big conversations are exactly that in three dimensions. One is working with both Pivotal and VMware on the PaaS and IaaS layers. So they want to see that platform in place, they want to see the agility, the flexibility, the Cloud-native essentials that are necessary to develop and deploy these new applications. By the way, also refactoring existing applications that they're deciding to keep into a more Cloud-native world. Second is automation. How do I automate the IT infrastructure? Yeah, I'll modernize it, I'll go all-flash, I'll go scalable, but how do I pull the labor cost out and be able to take that labor into more creative, innovative areas of my company? But I want to automate IT. And then third is to make sure that the cost-effectiveness and the resiliency of that infrastructure is top-notch in world-class. Those are the conversations. The CIOs today, their job is getting more and more tough. They need to pull costs out. They have to have agility and flexibility. But oh, by the way, the systems can never go down. And I want that new IoT thing. I want that new data analytic thing. I want that new machine learning thing. So give me that agility and flexibility and creativity going forward. And those are the conversations we're having every day. Howard is the guy who sort of oversaw this consolidation of these two companies. You have a chance to do something, I think no companies, no two big companies have ever done before, which has successfully merged. We were thinking earlier about is there a precedent for a merger of this size that actually worked out? And we couldn't think of one. Certainly not an IT. Not an IT, right, exactly. What makes you think this one will be different other than the fact that you're running it? Well, I'm running services in IT now. I helped put the playbook together. Look, the senior leadership team is now running it. And that's why we're going to continue to win because of our relentless focus on customers. We all spend a tremendous amount of time understanding what our customers are doing, what more they want us to do, the feedback from our customers. We spend almost as much time with our partners as well. But this leadership team is on the mission. And it's about creating the essential infrastructure company for the next great era of IT, the industrial revolution where we know that companies need to transform in all those dimensions we talk about. And our leadership team, and we're just actually going through our next, we call Tell Dell Survey, where we also get feedback from our team members, from our employees. And our measurements are clear. We measure ourselves on customer NPS, our team member employee NPS, our relative market share performance. Are we gaining share or are we not? And then all of that will deliver the financials that we all look for. And we are all aligned on that. Howard, you also oversee the Dell IT program. This is proven IT program. What is that about? I've heard some buzz about that. Yeah, so this started several years ago where a lot of customers would say, so you want me to buy XYZ solution, array, converged infrastructure offering, so show me how you use it. And so we actually formalized a program we call Proven IT, or IT Proven, where the practitioners from our IT organization actually meet with customers. We write white papers. So it's really drinking our champagne of our own technology, but it's the practitioners that actually work with our customers to say, hey, by the way, here's the five things that work. Here's the two things that didn't work. Here was the work around. Here's how we mitigated. So you're sharing. We're sharing. It's experiential sharing. And that's certainly relevant. And as you guys crank out the new technology, deploy it. Absolutely. And all the systems involve automating is challenging. Okay, final question. What's next? What's going to be the one year out look for you guys? What are you guys thinking about? What's on the table? What's on the back burner? What's on the front burner? What's cooking up in your world? We're going to continue to execute on our mission of staying focused on our customers. We want to drive up the CSAT and the CNPS. First and foremost, we know we have to help our customers adopt and consume the technology they're buying from us. They have to be absolutely at world class satisfaction levels, or they're not going to buy more, and they're not going to tell their friends and colleagues to come talk with us. And then we're going to continue to build out the richness of our portfolio, because we're getting so much request from customers. Help me with this, help me with that. And so it's going to scale that, but we're going to scale it directly and with our partner ecosystem. Howard, great to see you. Thanks for coming and joining on theCUBE for the eighth consecutive year. It's been a great journey for us as well. In fact, I remember the first slogan, journey to the private cloud. Oh yes. And the Wikibon has some new market share routes. It's going to be a $260 billion market that's true private cloud. So you guys are number one in that as well, Dell EMC. Great to see you and congratulations on a very successful transaction, and hope to see more updates along the way. You got it, great to see you. Thank you very much. This is theCUBE live coverage from Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillen. We'll be right back with more coverage. Stay with us.