Doug Schmitt, Dell Technologies & Satish Iyer, Dell Technologies | Dell Technologies World 2023

foreign it's thecube and we're back day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2023 from The Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas Lisa Martin with Dave vellante we've had we always have great conversations I always say that it's my kind of default but it's true and we love having alumni come back talking with us about how customer needs and priorities are changing and what Dell is doing to respond yeah a shout out to John Furrier who's got fomo he's at Red Hat Summit in Boston I know he's kind of bummed John that you weren't able to interview Michael but hey you know we're thinking about you we are thinking about you and that's what happens when the cube is so busy we've got multiple shows going on in the same week we are pleased to welcome back to alumni with us Doug Schmidt is here president of Dell technology services and satisha Iyer is here as well VP of emerging Services Dell technology Services it's great to have you both back on thecube thanks for joining us well it's great to be back thank you for having us so this event is here we are day three this this room is packed are happy to be here hearing a lot of Innovations but with you first customer priorities are changing in a lot of ways from a Services standpoint what are some of the ways in which Dell Technologies is responding to this customer's priorities that are shifting well I think maybe just a little bit about the services what we believe some of our advantages are to help with those Trends uh we're over 60 000 team members both direct and indirect and 170 countries and we are able to service our customers in over 50 languages with an asset and stale base that we're servicing of over 250 million the reason I bring that up before getting to your question on the trends which is very important is it gives us very big ears a very wide range to see and hear what our customers are seeing with the issues they're having around technology and how they want to use technology to deliver their outcomes so when when you stand back we really just recently uh issued a Forester research on you know what customers were seeing and hearing in their technology environments about 71 percent said that what they're seeing is a speed up of these these five Trends and the trends really start with basically what you're hearing security you've heard that a lot here I noticed just right behind us is a great security exhibit so that'd be the first one second one would be around multi-cloud uh helping our customers deliver to this end to end is very very important for us so uh it's a big piece of where our customers want to go whether it's coming down from the cloud into the back to the data center or the data center into the cloud we can help our customers achieve that the third one The Edge you've heard a great deal about this look this is all bringing it down to a retail store for example where we're helping our customers with what stocked on the Shelf the cash registers themselves are their customers us walking through the store being able to help them with specials is what's going on that edge is real and helping our customers deploy that so that they can get the outcome is is important the fourth Trend that customers are dealing with is really around the hybrid work that's still with us and they're looking for someone like Dell to help them manage that PC laptop life cycle how do you get it to us already with the image loaded how do you help us get it deployed how do you help us all the way down to the asset recovery and we can help them with that the fifth one that's really important is be a trusted advisor and help us navigate this and we're able to do that with the end-to-end services that we have everything from Consulting all the way back down through the asset recovery side is that typically done where it starts with that last one that you mentioned that we're going to you know start up front do some planning and then figure out which of these are your priorities it's a good that's a very good question um the reason it's a good question is I I would that's what I actually we thought as we were building out more and more of these Solutions as the Consulting side I'll be honest it can start in a lot of different ways we had a lot of customers come to us uh during the hybrid work during covet and they needed help right away on the client side and they saw what we could do then they come back and they help you they want you to help you on a broader project in the multi-cloud space yes I would say they're coming to us and they are asking for the help of cloud by Design but but I would tell you it's all it's it's they can enter in many in places on the services side I'm actually surprised another key place by the way is security when they when a customer needs help they may not be using you and all the all the services we have but once an incident happens and we're helping them they're like okay we need to we need to step back and and design that so different entry points in the journey interesting yeah very much so so do you comment your VP of emerging Services comment on what Dell is doing how is it preparing to help customers meet future needs that they might not be able to forecast right now absolutely so um within emerging services our focus is primarily to look at those strategic areas um you know doc talked about the five core priorities and how Services operate so we are primarily focused on you know multi-cloud you saw a lot of offers yesterday being announced on multi-cloud and Apex the Transformations are Cloud for customers we're also focused on uh Telecom and 5G so there's a massive transformation within you know telecommunication ecosystems in terms of disaggregation so Dell actually is participating in the network domain of Telecom and then lastly you know everything is being automated you know our customers want outcomes of the customers one automation of the managed Services they want us to do the heavy lifting right so our focus with an emerging Services has been to look at all these growth strategic priorities between talking about the last two days but then what does it mean in Services how do Services need to change and adapt to those new things and that's basically our number one Focus has been emerging and that basically comes with talking to the customer and driving to the customer with the specific outcomes in these specific areas I love the services conversation I always say it's where the rubber meets the road it's where the value is actually realized the other area you mentioned is Edge Telco and we were at mwc 23 at World Congress and that we the whole discussion was about the stack disaggregation in Telco it's going to take a long time because it's Telco highly regulated it's it works and so they don't want to disrupt that but what's the state of that are you getting dragged into a lot of engagements is it more in the planning phase or is it are there you see some disrupt users that are doing some things like Dish Networks that are maybe a little bit you know leaning in what are you seeing in that whole Space she just got back from oh yeah yeah so uh you were there yes so uh look um like you rightfully said you know the uh the the rigor and the diligence in Telecom Space is really really critical right it takes it's very standardized approach right uh in terms of what's Happening the way I think about this is cloud is coming coming to the Telco world right so telecom companies are learning from the cloud world how they can actually pick the best in class right and then make sure that actually drives an outcome right so this disaggregation they are not licking on what really end-to-end monolithic systems they used to in the how they're saying who brings the best company what kind of specialized computer I need if I want to go to open ecosystem open Telecom ecosystem is what we call right then I want to have the best and Best in Class radio I want to pick the best in class core I want to pick the best in compute all over myself I want to bring some I want somebody to bring it all together right so I think that's happening and that that that transformation is already starting right and we talked about uh Dish Networks is one of our strategic Partners in the U.S districts building out the Next Generation 5G Network and they'll be done with 75 by FTC mandate by middle of June right and we are a strategic partner for this so we are working with them so to me Dave I mean it's a journey right we are in it in it and we think it's a massive opportunities for Dell to be the that strategic advisor and the player as telecom companies transform and I think they have a great start so it's obviously it's the year of AI you know llms and generative Ai and gpts and so forth it may be the decade or the I don't know Century we'll see um how much of the conversations and services are around I mean I'm sure a lot of the sales folks are talking about it for sure exploration and where can we apply how can they help but what are you hearing from Services engagements in terms of llms and AI there's there's two two angles to that for us first one is what we're actually doing internally with uh our services team and then as you're as you're asking about what are the customers then asking you know we have a we've learned a tremendous amount over the last three to four years we've really started working on the data science the polling of the data together leveraging that digitizing our processes to pour more data down and then actually analyzing all of that through bi business intelligence to know exactly where our errors are at right away and feeding that back to our team members right away uh then with the Telemetry we're pulling down with our customers you know through all of the things that the systems are using what we're seeing is they're asked what it's going to drive is additional outcomes that the customers want and what I mean by that is I think you're going to see intelligence as a service so it used to be probably just five years ago that edge example I gave you we would go in and deploy the cash register we would deploy the handhelds the Wi-Fi all of those things and your you know the Optiplex everything you need to run it well now they're coming and saying well you have all the data of when people are running the cash register tell us when we need to staff intelligence is the data is there I think generative AI to your point is going to speed all that up and people are gonna actually say we want you to help us identify what we need to be running better in our business model not just the technology side so you hear companies I mean IBM there's a big news I'm going to defer I guess I don't really know exactly whether it was they were going to be able to cut I think it was through attrition 7 200 people that AI would replace was interesting it wasn't Watson AI it was AI so it's kind of a snarky analyst comment but um throw that away are you seeing I mean in IBM more of a Services Company really than a product company in your world are you seeing a similar dynamic or is it more hey we're going to be able to redeploy those people for you know new strategic areas how do you think about that well that's a good question and we look we've we've been scaling with aibi Insight Services literally for the last five years it's not new to you it's it's not it's in Dell's nature to to really look at those how we can be efficiently delivering what the customer values uh and and remove the things that the customer does not value and but look I do think what we're going to find is for service people like myself and Satish and the other 60 000 of us it's going to be a great tool to get in front of the customer more we spend a great deal of time today think about somebody writing a services or a response back for an RFQ any of these things that are going on getting the data to help a customer uh the data logs instead of data logs you're getting immediately what's wrong so the answer is we will scale with that but I think what you're going to find is generative AI is going to be an excellent tool to allow us to spend more time in front of the customer instead of gathering the information Patrice comment on the customer Loop Doug was talking about the breadth and the size of the reach of Dell technology services and the big ears I love that that analogy talk about though the customer share with us how are customers involved in providing that feedback to help determine what some of those emerging services are going to become yeah I mean look I'll give you two examples right uh one is if you you know Doug talked about Dell Services especially being that advisor that trusted advisor and partner um you know Trident proposal management is a company a customer of ours very very small right they help other small companies get Federal contracts right so as you know if you need a bit professional contracts it's a quite complicated process if you're a small company so it's a small company helping a lot of other small companies so they come to us so they are very small stuff they're very distributed across the country right so they come to us and say look for them they wanted you know a technology a provider a trust advisor for them to be able to do its they don't have idea on it department they want it as a service so we they leverage Apex devices as a service from them right so what we what that enables them to do is basically simple stuff but you know it keeps all their employees up to date on technology in terms of their I.T assets it also gives them the security because they are dealing with a lot of federal contracts a lot of security postures they don't need to worry about all of that stuff it's fundamentally I think taking some of that pain away from the customers so that we can actually Bear and drive that right the sorry go ahead please no the other The Other Extreme and I want to add to what Doug is talking about in the AI space right so one of the things if you see um uh the announcements yesterday with project Helix we did with Nvidia right is a lot of customers are going to look at these infrastructures these things which are custom made for these you know generative ai ai Solutions they're going to deploy it on-prem they're going to report in color right so we are going to play you know massively in that space with Nvidia managing and developing these models are quite complex they are not simple right we talk about how much developers are going to spend time creating these new models versus managing that ecosystem of these model building Model Management that's where Services can help right so we actually have managed Services where we actually can take the entire machine learning Ops devops cycle the complexity away from them right just like the Trident example how do I make sure this is much more complex ecosystem but how do we make sure that we give you that customers a choice so the customers can worry about building and taking those models out rather than worrying about the complexity of governing those right those are good you know two extreme examples but I think that's kind of where I think they'll now V can actually help podcast maybe just this may be Two Nuts and Bolts but I love nuts and bolts on getting down to answer a question even more specifically one level below that double click is every week we look at this the what the customer are sending to us for what they want for a solution right there the second thing we're doing is we we talk once a week with all of their Consultants of what they're working on and what they're seeing the customers need or want and then we combine those two and we literally we rank them something is new something is wow we're seeing more of this volume and it moves up to where we productize it even more and that's just a cycle so we're constantly getting that feedback literally weekly and then working with PG uh as well on the product side with that and that's just part of Dell's DNA from what I understand we love it yeah how much of a problem how much of my priority is it for your customers right now in this day and age given the macro environment all the other things that they got to worry about cyber et cetera how much of a priority is fixing their multi-cloud problem and for those customers where it is a priority are there any patterns is there any industry or a situation where it's more acute that you've noticed yeah sure go ahead so I mean look um multi-cloud by Design right we we talked about it we know from the get-go we want our customers have a choice and one of the things that we talk about is VR multi-cloud by design that means our customers also want to know where what workloads to put where right what makes sense where right do we do this in on-prem do we do this in color are these things better for public Cloud right so at the end of the day it's all about having the right solutions for the customers to be able to support in that Journey right that that's that's as simple as it gets multi-cloud to me uh it also make calls for some interesting architectures in terms of how our customers view their outcomes and that's another area where you know customers have choices and they have implementations but when you marry that with what is already there right a lot of our customers especially the global 500s and thousands have maximum they are you know they have a lot of complicated you know implementations today how do you basically adapt those how do you transform those into this new design that's a big opportunity and that's also another area where they are talking to us quite a bit and I do think those Trends to follow up on that we talked about earlier the economic environment we're on right now I believe will speed those Trends up to your point that's 10 that tends to be what we see is our customers are leaning into technology the digitalization and the multi-cloud because it helps them get to their their end result faster have I guess I haven't but I'm going to ask it anyway have have customers figured out the sort of future of work the hybrid work still tweaking it the model Dell itself is you know we can figure it out right is that a fair thing it's yeah it's like evolution the amplitude is maybe getting less but it's still a little tweaking going on I I think that's very fair I mean um look we this all happened globally if you would have asked me before if this could have happened it would have been something out of a sci-fi movie I mean it real literally overnight I think it was actually it's not one that I want to watch again don't watch the Terminator yeah so it happened overnight and I think now we're finding what the new normal is and you're right it's a journey and it's it's tweaking with what works for all of us and listening to our team members really this is really listening to what they what they want what they need and how are we finding the best solution to make that happen so what's what is the impact because you know for a while I thought wow this is going to be permanent you know and this is it still is in many cases I mean you look at the vacancy rates in San Francisco and yeah and even New York so it is quasi-permanent um and so that forced a march to remote and it you know changed a lot of things cyber you guys it's been well discussed and then the headquarters were underfunded we saw a big spike you know we sort of came back and for the let me ask you this for the ones that are settled on their hybrid you know we got Taco Tuesday you got you know cheaper health care and they're getting people to come in on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday let's say for those guys have they have they settled on their infrastructure or are they still trying to harden it um in a way that is optimized for this future of work well first of all yes they are and I think back to those five security we just launched what we call our managed detection 2.0 which is helping our customers manage their endpoint security so yes and we're seeing them they love that service by the way so that becomes you know security becomes as you get more distributed as you know that gets to be even more important and then on the hybrid specifically when you talk about desktops notebooks getting people enabled to do their work what customers are now asking us for wait this is managing all this when it's this distributed help us Dell and that's what we have with our Apex as a service which you saw at launch but also now our life cycle management so you can get connected provisioning so if somebody pops up their PC you're not doing second touch anymore and all the way to helping them we meaning helping the customer manage that all the way to the asset end of life so I think what you're seeing to get to your question is is is is that there they're not finding value in managing that day to day and they do noise Distributing and they're asking Dell to help them do that excellent they're helping dull to do that good business opportunity right I mean it's it's always it's a heavy lifting that they don't want to do and happy to let you guys do it and because you're doing it better and more efficiently yeah it well yeah and and better experience for the uh for their for their team members right uh as well so right yeah Satish rappus take us home with your crystal ball or maybe it's a magic eight ball I like both about what's coming next for services for Dallas technology Services um I think one we are absolutely going to be focused on our core strategic priorities right um we are very focused on basically making helping and being a trust advice for customers that takes various shapes and forms in terms of you know return to work hybrid work like we talked about what does that mean for our customers what does that mean for the journey it also means adapting and driving to the new technology areas and that talked about in AI like what does it mean for us say what do we do and where do we start right I think um some of this stuff again it also applies internally to us in terms of how we can actually take advantage of these Technologies to be better but that's also more important to say where are these customers in their journey and how do we help them multi-cloud is another example right um and there are products and assets and portfolios which we are working with our product teams on but it's also about what do I have in my current customers estate right what do I have in my its state today how do I actually make them cloud ready right so we talked about some of the offers like manage devcloud and managed Services where we are actually developing this cable to say we can actually help you take your existing base existing infrastructure and get it up to a level where it feels like Cloud line right so I think it's uh it's a mix of bringing nuke assets new products new services to the market but it's also helping our customers bridge the gap in terms of some of these Market transitions we talked about yeah and helping them help enable their customers guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program talking about how customers priorities are changing and those five key ways in which jello's responding we we will definitely keep our ion Dell technology Services thank you so much Doug and Satish thank you listening thank you appreciate it all right for our guest on Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin we have a short break but after the break Ash McCarty's going to join us going to talk about all things multi-cloud from default to design and how vxrail is adding sustainability specifically for Edge use cases we'll see you after a short break [Music]

2023-05-30 13:20

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