 Dave, welcome back, my co-host Dave Vellante. Hi, John, Dave Vellante from wikibon.org, and we're here now with Sukumar Narayanan from Dell. Sukumar is a repeat guest. Welcome back, Sukumar. Welcome back. Good to see you again, Louis. Last time we saw you, we were in a tight quarters. We were in the small booth at Oracle Open World, where we kind of got in through the Q-Logic booth, and that was... We snuck in. Now we got some more room, a little bit marquee location, SAP. A lot of great news. So we were talking about Dell, and I was speculating that Dell's core competency and direct business model, it's a good opportunity to be a service provider in this space. So what's the news and tell us what's going on with Dell? There's a lot of interesting developments, and we're highlighting several new solutions at Sapphire this year. The main ones that we're highlighting are certification with HANA and BWA, which are these in-memory computing platforms. And we're also highlighting the cloud certification with SAP. So we have a private cloud certification with SAP that we're highlighting. So we were talking, so that was Monday, you made an announcement, and now you're extending that into some of the certifications and providing. So we talked off-camera, you said that HANA is game-changing. Why is that? What do you mean by game-changing? In what way? I think in its current incarnation, what it's allowing people to do is the types of analytics and computations that were not possible before. And by removing some of the constraints that are placed by a physical data warehouse and the ETL kind of architecture that we have today in traditional data warehousing, it's enabling customers to do a lot more with the data that they have and do much more predictive type of analytics, more actionable type of analytics than was possible before its advent. But I think the real game-changer is gonna come from when HANA goes into its next form, or what is the future state that they're envisioning, where it essentially replaces the need for both an operational database as well as a data warehouse, and everything happens in memory. That truly is a game-changing both in terms of compute performance and then the types of things that are possible, but also in terms of how these kind of enterprise solutions get architectured in the future. So let's talk a little bit about cloud. It's all the buzz, it's the rage, but in fact, there's a lot of activity going on in the cloud. It's real, isn't it? That's correct. Initially, when the economic downturn occurred, it was like things accelerated toward the cloud. People were really interested because they thought they could save a lot of money and pushing a lot of stuff into the cloud. But people seem to be getting more selective now, maybe honing in on some of the use cases. What are you seeing at Dell in terms of cloud? What are the big drivers in your cloud business? You're absolutely right. The downturn really created the interest because what has happened over the course of the last three years is that IT budgets have remained somewhat stagnant to declining, but the pressures on CIOs to drive greater efficiency, deliver greater value and drive more innovation hasn't abated. So they are trying to figure out ways in which they can reduce the costs that are just used to keep the lights on and use that saving to drive greater innovation and value-generating activity within IT. And cloud computing allows you to be able to do that and we're still in early stages but the TCO potential is probably somewhere in the 25 to 30% range with enterprise applications because even in a private cloud setting you're able to size your infrastructure to your average workload, not your peak workload because most infrastructure is sized for peak and then some. So there's, and if you can size it for your average workload and a cloud setting allows you to have flexible burst capacity to deal with the peaks and you're only paying by the hour completely utility model for that burst capacity, the savings are very obvious. So it seems like you've got three classes of applications. You've got the legacy stuff that maybe mission critical, you're going to put a brick wall around it and maybe that never gets virtualized or never gets cloudized. But then you've got this sort of business critical applications and you've got the test and dev. The clearly test and dev is gone, going, it's going, going, gone, right? I mean, and it seems like people are moving into the business critical applications and when that happens, does the benefit change? I mean, is it still sort of cost cutting? Is it shifting to more other more business oriented values, whether that's recovery, disaster recovery, speed, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it's all of those, right? So it goes beyond cost to you're reducing the points of failure. So if it is sitting in your data center, you have a single point of failure for the most part. You know, if you're moving it into a private cloud environment, suddenly now you're dealing with maybe 50 points of failure because it's a much larger leveraged environment, perhaps a lot more robust environment. Clearly there's a risk mitigation play and a risk sharing play and the other advantage that a private cloud environment can afford you is rather than spending money individually on enhancing security, which is a huge issue, both the physical security as well as network and other types of security, application security, which is an enormous issue that people are dealing with on an individual basis. Now you can share, you can leverage that investment across a myriad of customers that are sitting in that sharing that same private cloud block, if you will. What's it like at Dell these days? So Dell was pretty much a PC company and now it's transforming, you've purchased Perot systems, storage assets, all kinds of diversity security assets and becoming in many ways an R&D company. What, talk a little bit about that culture shift. I mean, you obviously came in as an acquired company. That's correct. But you got to hear, talk about it, you've got to observe, what's your observation and how is the company changing and what does it all mean? There's clearly renewed energy and a different sense of purpose, you know, a definite sense of purpose around Dell and around its transformation, you know, of becoming a solutions company rather than an infrastructure company and or just a purely services company, right? Yeah, from your perspective. Yeah, from our perspective. And the solutions that we're developing are all geared to address the three major challenges that most of our customers and particularly CIOs are grappling with. The explosion of data, which is top of mind for a lot of CIOs, both in terms of, you know, how to store it efficiently, store and retrieve it efficiently, how to keep it secure, as well as then how to make sense out of it, right? So all three aspects of it. And the second is to the sort of the proliferation of devices is, you know, people want the information in wherever they are, you know, on different types of devices, whether it's a laptop or a smartphone or a pad device of some sort. And that is not just a consumer issue. Those devices are proliferating inside of the enterprise now. They're on the shop floor, you know, they're in, you know, the people that are doing service management, you know, going out and doing, you know, they're using those kinds of devices. That's a store for the enterprise, big thing. Right, so all of those kinds of things. And the third major challenge, which we alluded to, which I alluded to earlier, which is really the pressure on CIOs to deliver greater value, you know, from IT on a constant budget and drive greater efficiency. So those are the three major customer challenges that all of our solutions that we're developing are geared to address. So extracting the value is a key one. And we heard McDermott talk about this, they're the same things. And he said, obviously, at the keynote, he said, obviously, in memory, instant business weeks, days now, seconds, that's obviously the speed, agility concept. The second thing he said was mobiles on new desktop, the new desktop, unstoppable force. And third, connecting business processes end to end. So on the third point, connecting business process end to end, that's what you do at Dell Services. We talked about extracting business value. How has the services business changed in the recent year or 18 months? And how is it changing forward going forward in the next couple months or years? Dave and I have been talking about the services angle. What's the angle on service changing? And so what's your perspective on the change? I mean, is it value chains that are going to change or the business models are changing? How are you guys preparing for that? What's your opinion on that? I'm not sure that the business models are necessarily changing, but I think a lot of services, particularly the SIs that are at an event of this nature, were really focused over the last several years to build the transactional plumbing, if you will, and putting those in. So if you think of the core ERP package around SAP, that's what that does. And a lot of companies have that transactional engine in place. So now the challenges that people are dealing with is, now how do I run this more efficiently? And how do I, this thing is spitting out a lot of information, a lot of data, but I'm unable to effectively take that data and turn it into actionable results. And that's really the big focus moving forward. So the packaging is, what do I need? How do I run it as the how? So you kind of get involved in both. Yes, absolutely. End to end. Yes, end to end. So we're here with Sukumar Narayanan, who's the vice president, actually, managing director, I believe is your official title, and general manager of Dell's global services business. And we're talking about cloud, we're talking about the transformation of Dell. Bill McDermott talked about big data up on stage. You hear a lot of talk about big data today, the tsunami of data, IDC says 1.2 million petabytes of data. Or is that exabytes? 1.2 million petabytes of data shipped last year, lots of data. In many ways SAP is a company that has been moving, managing the world's data for decades. What's your take on big data? How real is it? How important is it? What's Dell's perspective on it? Big data is an enormous issue. And it just seems based on the keynotes and it's everybody here. It's on everybody's mind and it's top of mind. And it is real and it's also, it's not just textual data. Data has become richer, right? So there is video content, there's images. And all of those things need to come together. If you think about a healthcare situation, how do you improve patient care and healthcare? How do you take different pieces of data, whether it's a doctor's notes from a visit to your test results, to your x-ray and bring it all together with the right contextual information and make it available to a caregiver so that they can improve patient outcomes. So those are the kinds of challenges that data pose but that's the kind of opportunity that exists with data. So there's really three things that we need to be thinking about when we're dealing with big data. One is around how do you deal with storing this information? Because not all of this information needs to be available real time. And not all of this information, there's structured information, there's unstructured information. So there's a lot of challenges around how to store it efficiently, how to be able to retrieve it efficiently, and then how to keep it secure. Because with the increasing amounts of data and then the challenge of keeping it secure becomes a bigger issue as well. And then finally, when you have that much data, how do you sift through that efficiently? We're using something like a HANA or BWA type of device which allows you to do very high degree of computations to make sense of that data. So you can really turn that data into something actionable. So those are the three major thrusts that people are dealing with but data is an enormous issue. So what's Dell's role in that value chain? Where do you fit? We fit in all three of those areas. So we have a set of solutions that allow for tiered storage and efficient retrieval of data. So we're addressing that aspect of the data challenge. We have a set of security solutions that are tied to securing this data. And then as evidenced by the releases that we've made, we're making a big push in the BI and analytics space, both in terms of having devices. So we have these appliances, HANA, BWA, and BWA appliances, but also a set of analytics solutions and services offerings to go along with that to address that third aspect of really being able to make a better sense of that data. So Gama, how important is the, I'll call it consulting, transformative consulting to your organization. Do you do a lot of that? Does Dell want to do more of that? Where does that fit? Absolutely, we do want to do more of that. We do do a fair bit of that. And in certain specific industries, we're not all things to all people, but we have tremendous depth of capability in certain industries where we're truly doing, you know, where we have real IP and deep industry insight and we're developing solutions for our customers. For example, the example that I gave about improving patient outcomes from healthcare, that is a real example of something that Dell is doing. Okay, so are you getting from your customers a desire to, we were talking about big data earlier in the intersection of consulting and big data. I'm wondering, are your customers starting to ask you to help them figure out ways to monetize data or you think that we're just, we're not there yet, it's a little early in that cycle. You know, there's, I think it is still a little bit early in that cycle. I think what were, what most of our customers are asking us right now is just help me understand how to come to grips with this data. It is growing faster that I can deal with it. So the first is to lay out some kind of a roadmap for how do we efficiently store this and then how do we secure this better and then get into developing an overall BI or analytic strategy for how to really then take advantage of this data and get to the monetization that you're talking about. So right now, big data is a pain point. It's a, you're selling aspirin. Yes. At some point, do you expect it to become an opportunity where you're selling vitamins? It absolutely is, right? In every industry, you take a retail customer and these things aren't new, where you have the store, you walk into a store, the store automatically recognizes that you're in the store through your smartphone and if you go pick up chicken in one aisle, maybe it sends you, in real time, offers to add other things to your grocery list, perhaps that encourage you to buy more items that will help you fix dinner, right? That sort of thing. So those things aren't necessarily new concepts, but I think the tool sets that we have and the richness of the data that's available will allow us to make those kinds of things more ubiquitous and therefore, clearly there's greater and greater opportunity to truly monetize the data that people have. Yeah, I mean, people talk about real time or near real time and at Wikibon, we've been talking about, okay, what is real time? Can big data be real time? Our definition ended up being real time is fast enough so you don't lose a customer. That's right. So I'm imagining I'm in a store and I read Laser, a product, and I say, well, I can get this cheaper somewhere else and I start walking away, but all of a sudden I get an offer, maybe to bundle that product with something else that is maybe, you know, maybe there's a lot of inventory of that something else, but I happen to want it and they know I happen to want it. I mean, that would be a very powerful combination. We see that coming. It sounds like you do as well and Dell positioning to take advantage of that, presumably. Yes. So, okay, well, we're here with Sukumar Narayanan of Dell Global Services talking about the transformation of Dell, talking about SAP, quite an event here. Yes. Million square feet. You know, it's good to be part of this, right? Yes, absolutely. And we have a huge presence here, the biggest presence ever that Dell has had at this event and I think we're creating quite a buzz. Yes, good. Well, Sukumar, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's always a pleasure having you back and hope to see you around again. All right, thank you for having me. Thank you. It's great.