 The service experience has dramatically changed over the course of history within enterprise IT. Once a purely break fixed business that put out fires, technology services has become a linchpin of customer IT execution strategies where companies carefully select technology partners to anticipate and remediate potential problems before they occur. Moreover, organizations have come to expect a cloud-like experience for their entire IT estate spanning on-prem, cloud, cross-clouds and increasingly the edge. And technology services are looked upon by customers to provide a layer that helps abstract that underlying complexity of IT so they can focus on what they do best. Welcome to theCUBE's ongoing virtual coverage of Dell Technologies World. With me today to talk about the modern services experience are Doug Schmidt who's the president of Dell Technologies Services and Alex Beretto, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Services. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Well, thank you, Doug, thanks for having us. Really, my pleasure, Doug. And I wonder if you could start by just giving us a quick overview of the organization that you lead. What's new with Dell Technologies Services? Well, yeah, Dave, so, you know, first of all, I get the privilege along with my team of leading over 60,000 service professionals and partners. And we support customers in over 170 countries and 54 languages. And we uncover the entire technology spectrum from the edge to the core to the cloud. And our expertise in this area is broad and deep as you can imagine. And we help our customers with their transformation with the end-to-end services. And this includes consulting, deployment, support, managed services, education services as well as asset recovery. So just to name a few. So we use all of this technology and this capability to help our customers with their digital transformation. Great, Alex, what's your wheelhouse? What's your role in the services strategy and technology? Yeah, I have the great opportunity to drive strategy, operations, and technology. We're doing exciting things across all three days, but in particular, the technology space when I think about the intersection with technology and customer experience, a lot of exciting things there, I'm sure we'll talk about today. Yeah, Doug, I mean, if you look at the past 12 months, I mean, you certainly saw a real shift to work from home technologies. And you guys know all about, you know the story well, but one of the things that we've been talking about is the uptick that we're expecting and we're already seeing it in professional services because there's a talent gap, there's a skill shortage and people have to, they have to get hybrid right, they have to fund their digital transformation, they need help. So there's been a lot of changes in the market during the past year. What are you hearing from customers? What are their priorities? How are they changing? Well, yeah, I just stated, Dave, look, there's a lot of changes in the market during the last year, clearly. And what our customers are telling us and where they're changing priorities are, are really centered around two things. The first is that all of us are helping our customers deliver a better experience to their customers, right? The end customers, that matters. You know, in a brand new study we commissioned from Forrester Consulting, actually 56% of IT leaders said that improving customer experience is the top driver for their digital transformation efforts. The second thing that we're hearing and that I'm hearing is that they're asking us to assist in this digital transformation. In that same research that I talked to you about, from Forrester, 81% of the IT leaders said that they need to leverage external technology-specific expertise to help their internal IT teams be successful. And I think just to deep dive these two items, you know, first, it's on the first one for their customer experience. It's just crucial for customers to transform their CX to be competitive, that's for all of us. And, you know, there's not an industry or a team around that's not going through this, whether it's schools, doing digital learning, healthcare, and all of the things, you know, recently I just talked to a doctor via the, you know, Zoom. I mean, these are all new experiences, right? Government and corporations, it's just, it's very remote, it's very seamless, it's very timely. And look, the employee experience is also closely tied to this, right? To the customer experience. Obviously, if your employees aren't able to perform in this environment, you can't really deliver the customer experience. And they need the right technology and tools to really deliver that. And that's where we at Dell Technologies and Dell Technology Services are really helping our customers. The second area I mentioned was really about getting our customers ready for the future. And, you know, digital transformation's not a one and done. This is a ongoing journey that gets our customers to assist their customers and their team members. And look, they're looking for trusted advisor who can, you know, specialize in the experience they need to guide them through this. And, you know, IT is not just back office anymore, as you know, it's really about getting in front of this, breaking down the silos, helping all of the departments, not just IT, everything with their business needs, and really delivering these outcomes that are going to help them with the customer experience and the digital transformation. Yeah, thank you for that. And Doug, I mean, the consumerization of IT has been going on for the better part of a decade or more. The cloud obviously has affected how we think about the experience and pricing and the like. And we're hearing a lot about Apex from Dell Tech right now. What's the role of services in Apex? Well, look, services has always been a primary interface with our customers and we'll continue to play a major part of that. And this is really about services and our products and our great solutions and software all coming together to really deliver the best experience for our customers. But specifically speaking about services, look, this will be about services helping our customers seamlessly integrate Apex offers and leverage the best of our infrastructure management capabilities end to end. And I talked a little bit about those at the beginning, but this will be helping the customers deploy Apex, monitor it, operate it, optimize, support, decommissioning, all those things from the end to end lifecycle. And look, we'll leverage our advantages in the supply chain as well and scale Apex globally, working with Kevin Brown and the operations team. So it's about bringing all the strengths of Dell along with services to deliver Apex. You know, services also is going to help accelerate the value to the customers with, for example, Apex data storage as a service, which I'm sure you're hearing about. We'll manage the infrastructure across the lifecycle and help our customers get the most out of all of this great technology we're bringing. So Alex and then Doug, maybe you can chime in, but you guys, you talked about how important the customer experience is. Can you tell us more about what services is doing to specifically enhance that customer experience? Yeah, sure, sure thing, Dave. And look, you talked about, which I thought was great, about the notion of services much more than just break fix. So that customer experience now spans the entire services lifecycle. So when we talk CX, it's really that entire CX. So we're doing a couple of things to really drive customer experience to the next level. In fact, three distinct focus areas. The first one is really around artificial intelligence, machine learning and embedding that notion of AI into everything that we do. Whether that's support, deployment services, managed services, consulting service, education service, the entire spectrum of our services offering now carries AI into the services offering. We started with support, but now we expanded to the entire spectrum. That drives efficiency and customers see that and feel that in terms of lower cost, greater speed. And it drives value for our customers as well because they're able to generate new and depreciated insights. And second, if you think about the total customer experience, there are times when they do have to interact with us. And that interaction now is full. And it says seamless, unified and simple experience that the customers have with us across the entire product set of Dell. So whether it's PCs, servers, networks, storage, we provide a single unified view and a simple view for our customers. And then third, if you think about our services offers, we're modernizing them. Doug talked a little bit about this as well. We're embedding technology into the services offering, make them better and faster. Good example of that is modern provisioning. We launched that at the beginning of this year. Great market feedback. It has new features, new capability, leverages our cloud infrastructure to deliver the services. You know, Alex, I'm going to be and stay on that for a minute because when I think about Apex, to me, it's a cultural transformation that's going on. I mean, look, Dell is a technology company, a product company and services there to support that. But it's always, you've always had to align with product. But now, I almost see the product is aligning with the customer service experience and they're coming together like this. So we talked about the changes and obviously the focus on CX. Can you tell us more about the specific technologies that services is leveraging to affect that? Yeah, it's a good question, David. Often we actually talk about product is a services now and services is the product. As you said, they're really coming together. And there are a number of things we're doing to drive that technology change, both within Apex and also outside Apex, so our regular KitKatAx model. So a couple of examples of things we're doing around the data management side as an example, using graph technologies to really contextualize data, generate insights from that data, regardless of how the data is structured, regardless of where the data is stored. Then we can present those values. We're using that inside Dell for services. We are actually then monetizing that and providing that to our customers via consulting services and managed services. You talked about Apex Clouds and Hybrid Cloud is a big area for us, a big focus here. In fact, all the Apex offers are actually Dell managed customer operators. So the managed services component is integrated and is a fundamental part of everything around our Apex offers that we're putting in place. There are a couple other areas we're also excited about, two of them to highlight specifically 5G and the Edge. In 5G, we see phenomenal growth in opportunities for our customers around the new additional transformation that they can do with 5G, but enabling that is the carriers behind that infrastructure of 5G, which we are supporting with our managed services developing carrier grade specific managed services capabilities for carriers around the globe. And then on the Edge side, with the growth and phenomenal exponential growth actually of data around the far edge being driven by sensors and greater compute needs and storage needs at the far edge. We're actually providing services for those specific data centers. They're very distributed. Some of them are in urban areas, some of them are in non-urban areas and there's hundreds of them and they require remote services capabilities which we have that infrastructure today. So we're deploying that in this far edge space. So another area that we're excited about is the 5G, the Edge, Apex and then our core services capabilities. Yeah, the Edge is like this really infinite technology opportunity. So we see the data center and you see the cloud and okay, we're largely a remote set of cloud services. You're seeing the cloud come into the on-prem, you're seeing on-prem come into the cloud. So you've got the hybrid connections here, cross cloud and then even at the Edge, you've got layers of Edge. I mean, you think about the autonomous vehicle, there's so much going on there, custom silicon, et cetera, it's okay, you're not going to get into the auto business, I don't think, at least anytime soon. But all that data that's being collected that has to get back to the cloud, now much of it's not going to get persisted, a lot of it's going to stay at the Edge, but a lot of it's going to come back to the cloud, everything's just exploding. You've got to roll there, it's just these layers and connections that are coming through into this ubiquitous matrix. I mean, it's like the movie, it's amazing. Very exciting times and Doug, I wonder, just going off here. Doug, I wonder if we could give you the last word, maybe as I'm looking into the future, beyond Apex. What's next for Dell, tech services and your customers? Well, first of all, Dave, you did a great job on that. It is exciting. Look, and the reason we're putting so much effort into the emerging technologies we've talked about is to prepare to assist our customers with this. And you brought this up as well. Look, the vast amount of customer data that they're going to have to contend with is just staggering. 175 zettabytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025, according to IDC. And even more amazing about that is 30% of it is projected to be processed real time. You're talking about that Edge, right? And more than 50% of the enterprise generated data will be created and processed at that Edge, according to Gartner. So look, it's going to be exciting. And over the next five to 10 years, we predict that all devices will be able to communicate anywhere on Earth. And look, these types of support tools to gather intelligence from billions of endpoints is going to be fascinating as well. And there will be new ways to consume this knowledge seamlessly, making the relationship between us and the intelligence even more seamless and natural. An example of that that we're working with right now is augmented reality, AR, out for our field resources. And we're seeing the capability it's going to provide our field engineers. And it's pretty amazing. Going to buy a better experience for our team members and a better experience for our customers. And customers are going to have to contend with all of these challenges. And so we're modernizing to help them. And kind of just summarizing up, look, the value of services is really about shifting to intelligence as a service. And there's three ways that this will really come about. One is our relationship with our customers is evolving from providing technology solutions. You mentioned this in your opening to being fully integrated as a business partner. That's the first one. Second one, we're helping to shape how our customers run their business from processes to resources to the experience they deliver to their end customer. That's number two. And number three, it's really about measuring our success. Everything we do is about our customers achieving their business targets and their outcomes. And that's why we believe intelligence as a service is the future of services. And this is where technology plays such an important role in the services component of that. As I said up front is the linchpin. There's an inverse relationship over the course of my career between the customer experience and the technical complexity. The simpler it gets for customers, the more complex it gets at the back end. And you got to hide that complexity. And that's a big part of where technology and services comes in. We're seeing the explosion of data, as you said, and the explosion of processing power. It's very exciting times. Alex and Doug, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the update on Dell tech services and the future. Really appreciate your time. Thank you Dave. Thank you for having us. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our ongoing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021. The virtual edition, we'll be right back.