 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back. Live, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, winding down three days of wall-to-wall cover. Got two senior guests from Dell Technologies here with us. Greg Bowen, senior vice president, CTO of Office of the CIO Dell Technologies and Gary Weissman, senior vice president, Office of the CIO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, great to be here. So we had Howard on, we had the CFO Tom Sweet on. Digital experience is a big part of it. On the news announcements, a lot of cloud stuff, but also a lot of workplace, workforce, human resource kind of vibe around the client edge. Digital technologies, work space, unified work spaces. All pointing to the benefits of what cloud and data can do, ultimately the end of the day. It has to drive great value in apps, but also user experience. I mean, people are working, they're mobile. This is one of the core themes of the show. You guys have a digital, Dell digital way kind of mission. What is that about? Tell us about that, because you're doing it internally, not even dog fooding, you're building it out in real time, rolling it out. Tell us, take us through the Dell digital way. Yeah, so the Dell digital way. If you guys have a Google digital transformation, good luck, the first six or seven results are all paid. Someone's trying to sell you the story on digital transformation. We're out there, and we're doing it all ourselves. We go to market with the IT transformation, workforce transformation, security, and application transformation. A lot of people are choosing to do those one or two at a time. We're trying to do it all at the same time. So we had to develop a way that allows to accelerate our path through that, and we call it the Dell digital way. It's really a people process and technology transformation that allows us to change our underlying culture. Really, the way we interact with the business, start with the business and the user first, and then work backwards from that. So the people part, it's really taking things from big functional silos that have a lot of matrix overlays and creating small balance teams that own their code. On process, it's taking very large programs that are just generating risk all the way up and breaking those down into small deliverables where you have very low risk. And then on the technology side, this is where we are drinking our own champagne. We're actually employing our reference architecture from VMware and Pivotal, all the way through the Dell EMC technologies in our own data centers, so we can operate as a multi-cloud environment as well. So it's not just an announcement from the top saying, okay, just go digital. We're hearing from some of the insiders in the hallways here at the conference, it's hardcore. It's training, agile training. I mean, this is not just talk, talk, talk. You guys are actually getting it done with the training. How important has that been? Because at the end of the day, everyone has all these kind of, they talk to talk, I might not walk the walk. It's training and getting the people right. At the end of the day, we have to change 10,000 hearts and minds in order to transform. And that means you have to touch those people and you have to actually train them to operate in the new world. If you don't do that, you can put all the technology you want into the environment. If they don't know how to use it, it does you no good. So we're starting with getting our people up skilled, getting them trained. We're taking program managers, putting them through full stack developer training. We've got our first sixties that are going to be graduating this summer. And then we're training the rest of them on the pivotal way. So that's really about starting with that customer and working backwards, user center design. How do people get the, how do companies get the people side, right? Because we all kind of work in the big companies. You guys are a lot bigger now at Dell Technologies, where kind of the old world was, let's reorganize, it's not working. You reorganize, it's a matrix organization. You know about agile teams, there's a lot of kind of HR issues that someone might be great on one team, not great on another. And so it's really about the attraction of talent, retaining talent, knowing when someone's a fit. Is this ad hoc? How do you guys get that right? Cause that seems to be a big part of it. Cause you got to be, to be agile, you don't want to be doing reorgs after the fact. Oh, we didn't post the numbers, we weren't successful. Let's reorg, which means failure. So how do you guys get that right? I think it's partly skills assessment going in, right? You actually know which people are right for which skills and there's really three key skills in this. There's the product manager, the product designer and engineering. And then there's a lot of people that come into the balance team after the fact. So it's really understanding where your teams are today and then getting and finding paths for them in the future. I don't know if you have any. Well, I also have to say, obviously being a company that presents itself as one that's modern from a development standpoint, our infrastructure, a place where really that next generation of developer or product manager or designer wants to come and work because they can see how we're really operating in this digital age. It's another key thing for us to make sure that as we recruit folks, particularly as we look at college hires, they're looking for those types of places to come to work. And so part of it's the workplace. We make sure that we have a modern looking workspace. We have open seating areas. We have lots of collaboration spaces for people to get together in. And of course with the technologies. We're very lucky to have such a rich set of technologies available within the company itself. So we have the pivotal methodology we use, but we have pivotal cloud foundry, which is a great way for people to go and build applications and run them in the cloud. We obviously have all of the things from a security standpoint that help us make sure that our customer data is secure. And so we can give them that insight as we bring them in. If we're trying to recruit people like the college hires as well as other industry folks that we're trying to attract, that we're in this big motion and we have scale. Right, that's the one big difference. South of the playbook then is, the playbook to get this right is core team, get that core fabric of whatever the objective is, product engineering, and then platooning people through and cross pollinating based upon what the situation might be. I need a little cloud. I need a little bit of hyperconvergence. So you kind of, it's kind of like a combine workout. It's kind of like sports. Yeah, I think you know, as Howard had mentioned previously in some of the other sessions, with such a large organization, there are people who are going to be really game for the change and really want to shift towards this new way of working. There are folks that are curious. And then there's a small percentage that may decide that this is not a journey they want to be a part of. And so it's really, as we go through those motions of saying, here are the plans of where we want to go. Who are the people that are going to opt in and who do we want to help move forward from a skills perspective? So a couple of challenges that I see. I wonder if you could help us understand how you address them. You've got business, users, apps, and then the tech comes last. Okay, it makes sense. But I'm sure there are a lot of similarities across how big it is, Dale. It's like hundreds of thousands of people. A lot of similarities, but there's also some unique requirements. So how do you deal with that? You try to find the overlaps and say, okay, 60% nail it and the others. Maybe we build snowflakes or maybe we just burn some bridges. How do you guys address those dissimilarities? So the good news is the frameworks that we're building and the decentralization of decision making allows you to address some of those dissimilarities. We've got applications that have built ground up cloud native. They're a green field. They started in the cloud. They started on PCF and they are really prepared for this journey. We have other applications that have been sitting in the data center for decades, right? And everything in between. We've found that we can create technology pipelines that can actually get all of those applications to production the same way. So there's one thing out of the way. The building process of writing software and deploying it to production standardized. The next step is when you decentralize decision making and you get the product teams to own their code, you get better decisions. So it's about creating a framework that allows you to handle the variety of challenges and use cases that are thrown at you. Okay, so you're also a 35 year old company. You got, there's all this technical debt hanging around. How do you deal with that? Maybe you could give some examples of situations where you said, okay, this part of the portfolio we're going to leave alone. You know, maybe some old cobalt mainframe. You're not that old. You're not that old. Oracle database. And we're not going to touch that. But how do you deal with that technical debt challenge? Yeah. I think, you know, the way we've looked at it is really where's the need for us to move fast? Because when you look at digital transformation, it's really about making sure that, yes, we're customer centric, we have high quality, but also that we can move quickly with the new expected fees of business. And so we've looked at it in the respect that a lot of the customer facing type of environment, so Del Marcom or our B2B site for customers or anything that service facing, those are the ones that we want to make sure we focus on iterating quickly versus, you know, the auto management system per se. So the auto management system, you know, it's an area that we're working on from a transformation standpoint, but it's not as critical to be able to move as quick there to keep up with customer features that they're expecting in this digital age. And so we look at it from a portfolio standpoint and again from an outcome perspective, and where do we want to have an impact that the customers or the employees will feel most immediately. And so that's how we prioritize things in this time. Yeah, a question John and I like to ask guys like you, as you mentioned drinking your own champagne before, but well, a lot of times, you know, the product guys are coming to you with, you know, things that are in beta perhaps. Champagne's not quite ready yet. Just want to be champagne. So you, I'm sure have a lot of people trying to, hey, try this out. You guys are busy. You're trying to, you know, drive, you know, company value. What role do you play in that regard in terms of beta testing, you know, do people love you? Do they hate you? Like you tell on them? How's that all work? We should be our first and best customer and actually our hardest one. So, you know, we've actually taken some of the container technology and run it through its paces. And early revs of that just wasn't ready for us, but we did put it into a non-production environment and started working on, okay, how can we utilize this for maybe non-production workloads? Some of the DevOps stuff, we're just needing, say, runners in a container to move code from point A to point B. So we can start flexing it and exercising it and give feedback where, you know what? It's not going to really handle some of our production workloads, but here's what you need to do. So we want to be the first and hardest customer. Yeah, I was going to say, it's not always a negative in that, yes, we might encounter issues. So we've adopted PCF, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a lot over the last year and applications. And yes, we've discovered things that either it couldn't do or there are issues with. And the fact that we have that close relationship with the product team, we can actually ask for new features that they will actually then go ahead and develop for us in order to support our business. But I presume with such a large portfolio, you have to be somewhat selective, right? You can't just take every new product. Okay, and so how do you measure the value? What are the key metrics that you're trying to lever? Yeah, so when we went and did this, we pulled the business case, right? Because it's a sizable investment. And we look at adoption of behaviors. So are you adopting the methodology, the agile Pivotal methodology? Are you adopting test-driven development? Then how does that impact our key performance indicators? Are we reducing user incidents and production incidents? Are we getting stories from the business into production faster? Or is it the velocity picking up? And then all of those outcomes lead to the business outcomes. Are we reducing our total spend? Are we becoming more technology focused, more development focused than say program management focused? So we have a nice cascade of adoption of behaviors, key performance indicator changes and then actually business metric outcomes. You guys make it sound so easy. Greg and Gary, thanks for spending the time. I know you guys have a hard stuff, but I want to get one last, a couple quick questions in. One of the things we're hearing is integration, the part of the whole Dell transformation. A lot of glue layer in the past, a lot of SI-like work being done in IT. How is that going for you guys? How is the heavy lifting of rolling out consistent infrastructure been and what kind of experiences is that throwing off for you guys for the end users? So I mean, I'd say, although I've only been in the company for the last couple of years, you know, I'm a Dell Technologies employee, not necessarily from either the business before, but from what I've observed and from what I've seen so far, integration's actually gone very well from a systems perspective for both the companies coming together at such scale. We have a North Star, so we have a strategy to make sure that where we have multiple systems and we want to end up with a single system, we're working towards that over the years. And likewise with the infrastructure, we have data centers that we're using, you know, now across different locations from both the entities as they came together that were continuing to optimize and modernize using the latest Dell Technologies. So from my perspective, as someone that came into the company a couple of years ago, it's very impressive at how well the teams- And that's where the efficiencies are going to be, right there too, right? Yes, it's amazing. The same of the sales tools as we're integrating those and making sure that we have tools where the sales people can sell the whole portfolio across Dell Technologies. It's another great benefit. T-Guy told me one time, he says, we're in business when we're out of business. Correct. Meaning, get that heavy lifting out of the way and shifting to the higher value capabilities with AI machine learning, doing much more higher crafted things. You guys see it the same way, I'm out of business, what are you saying? But when you're invisible, it's good, right? Our job is to enable the business, ultimately. And if no one knows we're there, that's when it's actually working the best. All right guys, thanks so much. Real quick, go down the line. What is the, take your IT hats off, take your CIO's hats off, put your tech hat on, industry participant, observer. What is the most important stories being told here at Dell Technologies? What's the big take on, what's the most important stories? Yeah, for me, I also own our AI capabilities in Dell Digital, so for us, it's just that huge amount of data that's being created on a daily basis and using technology to do something with it. And I think you have to be ready and prepared for that. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways. Gary, I would simply say that the dream, I would be able to run workloads in whether it's your own infrastructure or multiple clouds that are out there and manage it in a single place. That's one of my big takeaways now that we've released that with the Dell cloud. That's a huge step. Operational seamlessness and then using data to have specialism in apps, in every industry that's unique. Taylor, it's horizontally scalable but vertically specialized. I mean, it's like a whole new world. Very exciting. Guys, congratulations, exciting news. We've been talking about this for three years on theCUBE. A more, seems like more. You can see some visibility out there. Congratulations. Thank you. Cube coverage here for Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier. Stay with more day three coverage. Two sets here in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies. We'll be right back.