 Hey, we're back here at Dell World 2012. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.com's TV program. We go out to the events and they strike the signal from the noise. This is our 27th event this year. This is our third season running. We go to all the events. We dig in, we talk to the tech athletes. We get the signal from the noise. Share that with you. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. And we've got a real quick spot here because you've got to meet the freakonomics guys for another conversation. Karen Quintos, SVP and CMO of Dell. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you, thanks for having me. So you're a tech athlete. You got some chops there at Dell. So, and now it's the marketing. You guys are global marketing. We saw some of your social media stuff that you're doing, pioneering state of the art. But Dell has a big business. You talk to a lot of customers. You got a lot going on. So before we get into that, let's talk about the show here at Dell World's second year. How's it going? What's next? New venue, bigger place. What's your take of? Share with the folks at Dell World. I'd love to. You know, this is our second time. Last year we had about 1,500 customers. This year we have well over 5,000. And next year we will have it here again in Austin. So Dell World 2013 will be even better than Dell World 2012. No Vegas next year. Oh sorry Vegas, we love you, but you know. Austin is, customers love coming to Austin. Austin has a vibe, it's our backyard. The music's fantastic. The music's fantastic. We proved it to customers on Tuesday night. We rocked Austin City Limits with Camp Freddy. Camp Freddy, that was unbelievable. We were there, it was great. It's incredible. Easy living as people say. Here, it's easy living. We heard that guy say that to us in the bar. Like, why do you like Austin? Easy living. Natural, family-oriented, but fun. Yeah, so Dell's culture, I say it's like Texas. You got to do barbecue with them. This is our first time with theCUBE here. We're very impressed with the hospitality of Dell and we've had some good, quote, medic. Absolutely, if you'll have us, we'll be back. We'll bring our independent media to you. Let's talk about your marketing now. Changing, digital channels are big. As you span the scope of the volume of dollars, Marius has got a big number he's going to go after. I mean, that's T-Von, you're growing. Obviously the stock is a different issue, but you guys are still exploding in growth. And what's the strategy? What's the plan for marketing? Well, this Dell World event is actually a great example of our marketing strategy, which is, how do we figure out how to reach larger audiences with the story around all of the great capabilities that we have built, acquired over the last several years? You know, when customers used to think of the Dell brand, they thought about it as a PC hardware, in some cases just a consumer, which is so far from the truth, where 80% plus of our revenue now comes from big, from commercial customers, non-consumer customers. And all of the assets that we've acquired has allowed us to solve our customer's biggest IT challenges. So we've built on this foundation of our PC hardware business, and now have the capability in terms of our being an end-to-end solution. So you guys have a footprint in the enterprise, but this legitimizes your enterprise. This show here to me legitimizes the enterprise position because of the different solution sets. Do you find that people say a lot like, I didn't know Dell had that. I mean, is that the challenge? It's like, just to get the evangelism up, is the awareness, is it more tactical? Yeah, well, you know, several years ago, they used to say that a lot. And now they're saying it less, but they're still saying it. So we still have work to do. And the job of marketing is to figure out how to get that message out in a way that resonates with customers, where they want to hear the message. So Dell World is one example of it. We do events smaller in nature across other regions. We're doing brand advertising now that's talking about Dell. We're doing it in China. We're doing it in Germany. We're doing it here in the US. We're going to be doing it in many markets around the world next year. So this is just part of our strategy and getting people to understand where we're going. I think your messaging challenge is quite significant. I mean, you've got a complicated company. You can't do a one-size-fits-all message. So how do you balance that? The message that shows like this versus the line and the demand of the business units to really help them, how do you rationalize all that? Well, first of all, when we talk about the Dell brand, we can talk about the Dell brand in a consistent way. That's what's great about the Dell brand. And when you come to an event like this, customers tell you all the time. Let me tell you why I do business with Dell. Because you're easy to do business with. Easy to do business with, absolutely. Because it's simple to do business. Because you're humble, you're pragmatic. You have this open, no-nonsense kind of approach. So that's why we do business with you. So as we take all of our messaging out to the marketplace around what we can do from an end-to-end solutions provider, we do it in a way that brings stories to life that really help to bring the Dell brand front and center and the things that customers are looking for us to provide them. So talk about how the enterprise emphasis has changed your marketing. You know, a couple ways. One is, our marketing used to be years ago all about speeds and feeds. And everybody wanted to know what's the fastest, the, you know, all of that speeds and feeds kind of product stuff. Now we're talking about what are the outcomes that customers want to achieve. So it's across marketing really forced us to think about customer pain points, integration, better together. And there's no better company to do that than Dell with all of the assets that we have across the portfolio. Well, it's exciting to have you here inside theCUBE. I know you got to run to your next interview with the Freakonomics folks here in the social media analytics lounge. But you guys, my final question is, is that Dell also is a maverick culture, right? I mean, they have their customer focused. Michael Dell was clear on that yesterday when he came here and that's clear. Easy to do business with. You guys made your bones there. But now you guys are pioneering. The word technology, the word transformation is kind of kicking away from that M&A perception. But now you're selling social media analytics. You have all this pioneering, groundbreaking digital marketing going on. So that's the one, that's cool. How do you take it to the next level? What's your plans on the next level because? Well, I'll tell you. So, you know, you talk about it. We talk about it in the context of this entrepreneurial spirit that is still alive at Dell and, you know, having a founder CEO that keeps that magic, that spirit alive. Social media services actually started as an idea in marketing. And we built this capability. We knew where it was going. And then we turned around and we said, wow, it's such an opportunity to help customers. So it was an innovative idea that we incubated in marketing. I can't think of many other technology companies where they have a solution that incubates in marketing and now we figured out how to take it to the broader market. Yeah, and specifically I want to get, first of all, totally agree, love that. I mean, that's amazing. We're going to amplify that to the cows come home. We love it so much. But we are living in an era where the first time in the history of a business, you can actually instrument your customer relationships and with a connected system with phones and smartphones and more compute, big data. So, I mean, old school marketing is transforming into a new era. What's your vision on that? Because this is so, I mean, we're the first generation of marketers to do that. What's your vision there? It's really, really interesting. You know, my vision is that social media is no longer a choice. It is absolutely a business imperative. It's here, whether you like it or not, it's here. I talked to a group of CIOs about that just this morning. I fundamentally believe that the company that will win in social media will be the one that will be able to take big customer data integrated in with content, relevant content, content that customers really care about and the integration in with their back-end customer systems that will enable us to communicate with customers, interact with customers, where customers want to, and from a business results perspective, be able to help our sales teams better target their customers and have the right conversations. That's who's going to win and that's what our vision is around what social media can do. So, I have one last question if I may. I know you're on. You and your peers are becoming much more influential in terms of consuming technology. We always talk about the CIO. You just mentioned the social media came out of marketing. Do you see in the near term that the messaging to the CMO is actually going to begin to outpace the messaging to the CIO and the IT practitioner crowd? Yeah, I don't know if it's ever going to outpace it, but it is certainly growing at substantial rates. The number of conversations that I'm having now with other CMOs, I had 20 CMOs here at the event today. And so, and we're all talking about that same thing. We're all talking about customer data, digital, social, everything that's happening. We actually have at Dell a great working relationship at a very strategic level and a very tactical level with our CIO. Andy Karabutas, she's fantastic. She gets the agenda of marketing. She understands the role that her organization plays to enable it. And you're going to see this thing just continue to take off at unprecedented rates. So about partnerships, collaborative networks. We heard that from President Clinton yesterday, John. Karen Quintos, tech athlete in marketing, innovating, building their own technology to solve their own problems. It's like, almost like mail order PC when it was passed, say go direct to the customers. This is the Dell innovation. You guys are awesome. Thanks for coming inside the queue. Appreciate it. Be right back with our next guest after this short break.