 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, day two of Dell Technologies World. Loads of people here, 14,000 in attendance, little 6,500 partners, analysts, press, you name it. It's here talking about all things transformation. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE Sam Garcott, Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Solutions Group Marketing. Welcome back. I'm psyched to be here, thanks for having me again. Lots of news, lots of buzz, break it down. We're powering up the modern data center. I think that was a big theme of this morning's keynote. We're very much focused on taking the, what we refer to as the pillars of the modern data center to the next level and being able to introduce a handful of new products this week. Very, very excited about them. I think we're getting the feedback and response we expected. Sam, I heard Jeff actually said power is that brand that I want to hear. We got the PowerMax and the PowerEdge and you know. I want to get used to it a little bit. You might be able to connect a couple trends here. We're powering up the modern data center, but we're not done yet. Obviously today was in this week is a big push there with the introduction of PowerMax, the new PowerEdge servers, as well as the VxRail, VxRack SDC enhancements. But this is a journey we're on as we power up the portfolio and we're just getting started. Sam, maybe bring us, give us the update on the portfolio. You basically have marketing for all the Dell EMC. The data center piece there. EMC, Joe Tucci always used to say, overlaps good, I never want to let a wedge in there. But the critique would always be it was like, oh my gosh, I can't figure out that portfolio. It's kind of sprawling. How do you balance the breadth and meeting what the customers need and how should we be looking at, both from a product and a market standpoint? Yeah, so you're right. Our history is no creases, no gaps, choice for everyone, options for everyone. The alternative, one product for everything. We've always chosen not to go that path. However, there is a balance here, I think that we all strive for. And that's something that I'm working very closely with the rest of the ISG team and Jeff's team to really understand as we move forward and power up this portfolio, how do we walk that fine balance of choice and flexibility for customers and partners as well as simplification and simplicity for end users that want to make sure they're deploying the best a breed solution for their needs and not confuse them at any time. So it's a fine line. I think we're making good progress there. We're going to continue to do that as we move forward. When you're talking with customers, the users, what is it that they're looking to power up? How is it actually applied within an organization? The big shift going on is this world of traditional enterprise applications that are certainly considered mission critical tier one. Those aren't going anywhere. Those are continuing to require the highest levels of resiliency and data services and everything you would expect from an enterprise grade array. What is new is the next generation applications that have historically been run in a sandbox, off the beaten path, a line of business and architect, built their own thing. And then guess what? It became important, in fact, now mission critical. This is where you find things like AI, ML, deep learning, IoT. When it becomes mainstream and important, guess whose problem it becomes? It moves to IT, because that's where they run their end-to-end data services, their resiliency plans, their data replication plans, business continuity. The expectations of those use cases now are at the enterprise level. So the bar is being raised there because they don't want sprawl of use cases and applications, especially for their mission critical use cases. So that's what we're focused on. As those apps have become mission critical, providing them solutions that give them the enterprise grade capability, but the performance and capabilities they expect for that other segment of the market. Sam, when I look at the portfolio, I wonder if you can speak to really who you're targeting with the messaging. Think back 10 years ago, it's like the EMC was a storage company. Dell, primarily, server and PCs and the like. Now we're talking digital transformation, powering the future. Jeff and Michael and Allison went through all of these trends. Transformation. How do you position where the products fit, who you're hitting, who are some of the key constituents that you will add to it with? It's gotten more complex. There's no doubt about it, especially as the next generation workloads emerge in various spots of the organization, as well as the more as you talk about digital transformation, you're really moving up the stack, so to speak, in terms of the type of people you're selling to. So we've got the world's greatest sales force in the industry, but we've had to modernize them as well as we've gone through this product modernization. How do we modernize a sales force that, of course, can have the storage admin conversation, the backup admin conversation? That's what we've been having for 20 years, but that's no longer good enough. You've got to be able to pivot and go up into the CXO level in terms of the leadership of the IT departments, the line of business leaders, which a lot of times are architects or specialists within a given field. And frankly, even in some cases, in my role, the CMO you're selling into, because it's a business data analytics engine or something that's providing new insights, new markets and new businesses. So it has gotten more complex there and the skills required to sell at the bite level all the way up to the boardroom level is paramount importance as we go forward. So we're spending a lot of time on that now. We were talking with a gentleman from TGen earlier today, Stu and I were, it's such an exciting topic, biomedical research, sequencing the human genome and how much faster they can do it now and how much more data they're generating. But they have such potential there, you mentioned CMOs, for example, to be able to use that data, combine it, recombine it to, people always say, oh, actionable insights. It's one thing to be able to get actionable insights. It's another thing to be able to have an infrastructure and agility, to be able to capitalize on them and deliver differentiated products. Market, revolutionize the customer experience. From a digital transformation perspective, are you finding any industries in particular, we've mentioned biomedical research, where they're kind of really leading the charge here and helping you guys develop the product strategy or is it more horizontal? I think genomics and medical and the health industry are great examples of traditional large businesses that also play very aggressively in early adopters. I was kind of born and raised in a small company called Isilon that is now part of the Dell EMC portfolio. And what we were able to do with a breakthrough bleeding edge technology 10 years ago was we went right after a vertical go-to-market strategy. So, genomics, research, media and entertainment, manufacturing, these are areas that are large businesses but they make big bets on emerging technology because it's the only place you can go to get those next generation capabilities as those applications mature over time. The great thing about within Dell EMC and the ISG portfolios, we have solutions that can now meet both of those world's needs. More so as they start to mature and become mission critical. I think we're even more well positioned to help them lead through that transformation that we're seeing going on in all those different verticals today. Sam, one of the things we heard in the keynotes are some of the emerging trends. Give us a little book forward. Your ISG group, what kind of things are hot on your plate, especially if you look at kind of the enterprise customers. What's kind of near-term and give us a little bit of a roadmap? Yeah, a couple things, I would certainly say cloud and moving to a cloud-first cloud-enabled world that is really driving a lot of our roadmap innovation as we go forward. So it includes everything from mobility of information from an on-prem hybrid to exclusively cloud-native off-prem. We're innovating in all of those vectors. You really just can't pick one anymore. So that's a key area. As well as cloud-based analytics and telemetry information leveraging the cloud to understand how your infrastructure is operating over time. I would say that's definitely a major area of investment. The other major area is we have a vision of autonomous infrastructure within the storage world, autonomous storage. Really eliminating the need for the day-to-day management of storage because the system is so smart it really takes care of all those typical tasks that consume a storage administrator, system administrators, day-to-day. We're in the business of creating outcomes and helping our customers create outcomes. The more we can get them out of the managing and migrating and protecting data and into the application layer where they're adding a lot more value to the organization, I think that's a win-win for both organizations. So machine learning, AI is the technology that's going to allow us to enable an autonomous infrastructure, really make the infrastructure invisible so you can focus on your applications and your outcomes. What are some of the things that you're hearing from channel partners in terms of they're on the front lines, often dealing with customers that are at some stage of a digital, of a transformation journey, we'll say. What's some of the feedback that you're hearing from the channel? We know that there's a number of announcements. We spoke with Cheryl Cook this morning. How are they being enabled to deliver these solutions to help drive autonomy, for example? We've got, in parallel to Dell Tech World, we've got the Global Partner Summit, we've got just an enormous amount of the channel community here for this event. We did make some key announcements, including the Dell MC Ready Bundle. I think it's a great ready stack, I should say. It's a great example of, which reflects the feedback that they've given us, is give us all the pieces to be successful, to stand up a IT transformation in their customer's environment, train them, enable them, package it for them, to make it easy and seamless for them to go in and be that trusted partner for those organizations. So that's one example of the direct feedback from the channel partners. They asked for that offer. We responded very, very quickly. Now we've provided them that kind of end-to-end, kind of reference architecture to build your own Dell EMC and NCI infrastructure. So, very excited about that, and that's direct feedback from the partner community. All right, so that's the partner. How about the customer feedback you've gotten so far? Went through a lot of announcements. I can't even imagine how many customer sessions are going on here. What's the consensus for that? The excitement is around NVMe, and look, we're not first to market. I'm totally okay with that. I'm fine admitting it in here in theCUBE, but we are the first to get to market the right way. And that's really what I measure ourselves on. We didn't just build our own custom NVMe modules. We didn't build something that would be difficult to add on to in terms of NVMe over fabrics or storage class media. We built something architected via software-defined architecture with an end-to-end NVMe implementation. Our customers love that because it gives you the right-of-way benefits of performance, but it also is future-proof in that they'll be able to easily add in storage class memory NVMe over fabrics when it becomes available into that system. So it's not a forklift upgrade. It's built for today as well as tomorrow. They love that aspect. So if customers, is there pent-up demand for this NVMe solution? Can you give us any guidance as to, is this going to be 10%? What kind of, how fast will adoption be if something like that? Yeah, so the reality is it's still fairly early days there as well. We expect this to be an offering that's going to start small and grow over time. That's why in the high-end space where PowerMax is complimenting our VMAX line, the VMAX 950 and 250 are not going anywhere anytime soon. For organizations that need to bring those next generation applications together and need that real-time response, PowerMax is the way to go. We expect 60 to 70% of all organizations by 2020 to have at least one real-time application running in a mission-critical environment. That's one, 60 to 70%. So I would say it's still early days. You're going to have a specific need for that level of performance to go to NVMe, but it's going to start accelerating here over this year, particularly with NVMe over fabrics coming to market later as well as storage class memory. That's going to accelerate it even more. All right, Sam, just want to give you the final word, takeaways you want people to have, understanding Dell and the Dell EMC portfolio when they leave Dell EMC, Dell Technologies World 2018 this year. Yeah, certainly I hope they see the investments we're making to power up the portfolio. I think the announcements we made this week have been fantastic in terms of responding to market needs, customer needs. And frankly, I want them to learn more. I want them to watch more and more of theCUBE to learn deeply how things are rolling out, what was the mind behind the madness of building these products. I know we've got a large amount of the team speaking in theCUBE, but whether it's in theCUBE or through the sessions, learn, adjust, because everybody's modernizing. Everybody needs to transform. This is a great opportunity for them to do that with their skill set and their knowledge in the industry. Everybody does need to transform. Sam, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing what's new and what you're doing, a leading marketing for all of Dell EMC. Thank you, thank you. And you've been watching theCUBE. We want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman. We are live day two of Dell Technologies World in Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.