>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>No, that, that you guys. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone. Live here on the floor in Las Vegas with Dell tech world 2022 cube coverage. I'm John for, with Dave Volante, Allison Ducey, chief marketing officer executive vice president of Dell technologies. Welcome back to the queue. Thanks for coming back on. Hey Allison. >>Hey. Hi guys. It's so good to see you. I am just so delighted to be on the cube and so delighted to see you both live and in person. >>So three years ago was the last physical event. A lot of virtual, a lot of, probably some scar tissue to share there, but give us the quick highlights here. The, the show format what's new, what's different. >>So I think one of the things I talked to my team about a lot is we've learned so much over the past couple of years. It's really important as we go forward to carry the best of what we've learned over the last two years, combined with the best of in person experiences that I know we all missed. So things that really people wanna do in person training, connection, the birds of the feather sessions and taking the technology and communications skills that we've developed over the last two years and making the event better as well. So, you know, Dave and I were talking about how do you extend the reach of the event beyond just three days? How do you engage with the global audience? Not all of whom are back to traveling all of the time. And so we think the impact of this event is the biggest and best that it's ever been. And it's not about going back to 2019. It's about the best of the last couple of years and the human connection. I think we've all been missing. >>So I remember last time here, here, we, we asked, we're coming up to state with Ashton Kucher and I told you about my man crush. And now you bring a on Matthew, which was an amazing interview. I mean, I don't really, no, I mean, I love his work, but wow. What a thoughtful and intelligent individual, and you obviously did a great job, you know, carrying that interview. So tremendous. I mean, you, you know him, right? He's like in your >>He's, he's an Austin Guy. He's really committed it to Austin. He's really committed to the university of Texas. We've done a number of things with him together. So we do know him and still, that was probably the most in depth conversation that we'd ever had with him. And it was so much >>Fun. Let me wait. So, okay. So I gotta make you laugh. So at the, after you were done, you said, okay, let's open it up for audience questions. Now I was really intimidated even though I to get up in front of the audience and ask questions, but I didn't know what to ask him. And I figured there'd be a long line of people asking the question. >>There was not. >>So I saw that and I'm like, I don't know what to ask 'em. So I texted my wife and my daughter who love 'em. They're like, all right. All right. And so my wife texted me a question, but it was too late. The, the session had ended. So I'm gonna ask you her question and ask you what, how you think he would've responded and we can >>Refine it. Okay. I'll give it a whirl. Your >>Question was, he's a big proponent of showing up. Okay. I didn't know this. You could ask him about if the definition for him of showing up has changed over time and how does he stay motivated to always show up? And I was like, wow, what a great question. >>That is a great question. And I will tell you as the interviewer, I think lots of people were sort of intimidated. One, one woman even said, this is making me nervous, but here's my question. So as the interviewer, I was looking out at the sea of nobody asking questions, doing scrambling in my head, trying to come up with some more questions, cuz I had already asked all my questions. So I wish you'd been able to get to the stage, uh, get to the mic and ask that question. But here's what I think he would've said. Who knows? Maybe he'll send me a note if I get it wrong. I think he would've said something along the lines of, it's always about being intentional about what's happening in your life at that moment. <affirmative> and so, as he thought about some there's an example he uses in his book. >>I don't remember the name of the movie where he kind of very early in his career where he kind of just winged it and he got to the set and he realized because he was, he thought he was getting over rehearsed. And so he thought I need to go back to the natural moment. And he realized the script was in Spanish and he said, I need six minutes. How is he gonna memorize script in six minutes in Spanish? And I think that was just an interesting example of when he realized that there's a synchronicity between being your natural self and being intentional and being really thoughtful about where you are and what you're doing at that moment. So I think that that intentionality spans his career. It's the moment of interest inspection about where you are in your life and doing brave things like leaving behind a safe, but no longer fulfilling romantic comedy career. So that's what I think he would've said. And >>Bringing that to the moment is where he gets his inspiration. >>I think so. Yeah. >>Yeah. So he's very impressive guy. I didn't read the book yet. It's green light is >>Green lights. Green lights >>Is able the book. So >>I recommend it and I didn't listen to it. I read it. I'm a reader, but I've had many, many, many people tell me that they listen to it. He narrates the book himself. So I think there's some benefit there because you get it truly in his voice. >>Yeah. That's always fun. Yeah. >>Speaking of in the moment, this event has got two things going on in the format you mentioned, but also the content. It is right on point. And a lot of the execs came in Michael and the COOs were both on the cube, interesting poll position you guys have for this. Now you got the marketing angle going on here. How do you throttle this next? What's next? How does it evolve? You got the content, you got the new format, Dell tech world plus digital now combined. What's next? >>I think, I mean, so obviously we are clearly in an inflection point in the technology industry and we've talked a lot about separating the hype from the reality of the day to day of what our customers are doing in their businesses and the problems they're trying to solve. But if you look at what makes us really, uh, I think special and unique is if the, the last number of years we've continued to show up and deliver for our customer tumors, we were there with them over the course of the pandemic. We helped them get their remote workforce up and running and now we're helping them lean into their data center challenges. And I think, for example, the snowflake announcement from earlier this week, this ability to have the best of both worlds and to have your data on premises whilst also benefiting from Snowflake's capabilities. I think that's just a good example of the kind of thing you'll see us do more of, and this intentionality that we're trying to bring to an incredibly complex and fragmented world. So that's what we're doing from a business. And then from a marketing perspective, I think it's just about this stretchy steady drumbeat. It's no longer one moment in time. It is all the moments in time while it's also keeping people's attention. Yeah. Not boring them to death with four hour keynotes. It's >>It's interesting. You know, we, we've been watching you guys for a long time, as you know, and it's interesting. You have such a big story. Now you have the story at the industry positioning of where it is for growth. You also got product innovation, right? Balancing the, the product innovation, which is still evolving. You got edges exploding, the snowflake deal with the new product use cases. There's still the need for the, the nerds, right. So to speak. And then you got the industry leadership, which is happening. So you've got balancing that. How do you thread that needle? How do you tie it all together? How what's, how do you think about that? What's your thought >>Of the things I think is at its simplest. It's not just about what we do. It's also about who we are as a company and you have to do both, right. We have to talk about where we're innovating in our products and our solutions. And it's also really important for us to tell the world who we are and how we show up in the world. And if you think about it, another one of the announcements from this week that I'm really proud of are our solar hubs. And that's a build off of the, uh, solar learning labs working with 25 communities around the world, underserved in terms of access to technology. And so it's, you have to do both sometimes I think in the past we've been just talking about our products cuz we're engineers at heart. And we're proud of that and not talking enough about who we are. I think some companies talk too much about who they are and you're like, well, what do you do exactly? So, you know, the question always is how do you do that? And so there's a believability gap. What we're always striving for is that combination of what we do, who we are. >>So you know, that what we do is really important and there's obviously a lot of very difficult and contentious social issues. Yes. And, and kind of a of follow up there is, is, you know, what's your philosophy on how to handle those? It's presumably what you do, not what you, you say. I mean, you gotta say things as well, and they're gonna be more, you know, we're hearing about it, reading about it, others that are gonna be down the road, how what's your philosophy on how to handle those? >>The first thing is we try to be really thoughtful about what conversations or actually relevant to us. One of the things I watch many companies do is comment on anything, anything, and everything. They sort of run into the fray of the moment and they over comment. And frankly, then I think they don't stand for anything because they're constantly chasing a press cycle, which is pretty vicious and pretty short lived. So we don't think that that serves us. What we do is we look at almost every issue you can imagine. And ahead of time, ahead of time, have the conversation about where are we going to engage? What are the issues that we stand for? And we've got much more intentional, even on our ESG and CSR front, around taking our moonshot goals and making them more practical so that we can be really thoughtful and intentional. Because as you know, at the moment of time, when a crisis hits you, haven't done that work ahead of time. You're probably responding. And you can see that sometimes without naming any names, because everybody knows some of these players are without my even having to say it, someone responding or flip flopping it's cuz they haven't thought about it ahead of time. >>Yeah. And a lot of that comes from the top and the CEO won't stop on Twitter. But so that to me ties in. Yeah. So it ties into the concept of trust. Going back to some of the keynote messages that we heard from Michael you've earned trust in a lot of ways you were there during the pandemic, you know, your products work, et cetera, et cetera, but the way in which you act builds trust doesn't it. And that we've in, I think came across in, in the keynotes. Why such a big theme on trust? I mean you see apple with privacy, doing certain things really doubling down on trust. Can you talk about that? >>I mean, I think it's because it is core to who we are and if you look at the hype cycle around technology, the hype cycle, around companies who can have kind of a moment in the sun and then you find out actually that their business practices weren't very good or they weren't really delivering on the innovation that they were claiming. So they were probably overclaiming at times it has always been core to who we are. What I think we're doing now is just being much more intentional about how important it is to show up that way. That's why I come back to, it's not just what we do, it's who we are and that's why customers choose us. And you hear some of the customer case studies like U S a a like CVS that we use a lot at the moment in time where they needed help managing through the pandemic. We delivered with a consistency that not everybody could provide. And I think provides us the room and the space to really lean into this trust conversation. I >>Love, I love the high level flag. You guys are flying at ESG stores. You're getting in immersed in issues that you're solving for yourselves. So you can understand them and have good positions, but also on digital. Now you have other ways to drive the business. We just started a discord server week before for Dell tech world and already got 8,000 members. And the only thing they really care about about Dell tech world here is what's the monitors, where's the speeds and speeds. Right? They want the speeds and these they're gamers, right? So there's omnichannels everywhere. Right? You have, that's hard, right? So is it a top down? Let, let things fly. Is there intentionality around execution to drive business value? >>I think that, I mean, one of the things that I would say for the company and for its leadership for me personally, is we're generally pretty intentional about most things that we do. I always have an expression that I, I, I don't like to reward a Smith fireman. If the building is on fire, I'm gonna ask you, why is the building on fire? Not, you know, I'll say, are you okay? But then I'll say, why is the building on fire? So the reason I use that analogy is we are pretty intentional about most things that we do. And then you also have to re leave room for innovation because it is a completely different product experience to build an alien where than it is to build server. And yet there's certain standards around how we think about our commitment to environmental goals and sustainability that's consistent. Yeah. So that's the balance that we're always looking for, >>You know, in the isolation economy, we, we learned that we didn't know what was coming next. Yeah. And now in the post isolation economy, we, we learned, you referenced this. We're not going back to 29 team, a rinse and repeat of of 2019 is not gonna work. So I know it's early. You haven't really had much time to think about it, but what have you learned from this event? We were surprised by how many people showed up. What else? >>I was a little surprised by how many people showed up in the fi. And we got a lot of people show up in the final register in the final week or so. I mean, one of the things I think we knew this, but I think we had to learn it a little bit. The hard way. Yeah. Was maybe you don't need four days of two hour keynotes, you know, maybe, maybe people can't absorb that much information. And so I think we've gotten a lot tighter on our messaging and delivering of the keynotes and then allowing people, the space to engage in other that are really important to them, like their own training. They, a lot of people come to this, this event for their own professional development. We should be proud of that and celebrate it. And one of the expressions I use a lot is let's get our inner geek back and provide people the opportunity to do that. And even with our own employees, one of the things that we've seen is just how happy they are to see each our, so leave space for that. >>The face to face matters. It's really valuable in some say, it's the scarce resource now. Yeah. And the digitals augmentation, what have you learned as the standards are, ER, there's no standards they're emerging in real time. What what's popping out as go to, that's gonna evolve as de facto standard digital event kind of hybrid. I >>Think I, I think the short and easy answer is that hybrid Brit evolves as the standard. I don't think anybody sort of like the cloud. Um, I don't think anybody is questioning that you can have the best of both. I think, um, you know, if I taking it out of the realm of events, we are very committed to a hybrid work environment. Just as an example. And this conversation about many companies say you can have flexibility as long as you're here on Tuesday. Well, that's not actually flexibility. That's just pretend flexibility. And so being intentional about, you know, you obviously have to have the conversation with your leader, but we, we are saying, figure out what works for you and work that way. And the reason I went, I took it from events to that example is because that's just one of the many examples of how we're all trying to figure it out. And it's intentionality, it's honesty, it's trust, you know, maybe your job is something that needs to be in person. Great. Then go do it in person. Maybe it's not then don't but have the conversation. So that's, that's how the conversation is sort of >>Maybe it event native, which is the old model. Yeah. Yeah. Hybrid events is there multi-event Daves club super event, >>Multi, multi hybrid events. >><laugh> >>And there actually we do take this show on the road with the Dell tech forum. So it is multi hybrid event. >>By the way you mentioned the team, how excited the team was. I thought it was a great touch at the end of the, of day one keynote to bring all the team members out. That was a really powerful moment, >>You know, to be honest, I loved it when I saw it on paper, I thought this could either be great or so cheesy. I'll be like climbing under my tour and I loved it. And, but even that was a risk where I thought that's fine. Try it. And if it, if it doesn't work, like it's fine, >>Go bigger, go home if they >>Exactly. So I think you see us trying to lean into those moments a little bit more and be willing to take that risk and see what happens. >>Allison always great to have you on the cube. I love your insight. Love your perspective. Final question for you. What are you into these days? What are you watching personally in the industry or in, in your life as we evolve into this next chapter of the generational of the cultural shift? >>I mean the biggest thing that I'm really thinking about is this question of hybrid work and what does it mean to build connection with our employees, with our customers, with our partners, with our broader ecosystem, whilst also having the freedom and flexibility that the last two years have brought us. I mean, I think you guys know, I, I have an odd personal life. I kind little bit of a digital Noma myself and you know, I, in a let's >>Extend the segment, let's >>Go down and in years for past I would not, um, have been able to maintain my life and my job. And that's the power of technology. You just have to look for the downside, which is maybe people need more connection too. So that's an unanswered question. >>Yeah. I knew fabrics are more urging my minds. Very clear. Yeah. Allison, great to have you on again. Pleasure having, Thanks for having us here in the queue. We really >>Appreciate it. We always love having you at Dell tech world. And it's great to see you personally. Thanks >>Executive vice president CMO Dell technologies here in the queue. I'm John for Dave LAN. We'll be right back with more after this break.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Okay listen, we're gearing up for the start of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit. And we want to go back to the early roots of Snowflake. We got some of the founding engineers here, Abdul Munir, Ashish Motivala and Allison Lee. They're three individuals that were at Snowflake, in the early years and participated in many of the technical decisions. That led to the platform and is making Snowflake famous today. Folks great to see you. Thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy schedules. >> Thank you for having us- >> Same. >> It's got to be really gratifying to see this platform that you've built, taking off and changing businesses. So I'm sure it was always smooth sailing, right? There were no debates, where there ever? >> I've never seen an engineer get into a debate. >> Yeah alright, so seriously. So take us back to the early days, you guys choose whoever wants to start, but what was it like, early on we're talking 2013 here, right? >> That's right. >> When I think back to the early days of Snowflake. I just think of all of us sitting in one room at the time, we just had an office that was one room with 12 or 13 engineers sitting there, clacking away at our keyboards, working really hard, churning out code punctuated by somebody asking a question about hey, what should we do about this? Or what should we do about that? And then everyone kind of looking up from their keyboards and getting into discussions and debates about the work that we were doing. >> So, Abdul was it just kind of heads down, headphones on just coding or? >> I think there was a lot of talking and followed by a lot of typing. And I think there were periods of time where anyone could just walk in into the office and probably out of the office and all they'd hear is probably people typing away their keyboards. And one of my most vivid memory is actually I used to sit right across from Allison and there was these two huge monitors between us. And I would just hear her typing away at her keyboard. And sometimes I was thinking and all that typing got me nervous because it seemed like Allison knew exactly what she needed to do. And I was just still thinking about it. >> So Ashish was this like bliss for you as a developer or an engineer? Or was it a stressful time? What was the mood? >> Then when you don't have a whole lot of customers, there's a lot of bliss, but at the same time, there's a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we build the product. There was a timeline ahead of us. We knew we had to build this in a certain timeframe. So one thing I'll add to what Allison and Abdul said is, we did a lot of whiteboarding as well. There were a lot of discussions and those discussions were a lot of fun. They actually cemented what we wanted to build. They made sure everyone was in tune and there we have it. >> Yeah, it is a really exciting time. We can do it any start-up. When you have to make decisions in development and variably you come to a fork in the road. So I'm curious as to what some of those forks might've been, how you guys decided which fork to take. Was there a Yoda in the room that served as the Jedi Master? How are those decisions made? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> That's an interesting question. And as I think back one of the memories that sticks out in my mind is this epic meeting in one of our conference rooms called Northstar and many of our conference rooms are named after ski resorts because the founders are really into skiing. And that's where the Snowflake name comes from. So there was this epic meeting and I'm not even sure exactly what topic we were discussing. I think it was the sign up flow and there were a few different options on the table. And one of the options that people were gravitating to, one of the founders didn't like it. And they said a few times that this makes no sense. There's no other system in the world that does it this way. And I think one of the other founders said, that's exactly why we should do it this way or at least seriously consider this option. So, I think there was always this tendency and this impulse that we needed to think big and think differently and not see the world the way it is, but the way we wanted it to be and then work our way backwards and try to make it happen. >> Allison, any fork in the road moments that you remember? >> Well, I'm just thinking back to a really early meeting with Ashish and a few of our founders where we're debating something probably not super exciting to a lot of people outside of hardcore database people, which was how to represent our column metadata. And I think it's funny that you that you mentioned Yoda, because we often make jokes about one of our founders Thierry and referred to him as Yoda, because he has this tendency to say very concise things that kind of make you scratch your head and say, wow, why didn't I think of that? Or what exactly does that mean? I never thought about it that way. So, when I think of the Yoda in the room, it was definitely Thierry, >> Ashish is there anything you can add to this conversation? >> I'll agree with Allison on the Yoda comment for sure. Another big fork in the road I recall was when we changed one of our meadow store, where we store and are willing to try and metadata. We used to use a tool called my SQL and we changed it to another database called foundation DV. I think that was a big game changer for us. And it was a tough decision. It took us a long time, for the longest time we even had our own little branch it was called foundation DV and everybody was developing on that branch, it's a little embarrassing but those are the kinds of decisions that have altered the shape of Snowflake. >> Yeah, these are really down in the weeds hardcore stuff that a lot of people might not be exposed to. What would you say was the least obvious technical decision that you had to make at the time? And I want to ask you about the most obvious too, but what was the one that was so out of the box? You kind of maybe mentioned it a little bit before, but I wonder if we could double click on that? >> Well, I think one of the core decisions in our architecture is the separation of compute and storage that is really core to our architecture. And there's so many features that we have today, for instance data sharing, zero-copy cloning, that we couldn't have without that architecture. And I think it was both not obvious. And when we told people about it in the early days, there was definitely skepticism about being able to make that work and being able to have that architecture and still get great performance. >> Exactly- >> Yeah, anything that was like clearly obvious, maybe that was the least and the most that separation from compute and store, 'cause it allowed you to actually take advantage of cloud native, but was there an obvious one that is it sort of dogma that you philosophically live behind to this day? >> I think one really obvious thing is the sort of no tuning, no knobs, ease of use story behind Snowflake. And I say it's really obvious because everybody wants their system to be easy to use. But then I would say there were tons of decisions behind that, that it's not always obvious the implications of such a choice, right? And really sticking to that. And I think that that's really like a core principle behind Snowflake that led to a lot of non-obvious decisions as a result of sticking to that principle. >> To wrap to that now you've gotten us thinking, I think another really interesting one was really, should we start from scratch or should we use something that already exists and build on top of that. And I think that was one of these almost philosophical kind of stances that we took, that a lot of the systems that were out there were the way they were because they weren't built for the platforms that they were running on. And the big thing that we were targeting was the cloud. And so one of the big stances we took was that we were going to build it from scratch and we weren't going to borrow a single line of code from any other database out there. And this was something that really shocked a lot of people and many times that this was pretty crazy. And it was, but this is how you build great products. >> That's awesome, all right, Ashish give your last word, we got like just 30 seconds left take, bring us home. >> Till date actually one of those that shocks people when you talk to them and they say, wow, you're not really using any other database? And you build this entirely yourself? The number of people who actually can build a database from scratch are fairly limited. The group is fairly small. And so it was really a humongous task. And as you've mentioned, it really changed the direction of how we designed the database. What does the database really mean to us, right? The way Snowflake has built a database, it's really a number of organs that come together and form the body. And that's also a concept that's novel to the database industry. >> Guys congratulations, you must be so proud and it's going to be awesome watching the next decade. So thank you so much for sharing your stories. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you- >> Thank you.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019 and I'm John Furrier and my co-host Dave Vellante breaking down all the action, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We go all day, all night here at Dell's great event. We're here with the CMO of Dell Technology Allison Dew, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, it's nice to be here. >> Good to see you again, Allison. >> It's fun. >> What a show, action-packed as always. We got two sets, we call it the theCUBE content cannons. We're just firing off content, a lot of conversations, a lot of boxes being checked, but also growth, lookin' at the numbers. The business performance of Dell is strong. Leadership across all categories, large-scale, and an integrated approach with the products and the relationship with VMware paying off in big-time. Azure News, Microsoft integrating in, so a lot of great product leadership, business results, things are booming at Dell Technologies. >> They really are and you know, when you think about the journey for us in particular over the last three years since starting the EMC combination, and all of the things that are written about integrations, technology integrations of this scale and scope, and you look at what the teams together have successfully done, the business performance, the share growth across categories, and as of today, the true end-to-end solutions that we're announcing in partnership with VMware and Secureworks. And we tend to be a pretty humble culture, but I will say, I think it's a pretty impressive result, when you look at most integrations are focused on don't break anything, and not only did we not break anything, we've kept the trust of our customers, we've continued to grow the customer base, and now we're really focused on, how across the Dell Technologies family, primarily with VMware and Secureworks and Pivotal do we bring to life the solutions that solve our customers' biggest IT problems. Pretty amazing spot to be in. >> You know one of the luxuries of doing theCUBE for 10 years is that we've had conversations over 10 years and I remember many years ago when Michael was about to go private, we saw him in Austin, was a small Dell world back then, we had two conferences, and he was standing there alone. We approached him, Dave and I, and we had a long conversation with him, he was very approachable, and then when he talked about, when he did the private and then the acquisition at these points, everyone was pooh-poohing it at saying, it's a declining market, things are going, why would you want to do this? Obviously the scale benefits are showing, but the macroeconomic conditions of the marketplace, you couldn't be happier for. Public cloud drove a lot of application deployment, you have SAS businesses started, you have on-premise booming, refresh and infrastructure, a complete growth. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's actual growth there. >> Right. >> So the bet paid off. You as a marketer have to market this now, so what's your strategy because you have digital transformation as the kind of standard positioning posture, but as you have to market Dell Technology on the portfolio of capabilities, which is large, I can only imagine it's challenging. >> So let me actually back up, and to one of the points that you talked about, and then I'll answer your actual question. So I can't remember off the top of my head, but we very jokingly talk about, in the era since the PC was declared dead, we have sold billions of PCs right and it would be funnier if I could remember the number, but you know we used to joke around with Jeff Clark, ala Monty Python, I'm not dead yet. >> Yeah. >> And so you get this hype about what's happening in the industry, and the truth is it's actually a very different picture than some of that hype, and one of the reasons I think that's important is because obviously we've continued to take share on the PC business, we've continued to grow there, but we also believe that the hype sometimes applies to these other technology cycles as well. So if you go back a couple of years ago, it was everything was going to the public cloud. If you don't go to the public cloud you are a dinosaur. You don't know what you're doing. You're going to go out of business. The traditional infrastructure companies are going to go out of the business, and to be honest, that is also just nonsense, right. And so if you think about what's evolving, is we believe very firmly that we're going to see the continued growth of a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world and it's not one thing or the other. And in fact, when you look at all of the research around the economics of doing one or the other, it all becomes workload-dependent. So for some workloads you should go to the public cloud. For some workloads, you should have it on-prem and that conversation may not be as interesting a headline, but it's the truth. >> It's reality actually. >> It's the truth. >> Well it's also reality, the workloads are dictating what the architecture should be or the solutions. That's what you're saying is a reality. >> Exactly, and so that's why we're so excited about the announcements that we had this morning with VMware, with Microsoft. We're really talking about a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, and across all of the solutions that we announced this morning. The key, continuity and what we're really focused on, sounds so hackneyed, is how do we make it simpler for our customers? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy PCs? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy your cloud environment, that's it. >> So let's talk about the show a little bit, let's see 15,000 attendees, 122 countries represented, 4,000 channel partners, 250 industry analysts and media folks, so pretty big numbers. You could see it in the hallways. It's not quiet. You're kind of doing a lot of this. >> It's actually sort of hard to pay attention to you guys with all the noise in the background. You must be used to it. I'm like a goldfish, like what's happening? >> Now the interesting thing to me is, and we were talking about you know, it's the transitions, consolidations, oh it's traditional infrastructure companies are dead, et cetera, et cetera. I'd observe that over the years the testament of today's leaders is they respond, they don't just sit back and say oh Unix is snake-oil. Do you remember that famous quote? Look at what Microsoft has done, but my point is Michael's keynote today, it wasn't about a bunch of products, it was about big visions, solving a lot of the world's problems, and really conveying that Dell is in a position to help these companies as a partner. I presume you had some input to that keynote, I just wonder. >> I hope so. (laughs) >> What the thinking was there? >> So there's a lot of conversation and it's, you don't have to go that far in the media to read everything about technology as a force of evil in the world. One of the things that you notice, Michael's keynote this morning and I'll come back to what we're doing about it again later this week, is we are putting a very firm stake in the ground that we believe that technology is overall a force for positive change in the world and we're having a conversation about that on Wednesday that I'll talk a little bit more about in a second. And there's a subtlety there, that I think sometimes again, may not be the most interesting headline but is true, which is technology in aggregate drives great progress in the world, however we as leaders, we as humans, also have a responsibility to drive the responsible use of technology and so you see some of the conversations that we're having later this week in the Guru sessions, for example, where Joy Bilal-Meany is talking about responsible use of AI and some of the inherent biases in AI. Those are the tough issues that leaders need to be tackling now. >> Yeah well and one of the other you know, you're right a trade press loves to pick up on it and pick at it but one of the things to talk about, of course, is jobs, automation affecting jobs, I know Erik Brynjolfsson is one of your speakers, he's been on theCUBE before, and the discussion we had was machines have always replaced humans. For the first time ever,now they're replacing humans in cognitive functions. So the the answer is not protect the past from the future it's educate people, find new ways to be creative. I mean, technology has always been-- >> That's right. >> Part of human good and human advancement. There's always a two-sided coin, but it's got to be managed. >> That's right, one of the conversations that I think gets lost is when we talk about, I am a Battlestar Galactica fan, the second one not the one from the 70s, so you know I always say jokingly-- >> Darn. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We're a little older. >> Did you watch the one from the 2,000s? >> Yes, of course. >> 2,000s are so good. You know the conversation about are the Cylons coming to get us? And is AI really the thing that's destroying what's happening for human populations? The reality is AI has been evolving for many years, so it's not actually new. What is new is the combination of AI and data and the compute power to make that real and I do think it requires a different conversation with societies, with employers about how do you continue to reeducate your employee base? What does that mean? And that is really meaty stuff that we need to be leaning into. On aside, you've got me thinking of this whole Battlestar Galactica. My mind's thinking Star Trek, Star Wars. I heard a rumor that you guys had so many unhappy employees because Game of Thrones was on yesterday. >> Yeah. >> That you actually rented a big screen? >> Yeah, we did. >> A lot of Game of Thrones fans? Are you in that mix? >> So yeah. >> No spoiler alerts. >> No, I won't say anything about what happened. But I'll tell you, so we have all of our employees who work at the show, have to get here on Saturday or Sunday at the very latest. And even me personally, we came to Las Vegas and I thought, well I can watch it in my hotel room and then my hotel room didn't have HBO and I thought I don't really want to watch it on my little HBO Go app that's about this big because we're all waiting for what's going to happen in episode three, and I won't tell you if you haven't seen it. >> It's a lot of battling. >> So exactly, so my team and I had this conversation about could we have a joint viewing of Game of Thrones and it's really my team who did all of the work, but it was super-fun and we had a party with a bunch of team, had a few beers and it was fun. >> That's a great culture. >> I just wanted to get that out there. I think, cool culture. Allison, you mentioned something about the press and stories for good and how people looking for headlines. You know we're not advertising, so we're not trying to chase the clickbait, it's about getting the story right and sometimes the boring story doesn't get the headlines. Or the page views, advertising. So we're in a world now where a lot of other people in the media, they're censoring posts, there was an incident on Forbes where I wrote a negative post about a company and they took it down, that was Oracle. A lot of journalists looking for stories just to put tech in a bad spot. >> Right. >> And there's a lot of tech for good, but a lot of people can't point to one thing saying that's an example for tech for good and there's some few out there missing children, exploited children, trafficking, all kinds of things, talk about that dynamic because this is changing how you market, how people consume. You have the role of open communities. >> Yep. >> Social networking. A lot of dynamics going on. How do you view all this? >> So first of all, I think so much of the conversation about tech for good or tech for bad actually indexes only on social media and media broadly, and perhaps that's because it's the media who are writing about that. And so there's sort of this loop that we get in and I do think there are real issues that we need to think about in terms of social media. You guys likely saw Kara Swisher had a an op-ed in the New York Times after the Sri Lankan bombings where she, long-term technology advocate, actually said after the Sri Lankan bombings when the government shut down all social media communications, I thought that was a good thing and so that probably actually did help with the immediate situation on the ground and yet is a very scary precedent, right? I'd like to to take the conversation and say what about media? Right, so there's a lot of work that we need to do in order to maintain media fairness and then there's a whole other conversation about technology that we're not talking about. Everything that we're doing in terms of medicine and indexing the human genome, and addressing deafness and Michael talked about that even this morning, there are these really big technology problems that were really leaning into, and yet we're either talking about Amazon drone delivery or what Facebook is doing. We need to talk about those, but let's talk about where technology is really struggling to address real problems. >> I just read an essay yesterday from Dana Boyd who wrote a great fascinating piece around extremism in social media. Media's being hijacked by these extreme groups and they're mixing up causation and correlation and conflating many things to just tell a story to support an initiatives, no curation. >> Right. >> And with social media everything's open so that just flies out there. And so that's a big problem. >> And then takes off, you know. >> So how do you deal with that as a CMO 'cause you're spending advertising dollars. You're trying to deploy capital. You now have a new open source kind of mindset around communities customers are shopping themselves now. >> Right, so this is going to sound possibly a little bit overly simplistic but what I am responsible for in my job is the reputation and brand of this company right. I think about other things in terms of how we think about media and everything but I want to make sure that we are spending our media dollars in a responsible way and yet also recognize that people can disagree with us and that's okay and be comfortable with, we can be both a media advertiser on a publication who might write a review where they don't like one of our products and I'm never going to be in the business of saying take down our media dollars because that sets a terrible precedent and frankly there are people who would say take down our media dollars so that's one thing that we're really focused on. And then the other is, we consistently year-over-year are recognized as one of the world's most ethical companies and I will tell you from the leadership with Michael across the board I believe that that is true. And we actually think about business in an ethical way and we behave in an ethical way and that's why frankly you're not reading those headlines about us which are a lot more problematic. >> It's a cultural thing you guys have. Michael's always been a direct-to-consumer. That's been a direct mail, back in the glory days, now-- >> We still do that actually. >> Cloud, SAS, he texts me all the time. Hey John, what's going on? So he's he's open. >> Yeah. >> He's also now with Cloud and SAS, it's a direct to consumer business. >> I love your positive attitude. You have a session tomorrow, Optimism and Happiness in the Digital Age, looking forward to that. I have a personal question. So you started out your career, I think, in East Asia studies, right? >> That's right, good memory. >> You speak multiple languages. >> Yeah. >> I think three languages? >> If you count English, three. >> Yes okay so you're trilingual. >> Trilingual, yeah. >> If you speak two, you're what? >> Bilingual. >> Speak one, you're what? >> Monolingual, American. (all laughing) American, I was like, I know this joke. >> I wonder how that affected sort of your career? >> Absolutely. >> In terms of getting into this business. >> I would first say that I was an incredibly naive undergraduate. I wanted to be an editor of a paper and I loved foreign languages. So I studied Japanese and French and that led me to going to Japan as a very naive 22 year old and I started working in this small Japanese ad agency. I was the only non-Japanese person in that company and of course I learned some functional things in terms of the art of advertising but what I actually learned was how to survive in an environment that was so different to mine. Even if you speak Japanese, it is a language of unsaid things and you have to constantly be figuring out what's actually happening here and so ironically that decision that I made at 18, very naively, to study Japanese is one of the things that sets the course of my life because I've always been, my entire career, in international jobs and I think if I ever had to come back to just being in an American job, I wouldn't know what to do with myself, I'd be so bored. And it's also one of the reasons when we talk about technology and education and AI and what are robots going to do, This is my personal opinion, somewhat controversial opinion which is of course we need to support STEM, of course I want to see more women in STEM. At the same time, I want to see us focus our children on critical thinking skills. How do you write well? How do you have an argument? How do you convince somebody? And that's because until I went to business school I was a liberal arts major born and bred and so that's not the pat answer that you expect from somebody in my job which is it's all about STEM. It's about STEM and more. >> Emotional quotient's a big thing we're seeing a lot. The whole self. That's a big part of the kids growing up being aware. >> Yeah. >> Socially emotional. Allison, thanks coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> My pleasure. >> Great insights here in theCUBE. We're here with the CMO, Allison Dew, with Dell Technologies. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more day one coverage after this short break. >> Awesome. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Good morning. Welcome to day two of the cube at Dell technologies world live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with John farrier, Dave Nicholson guys, a lot of momentum yesterday. The vibe was amazing. We're think there's about 8,000 people here and spends yesterday a lot going on with multi-cloud with partners, with customers, John, we got Michael Dell coming on in just about 15, 20 minutes. >>Yep. The keynotes getting out, people are starting to come in. You can see them, uh, flowing through the hallway. Michael Dell will be on about 15 minutes and we're gonna ask him every year when they have the cube here, we're gonna have room with questions around digital transformation. Security is the hot thing. Obviously here, data and what's up with Dell. So we'll see what, what he is gonna say. >>We had some really good interviews yesterday. We, we had customers on, we had partners and the, the overall sentiment was people are very excited about, I mean, the momentum that Dell is coming off of from F Y 22 of first time hitting north of a, of a hundred billion or in the company's history, the partner ecosystem expanding what their acknowledgement multi-cloud is here. Yeah. The, the vibe was good. The, the partners are excited. Lot of opportunity. Yeah. >>I mean, I think the big thing story here this year is that, you know, VMware's not part of Dell technologies world, although there is some stuff kind of connecting together in terms of ownership, but it's still now on its own. So that's, that's a key, um, development that's happened since we were last here in person, but the digital transformation train continues to go down the tracks and it's getting better and better and better. And for, in terms of what is happening, but there's still more complexity at the edge. That's something that's important and security more than ever is important on a global stage. But also the cyber attacks are going up. Ransomware is, has essentially I'm so standard. Everyone needs a, a solution. So everyone's pivoting to endpoint protection, zero, zero trust. And, um, ransomware has been, you see the storage vendors go that way. So that's a big trend. Uh, a lot of people go in there and they need it too. Cuz ransomware is very dangerous. So, and then obviously cyber all over the world is, is a huge, so, you know, Dell plays a role in that. They have a lot of gear and, and I think the edge is developing nicely. >>Yeah. You talk about ransomware. I was reading some stats recently that there's one attack, every 11 seconds that organizations now it's not a matter of, are we gonna get hit it's when yeah. And I think I wrote a stat the other day that said 75% of organizations will be hit by at least one cyber attack by 2025, which is around the corner. So security is that board level, front and center conversation. Yeah. And we saw a lot of that with what they were announcing just yesterday alone. >>Yeah. And to me, the cybersecurity issue is just also a political one. Uh, the adversaries can play with open source and the threats are real. The threat vectors are increasing and there's no perimeter as everyone knows that in security and you start to see data being protected. So now you've got data protection is that's big for Dell. You know, they have a huge footprint of disaster recovery and data protection. And so that becomes a really key point for protecting the data in flight, uh, data. Engineering's a hot trend. So data as code has become huge. You're seeing that in, in all the digital applications, the role of data is becoming more and more. >>Absolutely. We talked a lot Dave about edge yesterday and especially, particularly in retail and a lot of the massive transformation and the pressure that retail is under, you know, us consumers, we bring this, we want the online experience in the connected store. And so they talked a lot about what they're doing with respect to edge at the retail yesterday and in financial services. Really interesting. What are some of your thoughts on the direction that Dell's going? >>So I've been, I've been taking a little bit of a different angle on this since I've been here prowling around looking under the covers to get an understanding of the advances in hardware that are driving the top line value per opposition. So here it's appropriate to talk about things like retail at the edge and the experience that that delivers to an end user customer Dell is still doing, however, the really hard work of optimizing systems on the back end, the stuff that a lot of people would say they don't care about. The idea is Dell makes sure that this development that happens so people at the edge don't have to care about it. So, so that's the thing that I find fascinating being a kind of an old school hardware guy myself, is that all these really cool things aren't getting talked about because we don't need to talk about them because Dell has it handled. So whether it's whether it's retail, uh, whether it's, uh, uh, advances insecurity, uh, they're all driven by highly optimized and tuned hardware. You mentioned partners, um, partnerships that Dell has behind the scenes are critical to all of that. >>I mean, I think the big thing about Dell too, is they have a co here. Um, they have Chuck Whitten, a co chief operating officer, uh, Jeff Clark, uh, Chuck Whitten's new, uh, came from BAE and you got two do Cocos. Right? Right. So you got a fledging company Dell's growing. And, and the big question is M and a right. Dave and I were talking about that last night with a bunch of folks in the, in the hallway about who does Dell buy? Do they need to buy anyone? Right? And again, uh, hardware is back. I mean, you look at what we talked about yesterday. And our wrap up day one was essentially, hardware's becoming more important. And even at Amazon reinvent, when we recovering that show role of Silicon plays a huge role. Now they run hardware in the cloud. So, um, we all know hardware, just servers, somewhere in the cloud there. So I think hardware is gonna be huge David, because, you know, edge needs more smaller, faster, cheaper Bob access to colo, uh, Equinox was on yesterday. Um, you're seeing like 5g edges deploying. So I think hardware is gonna matter. I think you'll see the home become much more device centric, smarter devices. So smart city, smart homes, hardware matters more than ever. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and from an acquisition perspective who, who knows maybe Dell would acquire VMware <laugh> crazier things have happened >>Or VMware could acquire Dell >>Or yeah. Crazier things have happened. >>They would argue that one. <laugh> >>So, so the hardware hardware's back back again. It makes me think of that M and M song slim, shady. You think we need to do some sort of parody on that <laugh> together, but what does that mean for, for the partner community? There are over 200,000 partners. We talk about Barun GSI data center, the hyperscalers, that partner. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, the partner story is I think more important than ever. And you seeing more ecosystems develop around companies that you wouldn't think have ecosystems that's because with cloud and now the cloud operating model, which is on-premise and edge, you can do piece parts of solutions and, and the glue layers, the abstraction layers in software at scale are now available. So it's easier for customers to buy point solutions or platforms and put them together. Bet it more than every the headless retail, as an example, uh, a trend that's happening. You're seeing, look at, look at, uh, in the, in the, uh, consumer market, ghost kitchens, ghost retail. So you're starting to see delivery. And so at the consumerization of it is happening. You're gonna see more and more customs applications that are taking advantage of stacks that are configured either on the fly or, you know, most multiple partners. So I think you're gonna see, you know, the big players like AWS, uh, uh, Microsoft, Dell have real big ecosystem players and that's gonna be a huge trend continuing. >>So today Michael Dell is coming on in just minutes. Chuck Whitten is also on Jeff Clark. What are some of the things that you really want to dig into with these guys, John? Well, >>The big thing I want to ask him is how they're stress, energy, and operations fit into how their customers are consuming. Uh, Dell's got a huge customer base. I wanna find out how their, how their solutions are being operationalized by the customers. And that's gonna be coming, poking at the cloud a little bit and see how real that's going. Apex has been very popular. The security story. I also wanna ask about the changing workforce because the it departments of the old those folks are aging out. So a new generation of it is coming together. And I think those folks want things easy, push button, easy button dashboards. They've never, maybe not even racked the server before. So completely different new generation. When I see how that impacts the, uh, how they make products, >>Good point. We saw some of that in, you know, this morning they were showing some of the gaming, um, opportunities, Dave and I were in there this morning and what they're doing for that, and the gamers are all very excited about that. But the connected home was something that they were talking about. >>Yeah. Yeah. Who knew you could make a, uh, you know, a track pad on a laptop, more exciting. <laugh> it's, I mean, it's brilliant, right? They, you know, controls for, uh, you know, for, uh, home video conferencing built in, um, it, it just shows that again, kind of at that hardware level where people think, ah, it doesn't matter. No, there's a lot of room for innovation there. And back to the discussion of around partners, um, much like the big cloud players depend upon systems integrators out in the marketplace in order to deliver these solutions to end user kind customers. The channel's gonna be incredibly important. And I know that Dell is putting a lot of effort behind that right now. That's pretty clear. Yep. >>Yeah. We've seen lot of that. So exciting stuff today. I mentioned the three guys, three only of the many folks that are coming on the show today. We've got Allison Dew tomorrow, some other happy hitters guys looking forward to great day two full coverage. Stay with us. We've got a lot of content coming at you from the cube live from the show floor of Dell technologies, world 2022 from the Venetian in Las Vegas, stick around Michael Dell will be up next with John and Dave.

>> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, day one, Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas at the Venetian. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Guys let's talk, first of all, first time back in person since Dell Tech World 2019. Lots going on, lots of news today. I'm going to start with you, Dave, since you're closest to me. What are some of the things that have impressed you at this first in-person event in three years? >> Well, the first thing I want to say is, so John and I, we started theCUBE in 2010, John, right? In Boston, EMC World. Now of course, Dell owns EMC, so wow. It's good to be back here. Dell's built this beautiful set. I'd say the number one thing that's surprised me was how many people were here. Airport was packed, cab lines, the line at the Palazzo, the hotel, to get in was, you know, probably an hour long. And there's, I thought there'd be maybe 5,000 people here. I would say it's closer to eight. So the hall was packed today and everybody was pumped. Michael Dell was so happy to be up on stage. He talked, I dunno if you guys saw his keynote. He basically talked, obviously how great it is to be back, but he talked about their mission, building technologies that enable that better human condition. There was a big, you know, chewy words, right? And then they got into, you know, all the cool stuff they're doing so we can get into it. But they had CVS up on stage, they had USAA on stage. A big theme was trust. Which of course, if you're Dell, you know, you want people to trust you. I guess the other thing is this is the first live event they've had since the VMware spin. >> Right. >> So in 2019 they owned VMware. VMware's no longer a part of the income statement. Dell had a ton of debt back then. Now Dell's balance sheet looks actually better than VMware's because they restructured everything. And so it's a world without VMware where now with VMware their gross margins were in the 30-plus percent range. Now they're down to 20%. So we're now asking what's next for Dell? And they stood up on stage, we can talk about it some more, but a lot of multi-cloud, a lot of cyber resilience, obviously big themes around APEX, you know, hybrid work, John. So, well let's get into that. >> What are some of the key things that you heard today? >> Well, first of all, the customers on stage are always great. Dell's Technologies, 10 years for theCUBE and their history. I saw something back here, 25 years with celebrating precision, the history of Michael Dell's journey and the current Dell Technologies with EMC folded in and a little bit of VMware DNA still in there even though they're separated out. Just has a loyal set of customers. And you roam the hallways here, you see a lot of people know Dell, love Dell. Michael Dell himself was proud to talk before the event about he's number one, Dave, in PC market share. That's been his goal to beat HP for years. (laughing) And so he's got that done. But they're transforming their business cause they have to, the data center is now cloud. Cloud is now the distributed computing. Dell has all the piece parts today. We've covered this three years ago. Now it's turned into multi-cloud, which is multi-vendor, as a service is how the consumers consume, innovate with data, that's kind of the raw material. Future of work, and obviously the partners that they have. So I think Dell is going to continue to maintain the news of being the great in the front lines as a data-center-slash-enterprise, now cloud, Edge player. So, you know, I'm impressed with their constant reinvention of the company and the news hits all the cards: Snowflake partnership, cutting edge company in the cloud, partnership with Snowflake, APEX, their product that's innovating at the Edge, this new kind of product that's going to bring it together. Unifying, all those themes, Dave, are all hitting the marks. >> Chuck Whitten up on stage, obviously he was the multicloud, you know, conversation. And I think the vision that they they're laying out and Jeff Clarke talked about it as well, is a term that John and I coined. We can't remember who coined it, John or me, "supercloud." >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And they're talking about building an abstraction layer, building on top of the clouds, connecting on-prem to the clouds, across clouds, out to the Edge, hiding the underlying complexity, Dell managing all that. That's their vision. It's aspirational today but that really is supercloud. And it's more than multi-cloud. >> You coined the term supercloud. >> Did I? >> We riffed together. I called it sub-cloud. >> Oh, that's right. And then I said, no, it's got to float over. Super! Superman flies. (John laughs) Right, that's right. >> Sub-cloud, not really a good name. Nobody wants to be sub of anything. >> I think my kid gave it to me, John, actually. (laughing) >> Well if we do know that Michael Dell watches theCUBE, he's been on theCUBE many times. He watches theCUBE, clearly he's paying attention! >> Yeah, well I hope so. I mean, we write a lot about this and we talk to a lot of customers and talk to a lot of people. But let's talk about the announcements if we can. So... The APEX cyber recovery service, you know, ransomware recovery. They're now also running that on AWS and Azure. So that's big. We heard Presidio, they was super thrilled about that. So they're... The thing I'd say about that is, you know, Dell used to be really defensive about cloud. Now I think they're leaning in. They're saying, "Hey we're not going to spend, you know, Charles Fitzgerald, the snarky guy, does some good work on CAPEX. I mean, you look at how much the cloud guys are spending on CAPEX a year, $30, $40 billion. >> They can't compete. >> On cloud CAPEX. Dell doesn't want compete. >> John: You can't compete. >> Build on top of that, so that's a gift. So that's cool. You mentioned the Snowflake announcement. I thought that was big. What that is... It's very interesting, so Frank Slootman has always said, "We're not doing a half-way house, we're in the cloud." Okay, so square that circle for me. Now Snowflake's coming on-prem. Well, yeah, what they're doing is allowing customers to keep data in a Dell object store, ECS or other object stores. But use Snowflake. So non-native Snowflake data on-prem. So that expands Snowflake cloud. What it also does is give Dell a little sizzle, a little better partner and there's a path to cloud migration if that's where the customers want to go. >> Well, I mean, I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah but that we've talked about this. Don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers, ultimately, from VMware. >> But that product's still doing very well. We'll see with NetApp is another one. NetApp on AWS. I forget what they call it, but yeah, file and AWS. So that was, go ahead. >> I was just going to say, what's the impact of Snowflake? Why do you think Snowflake chose Dell? >> Because Dell's a $101 billion company and they have a huge distribution channel and a lot of common customers. >> They own storage on the premise. >> Yep. And so Snowflake's looking for, you know, storage options on which they can, you know, bring data into their cloud. Snowflake wants the data to go from on-prem into the cloud. There's no question about that. >> And I would add another thing, is that Snowflake can't do what Dell Technologies does on-premises with storage and Dell can't do what Snowflake's doing. So I think it's a mutual short-term and medium-term benefit to say, "Hey you want to run on Snowflake? You need some services there? Great, but come back and use Dell." So that to me, I think that's a win-win for Snowflake. Just the dangerous game is, whoever can develop the higher-level services in the cloud will ultimately be the winner. >> But I think the thing I would say there is, as I said, Snowflake would love for the migration to occur, but they realize it's not always going to happen. And so why not partner with a company like Dell, you know, start that pipeline. And for Dell, hey, you know, why fight fashion, as Jeremy Burton would say. The other thing was Project Alpine, which is file, block and object across cloud. That's again setting up this supercloud. And then APEX. I mean, APEX is the discussion. We had a one-on-one session, a bunch of analysts with Jeff Woodrow who runs ISG. We were supposed to be talking about ISG, all we talked about is APEX. Then we had another session with APEX and all we talked about, of course, is APEX. So, they're still figuring that out, I would say, at this point. They don't quite have product market fit and I think they'd admit that, but they're working hard on scaling engineering, trying to figure out the channel model, the compensation. You know, taking their time even, but moving fast if you know what I mean. >> I mean, Dave, I think the big trend that's jumping out of me here is that, something that we've been covering, the headless cloud, meaning if you can do as a service, which is one of Dell's major points today, that to me, everyone is a PaaS layer. I think everyone that's building digital transformation apps has to be their own SaaS. So they either do that with somebody, a man in service, which fits beautifully into that trend, or do it own. Now e-commerce has this nailed down. Shopify or build your own on top of the cloud. So headless retail's a hot trend. You're going to start to see that come into the enterprise where the enterprise can have their cake and eat it too and take advantage of managed services where they don't have expertise. So those two things right there I think is going to drive a lot of growth for Dell. >> So essentially Lisa, what Dell is doing is saying, "Okay, the timing's good with the VMware spin." They say, "Now we're going to build our own cloud as a service, APEX." And they're starting with infrastructure as a service, you know, storage as a service. Obviously cyber recovery is a service. So you're going to get compute and storage and data protection. Eventually they'll move into other areas. And it's really important for them to do that to have their own cloud, but they've got to build up the ecosystem. Snowflake is a small example. My view, they need hundreds and hundreds of Snowflakes to fill the gaps, you know, move up the stack in middleware and database and DevOps. I mean, they should be partnering with HashiCorp. They should be partnering with all these companies that do DevOps stuff. They should be... I'd like to see them, frankly, partner with competitors to their data protection group. Why, you know, sounds crazy, but if you're going to build a cloud, look at AWS. They partner with everybody, right? And so that's what a true cloud experience looks like. You've got this huge menu. And so I think Dell's going to have to try to differentiate from HP. HPE was first, right, and they're all in. Dell's saying we're going to let the customers tell us where to go. And so they, I think one differentiation is their ecosystem, their ability to build that ecosystem. Yeah, but HP's got a good distribution channel too. Just not as big as Dell's. >> They all got the assets in it, but they're transforming. So I think at the end of the day, as Dell and even HPE transforms, they got to solve the customer problems and reduce the complexity. So again, the managed services piece with APEX is huge. I think having the building blocks for multi hybrid cloud at the Edge, just, you can't go wrong with that. If the customers can deploy it and consume it. >> What were some of the messages that you heard from, you mentioned CVS on stage, USAA on stage. Dell's always been very, very customer-focused. They've got some great brands. What did you hear from that customer's voice that shows you they're going in the right direction? >> Well first of all, the customers are longstanding customers of Dell Technologies, so that's one recognition of the ongoing partnerships. But they're also messaged up with Dell's messaging, right? They're telling the Dell story. And what I heard from the Dell story was moving fast and reducing complexity is their number one goal. They see the cloud option has to be there. Cloud native, Edge came up a little bit and the role of data. So I think all the new application development today that's relevant has a data as code kind of concept. Data engineering is the hottest skillset on the planet right now. And data engineering is not data science. So you start to see top-level CSOs and CIOs saying the new modern applications have to have data embedded in. It's just too hard. It's too hard to find that engineering team. So I heard the customer saying, we love the direction, we love the managed services. And by the way, we want to have that supply chain and cyber risk reduced. So yeah, big endorsement for Dell. >> You know, the biggest transformation in Dell, the two biggest transformations. One was the financials. You know, the income statement is totaled at a $101 billion company, growing at 17% a year. That's actually quite remarkable. But the flip side of that, the other big transformation was the customer. And with the acquisition of EMC but specifically VMware, it changed the whole conversation for Dell with customers. I think pre-2015, you wouldn't have had that type of narrative up on stage with customers. Cause it was, you know, compellant and it was equal logic and it was small businesses. Now you're talking about really deep strategic relationships that were enabled by that transformation. So my point is, to answer your question, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens post-VMware because when VMware came together with Dell, the industry didn't like it. The VMware ecosystem was like (growls) Dell. Okay, but customers loved it, right? And that's one of the things I heard on stage today. They didn't say, oh, well we love the VMware. But he mentioned VMware, the CTO from USAA. So Dell configured this commercial agreement with VMware, Michael Dell's the chairman of both companies. So that was part of the incentive. The other incentive is Dell is the number one distribution channel for VMware. So I think they now have that muscle memory in place where they've earned that trust. And I think that will continue on past the spin. It was actually quite brilliant the way they've orchestrated that. >> Yeah, Lisa, one more thing I want to add to that is that what I heard also was, you got the classic "here's how you be a leader in the modern era." It's a big leadership message. But then when you heard some of the notes, software-defined, multi-cloud with an emphasis on operations, Dave. So, okay, if you're a good leader, stay with Dell in operations. So you see strategy and operations kind of coming together around cloud. But big software defined multi-cloud data operational story. And I think those customers are kind of on that. You know, you got to maintain your operations. DevOps is operations, DevSecOps is operations. So big, like, don't get too greedy on the modern, shiny new toy, you know, in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a safe bet, right? For infrastructure. I mean, HPE is a good bet too, but I mean Dell's got a way broader portfolio, bigger supply chain. It's got the end-to-end with the desktop, laptop, you know, the client side business, you know, a bigger services organization. And now the big challenge in my mind for Dell is okay, what's next? And I think they got to get into data management, obviously build up as a service, build up their cloud. They need software in their portfolio. I mean, you know, 20% gross margin company, it just, Wall Street's not as interested. You know, if they want to build more value, which they do, they've got to get more into software and I think you're going to see that. Again, I think you're going to see more M&A. I'd love to see more organic R&D instead of stock buybacks but I get why they have to do that. >> Well one of the things I'm looking at, Dave, in terms of what I think the future impact's going to be is the generational shift with the gen-Z and millennials running IT in the modern era. Not your old school rack-and-stack data center mentality. And then ultimately the scoreboard will determine, in my mind, the winner in their race is, where are the workloads running? Right? The workloads, and then also what's the application development scene look like? What do the apps look like? What are they building on? What's scaling them, what's running them? And the Edge is going to be a big part of that. So to me, operations, Edge, workloads and the development and then the workforce shift. >> And I do think Edge, I'm glad you brought up Edge. Edge is, you know, so fragmented but I think there's going to be a massive opportunity in Edge. There's going to be so much compute at the Edge. Dell talked about it, so much data. It's unclear to me right now how they go after that other than in pockets, like we heard from Gill. I believe they're going to do really well in retail. No question there. >> Yeah. >> But there's so much other industrial aisle IT- >> The telco space of towers, Edge. >> And Dell's, you know, Dell's server business, eh okay, it's got Intel and AMD inside, okay great. Their high margins come from storage, not from compute. Not the case with AWS. AWS had 35% operating margins last quarter. Oracle and Microsoft, that's the level that they're at. And I'd love to see Dell figure out a way to get paid more for their compute expertise. And that's going to take some R&D. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> Last question guys, as we wrap up our wrap of day one. Given everything that we've all been through the last couple of years, what is your overall summary of what Dell announced today? The vibe of the show? How well have they fared the last two years? >> Well, I mean, they had a remarkable last two years. In a large part thanks to the client business. I think today you're seeing, you know, them lift the veil on what's next. And I think their story is coherent. There's, again, financially, they're a much more sound company, much better balance sheet. Not the most attractive income statement from a margin standpoint and they got work to do there. But wow, as far as driving revenue, they know how to sell. >> Yeah, I mean to me, I think looking back to before the pandemic, when we were here on the stage last, we were talking end-to-end, Dell leadership. And I say the biggest thing is Dell's catching up fast, faster than I thought. And I think they got, they're skating to where the puck is going, Dave, and I'll tell you why. The end-to-end I thought wouldn't be a total flyer if the Edge got too dynamic, but the fact that the Edge is growing so fast, it's more complex, that's actually given Dell more time. So to me, what I see happening is Dell having that extra time to nail the Edge piece, cause if they get there, if they get there, then they'll have their core competency. And why do I say that? Cause hardware is back. Server god boxes are going to be back. You're going to see servers at the Edge. And look at the failure of Amazon's Outpost, okay? Amazon's Outpost was essentially hardware. That's Dell's business. So you talk about like compute as a cloud but they really didn't do well with deploying compute like Dell does with servers. EKS is kicking ass at the Edge. So serverless with hardware, I think, is going to be the killer solution at the Edge. A combination of cloud and Edge hardware. And the Edge looks more like a data center than the cloud looks like the data center, so- >> So you're saying hardware matters? >> HardwareMatters.com. >> I think that's what I heard. >> HardwareMatters.com, check out that site, coming soon. (all laughing) >> I think it matters more than ever, you know- >> Blockchain, silicon advances. >> I think reason hardware matters is cause it's barbelling. It's going from the box to the silicon and it's going, you know, upstream into software defined. >> Horizontally, scalability means good silicon at the Edge, under the cover, scaling all the stuff and machine learning and AI in the application. So we've said this on theCUBE now, what, five years now? >> Dave: Yeah, yep. >> Guys, we've got an action packed night tonight. Two days tomorrow and Wednesday. Michael Dell is on tomorrow. Chuck Whitten is on, Jeff Clarke, et cetera, et cetera. Caitlin Gordon is on Wednesday. >> All the heavy hitters are coming on. >> They're coming on, they're going to be... >> Dave: Allison Dew's coming on. >> Allison Dew's coming on. >> We're going to talk about the Matthew McConaughey interview, which was, I thought, fantastic. J.J. Davis is coming on. So we're going to have a great channel discussion, as well, with Cheryl Cook. >> That's right. >> A lot of the product people are coming on. We're going to be talking APEX, it's going to be good. With cyber recovery, the Storage Alchemist is coming on, John! (all laughing) >> Boy, I can't wait to see that one. >> Well stick around guys for our coverage all day tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and John Furrier coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. This is Dell Technologies World 2022. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow and the next day. (bouncy, upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, good day, everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage here at Postgres Vision in 2021. Talking today with Andy Harris, who is the Chief Technology Officer at Osirium, a leader in the Privileged Access Management Space, and Andy, good day to you. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Good morning to you and good afternoon, yes. >> That's right. Joining us from overseas over in England, we're on this side of the big pond, but nonetheless, we're joined by the power of Zoom. So again, thanks for the time. Andy, for those who aren't familiar who are watching about Osirium, share a little bit about your various service levels of what you provide, the kind of solutions you provide, and how you've achieved a great success in this space. >> Okay. I know these things, mine will be boring. So I'll just put a little slide up now, which is the minimum I think I can get away with which is that we're all about managing privilege. So that's privileged at the endpoint, Privileged Access Management, and Privileged Process Automation. So wherever a CIS admin has to do something on a machine that needs privilege, we like to be involved. Obviously, we like to be able to delegate all the way down to the business functions with Privileged Process Automation and with the EDB or the BDR part of that functionality in EDB that really fits in to our Privileged Access Management. So what I'll do just to take you away from our product. So I'll just quickly show you a slide of the architecture, which is as simple as we have these nodes. If you like the running ADB BDR and they can perform log-ins to a target device using privileged credentials, which we control when we might be really long up to about 128 characters. >> So Andy, if you would, I think you had put together a little show and tell you a demonstration for how when these systems are perhaps under siege if you will. That there are ways in which obviously you've developed to counter this and to be able to continue secure communications, which in the privilege assets world as you know is paramount. >> Yes, indeed. So I'll show you another slide, which gives you a kind of a overview of everything that's going on and you're going to see a little demonstration of two nodes here that has the BDL technology on and they can make these logins, and we have these characters, Bob and Allison. I've just noticed how it marks in department turn Alice to Allison. they should really be Alice because you get Bob, Alice, Carol, Dave, which are the standard encryption users. And what we're going to do is we're going to demonstrate that you can have breaks in the network. So I'm just sharing the network breaks slide. I'm showing the second network break slide. And then we have this function that we've built which we're going to demonstrate for you today, which is called evil beatings. And what it does is whilst there is a politician in the network, we are going to refresh many thousands of times the credentials on the target device. And then we're going to heal the break in the network and then prove that everything is still working. So right now, I'm going to zoom over to my live connection, terminal connections to the machine. And I'm going to run this command here, which is Python EV3. And I'm going to put a hundred cycles in it which is going to do around about 10,000 password refreshes. Okay. And I'm then going to go over to Chrome, and I should have a system here waiting for me. And in this system, you'll see that I've got the device demo and I've got this come online, SSH. And if I click on this I've got a live connection to this machine. Even whilst I have a huge number of queued up and I'll just show you the queued out connections through the admin interface. The system is working extremely hard at the moment. And in fact, if I show you this slide here, you can see that I have all of these queued credential resets and that is giving our system an awful lot of grief. Yeah. I can go back to the device connection and it is all here still top. Why not? And as you can see, it is all working perfectly. And if I was a user of EDB, I think this has to be one of the demonstrations I'd be interested in because it's one of the first things that we did when we dropped that functionality into our products. We wanted to know how well it would work under extreme conditions because you don't think of extreme conditions as normal working, but whenever you have 10 nodes in different countries, there will always be a network break somewhere and someone will always need to be refreshing passwords a ridiculous rates of knots. So Andy let's talk about this kind of the notion that you're providing here, this about accountability and visibility, audit-ability, all these insights that you're providing through this kind of demonstration you've given us how critical is that today, especially when we know there are so many possible intrusions and so many opportunities with legacy systems and new apps and all of this. I mean talking about those three pillars, if you will, the importance of that and what we just saw in terms of providing that peace of mind that everybody wants in their system. >> That's a cracking question. I'm going to enjoy that question. Legacy systems, that's a really good question. If you, we have NHS, which is our national health service and we have hospitals and you have hospitals every country has hospitals. And the equipment that they use like the MRI scanners, the electro-microscope, some of the blood analysis machines, the systems in those costs multiple Gillions of dollars or should use dollars euros, dollars, pounds and the operating systems running those systems, the lifetime of that piece of equipment is much much longer than the lifetime of an operating system. So we glibly throw around this idea of legacy systems and to a hospital that's a system that's a mere five years old and has got to be delivering for another 15 years. But in reality, all of this stuff gets, acquires vulnerabilities because our adversaries the people that want to do organizations bad things ransomware and all the rest of it they are spending all that time learning about the vulnerabilities of old systems. So the beauty of what we do is being able to take those old legacy systems and put a zero trust safety shell around them, and then use extremely long credentials which can't be cracked. And then we make sure that those credentials don't go anywhere near any workstations. But what they do do, is they're inside that ADB database encrypted with a master encryption key, and they make that jump just inside the zero trust boundary so that Bob and Alice outside can get administration connections inside for them to work. So what we're doing is providing safety for those legacy systems. We are also providing an environment for old apps to run in as well. So we have something called a map server which I didn't think you'd asked us that question. I'd have to find you some slides or presentations, which we want to do. We have a map server, which is effectively a very protected window server, and you can put your old applications on them and you can let them age gracefully and carry on running. Dot net 3.5 and all of those old things. And we can map your connection into the older application and then map those connections out. But in terms of the other aspects of it is the hospital stay open 24 hours a day banks run 24 hours a day and they need to be managed from anywhere. We're in a global pandemic, people are working from home. That means that people are working from laptops and all sorts of things that haven't been provisioned by centrality and could all have all sorts of threats and problems to them. And being able to access any time is really important. And because we are changing the credentials on these machines on a regular basis, you cannot lose one. It's absolutely critical. You cannot go around losing Windows active directory domain credentials it just can't be done. And if you have a situation where you've just updated a password and you've had a failure one of those 10 nodes has the correct set of credentials. And when the system heals, you have to work out which one of the 10 it is and the one that did it last must be the one that updates all the other 10 nodes. And I think the important thing is as Osirium we have the responsibility for doing the updates and we have the responsibility for tracking all those things. But we hand the responsibility of making sure that all the other 10 nodes are up to date which just drop it into bi-directional replication and it just happens. And you've seen it happen. I mean, might be just for the fun of it, We'll go back to that demonstration Chrome, and you can see we're still connected to that machine. That's all still running fine but we could go off to our management thing, refresh it and you see that everything there is successful. I can go to a second machine and I can make a second connection to that device. Yet, in the meantime that password has been changed, Oh, I mean, I wouldn't like to tell you how many times it's been changed. I need to be on a slightly different device. I was going to do a reveal password for you, I'll make another connection but the passwords will be typically, do a top on that just to create some more load. But the passwords will typically be... I'll come back to me. They'll typically be 128 characters long. >> Andy, if I could, I mean, 'cause I think you're really showing this very complex set of challenges that you have these days, right? In terms of providing access to multiple devices across, in multiple networking challenges, when you talk to your prospective clients about the kind of how this security perimeters changed, it's very different now than it was four or five years ago. What are the key points that you want them to take away from your discussion about how they have to think about security and access especially in this day and age when we've even seen here in the States. Some very serious intrusions that I think certainly get everybody's attention. >> That's a great question again. They're all... The way that I would answer that question would definitely depend on the continent that I was talking to. But my favorite answer will be a European answer, so I'll give you a European answer. One of the things that you're doing when you come along and provide Privileged Access Management to a traditional IT team, is your taking away the sysadmins right now, before privilege access, they will know the passwords. They will be keeping the passwords in a password vault or something like this. So they own the passwords, they own the credentials. And when you come along with a product like privilege access management you're taking over management of those credentials and you're protecting those systems from a whole wide range of threats. And one of those threats is from the system administrators themselves. And they understand that. So what I would say, it's an interesting question. 'Cause I'm like, I'm thinking I've got two ways of answering I can answer as if I'm talking to management or as if I'm talking to the people who are actually going to use the products and I feel more aligned with the, I feel more aligned with the actual users. >> Yeah, I think let's just, we'll focus on that and I'll let you know, we just have a moment or two left. So if you could maybe boil it down for me a little bit. >> Boiling it down, I would say now look here CIS admins. It's really important that you get your job done but you need to understand that those privileged accounts that you're using on those systems are absolute gold dust if they get into the hands of your adversaries and you need protections income away from those adversaries, but we trust you and we are going to get you the access to your machines as fast as possible. So we're a little bit like a nightclub bouncer but we're like the Heineken of nightclub bounces. When you arrive, we know it's you and we're going to get you to your favorite machine logged on as domain admin, as fast as possible. And while you're there, we're going to cut that session recording of you. And just keep you safe and on the right side. >> All right, I'm going to enjoy my night in the nightclub. Now I can sleep easy tonight knowing that Andy Harris and Osirium are on the case. Thanks, Andy. Andy Harris speaking with us. So the Chief Technology Officer from Osirium as part of our Postgres vision, 2021, coverage here on theCUBE. (upbeat music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation.

>>Mhm Yes. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World Virtual. I'm john for a host of the cube. We've got a great two guests here talking about a new apex brand and products Allison Langdon, Senior Manager, product marketing at Dell and David Reed senior Director of Product Management. Dell all around the apex to CUBA alumni's great to see you remotely. Soon to be in person. It's right around the corner but great to see you. >>Hey, thanks for having me and us. >>So I wish >>we were in person. >>We missed the Deltek Worlds amazing event. Um we're virtual this year but all great goodness is here but great big announcement still go on. The Apex Brandon portfolio is coming together the cloud and as a service, everything is happening. You got the new apex data storage service take us through what what is the new service? Why? >>Sure. So I can start um you know, we've been seeing this this shift towards an as a service model, you know I. T. Has always struggled with complexities associated with under and over provisioning capital budget constraints, lengthy and complex to refresh cycles. So you know the events over this past year and our new normal is really accelerated these you know challenges and it made them even more manageable. You know organizations need to become really agile and um they don't want to invest make big upfront investments in infrastructure when they're having such a hard time forecasting there needs you know the new levels of unpredictability that's been accelerating this you know adoption of as of service. So this is why we're introducing apex data storage services essentially were radically simplifying how customers can acquire and manage their storage resources. So data storage services is going to be the first as a service offering in our apex portfolio. So it's going to provide an on crown portfolio of scalable and elastic storage resources that are designed for affects treatment. It's all going to be anchored in our apex console. So it's gonna be a seamless self service experience where you just have a few key inputs, your data service, your performance tier, you're looking for your commitment term, your base capacity, for example and then all the infrastructure is owned and maintained by us built on our Industry leading Technology. So really delivering a super simple self service as a service experience, >>You know, when Jeff Clark was first talking about this as a service as it should be, you know, introducing the project, Apex Devon, I was kind of okay, this is kind of what we heard when we were last in person in 2019. The end to end l cloud, hybrid, cloud operating model, this is kind of what we're talking about here. What's something that covers? What's what's what is this data services? How does that vector into that? Because you know data control planes are being talked about a lot. The use of data in A I. And A II. Operations impacts I. T. And cloud scale. So hybrids now the operating model for the enterprise. >>Yeah. Yeah definitely. And it's this is really only where we're starting and we're going to be starting on a set of apex data storage services. Um so if I step back a little bit and talk a little bit about what apex data storage services are, I'd like to draw a little bit of a contrast to how customers procure their equipment today. So a customer typically today says I need some storage I need some mid range storage. I need for example a power store 5000 and then they work with the sales representative and says I need 24 1.92 terabyte drives. They need certain connectivity and then we present a quote to them with a whole bunch of line items with a lot of different prices and then the customer needs purchased that year, purchased that upfront and then uh, the only asset and then they managed the asset. So they're taking the risk. They need to plan for that capacity. And what we're doing is we're radically flipping that model. Uh, and what we're, what we're doing here is we're just driving to an outcome. So customers, they don't want to take that risk. They just want to drive to their business outcomes and they want to manage their applications. So what they have to do in this model is just pick, hey, I want storage services, I want some block services, I want a certain performance level and I learned a certain capacity and I want a commitment level. And what we do is we basically create a rate for them And we've optimized a lot of our processes on the back end to be able to, once that order has booked, we target a very rapid time of 14 days from the time the order is dropped until the customer can actually start operating on that here. From the, the time is dropped to the time that they can produce in their first volume Is 14 days. And really all they have to do is operate the year and we manage everything everything for them that you know, from capacity management to change management to software, life cycles, patching and you and things like that. And now jOHN I want to address your question about the hybrid world. It's absolutely designed for a hybrid world. So in our first release will be offering this on customer premises. And we're also introducing announcing a relationship we have with the data center provider of Equinox, which is the largest co location provider in the world. And what will be able to do is provide the subscription service of this as a service, not only customer on customer premises but in near cloud environments, in a co location facility. And we also have software assets that will extend into this environment, all driven by a central pain of unified experience. >>That's awesome. The hybrid cloud, It's gotta have that table stakes now. So, good, good plug there. Thanks Call out Allison, I gotta ask you on the customer side, what's the drivers for the apex data storage service? What was the key things that there you're hearing, why this is important to them? Uh, and what is the value proposition? >>Right, Great question. So I touched on a little bit of that upfront, but it's, you know, essentially what we what we do with this offering is take it out of the infrastructure business so that they can focus on more value added activities, focusing on customer satisfaction. Um You know, because we're maintaining we're managing and maintaining all the infrastructure for them. You know, some of the key pain points are just, you know, the overhead associated with maintaining and managing that infrastructure. But there's also the financial aspect as well. These services are designed for affects treatment, so you're not having to make that big initial Capex expense, um you're really able to align your expenses with actual usage versus anticipated usage. So it eliminates that, you know, cycle of over and under provisioning, which either results in, you know, over provisions waste or under provisions risk. We essentially, you know, streamlined all of those processes. So the customer just has to worry about operating the, operating their storage and it takes a lot of that worry off of them and they're able to just pay for what they use, elastically scale of resources up and down. So it's essentially really simplified and more predictable. >>Page has always been one of those things where hey, I'll pay when I need it. I gotta ask you on the differentiation side. This is comes up all the time. How do you guys different from alternatives? How do you differentiate going forward? How do you guys be successful? What's the, what's the strategy? What's the, what's the focus? >>Yeah. So I'll take the, I'll take a couple of points and then I'll pass it over to you Alison if you don't >>mind. Um, >>so first and foremost, I'm asked this a lot. So what does Dell bring to the table in this whole little apex? And as a service? First and foremost, Del is the leading infrastructure provider for all of I. T. On premise. We have the enterprise infrastructure re leading across just about every major category of infrastructure. So first and foremost we have that. We also have the scale of the reach, not only in our enterprise relationships through our partner community. So that is one that is one huge advantage that we have. One thing that we're and we talked about this model. Um the level of management that we provide for our customers is second to none with this solution. So we provide um we provide all of the the difficult management tasks from end end that a customer that we repeatedly hear from our customers that they don't want to be dealing with anymore. And we're going to be able to do that at scale for our customers. And I know there's a couple more points, so I'd like to I'll pass it on to Alison and she can she can address a couple more points there. >>Yeah, sure. I mean obviously Devin makes a great point as being an industry leader and just the breadth of our portfolio in general, beyond just storage that we can essentially deliver as a service, but no, with our initial flagship storage as a service offering. Um, so with apex data storage services, you know, I talked a little bit about, you know, the pay as you go, pay as you know, pay for what you use. You know, essentially the way this works is, you know, there's an initial based commitment of capacity that the customer commits to and then they're able to elastically scale up and down above that base and only pay for what they use. One of the differentiators were bringing to the table is that, you know, in addition to that base and that, you know, the on demand space if you will, that that goes above that we're charging a single rate. So it's really a simplified and transparent billing process. So you're not getting any over ridge penalties or fees for going into that on demand. It's essentially a single rate based on your commitment and you know, as much as you scale up and down, you're gonna you're gonna stay within one single rate. So no surprise average penalties. So that's definitely something that that differentiates us. And the customers also have the ability to raise that based commitment at any point. Co terminus lee in their contract. So if they're seeing like a strong growth trajectory or anticipating a more, you know, a big burst in usage for some data intensive type workloads. You know, we can add that can raise that floor commitment resulting in a lower rate but still a single rate for both based on demand. >>Well certainly data storage and moving data around, having it in the edge to the core to whatever is critical. And I think I think that's a great service. The question I want to ask you guys next to addresses. Give us an update on the apex brand and portfolio overall. How does this fit in? How is it shaping out? Can just take a minute to explain kind of where it is right now and what's available, how it was the strategy and what's coming? >>Sure. So I can talk a little bit about what's available when we're talking about today and then maybe devon if you can touch a little bit on the on the strategy and going forward. Um But what we've announced today is you at Del Tech World is the apex brand, the apex portfolio, which as I mentioned, it's our strategy for as a service and cloud. So in addition to our data storage services offering that we've been focused on today, um which is part of our infrastructure services, we're also introducing our cloud services as well as some more customizable services. So from a cloud services perspective, we're also going to be talking about our apex private cloud and apex hybrid cloud offerings. And then of course the apex console is really what brings all of these pieces together. It's that single self service experience to manage all of your as a service resources from a single place, David, I don't know if you want to take it. >>So what I would, what I would like to add is a little bit more color on the customized services. So if you look at apex at a high level um it's really how we're transforming the way we do business with our partners and customers and the way we deliver products and offers to our our partners and customers. And within the apex umbrella there's really two segments of customers that we see. One, there is still a segment of customers that want some technology control. They want to build their they want to build their clouds, they want to build their infrastructure and that's where really the apex custom comes into it. And we have a very large business in our custom business today with Dell technologies on demand with flex on demand and data center utility and those will be represented to be apex flex on demand, apex data center utility, um you know, that's what we're announcing here. And then the second portion is really this apex turnkey offer where customers don't care to manage it, they want to just consume, they want to operate their gear. And that's where a lot of the innovation, a lot of the a lot of the strategy that we're talking about here with the hybrid cloud service, the product cloud service, apex data storage services. So we're building out a set of world class infrastructure services that will then be able to wrap our leading infrastructure utilities around data protection, security, migration, compliance etcetera. And then build a set of horizontal and vertical solutions on top of this infrastructure to provide uh paramount uh value to our >>awesome Alice. I gotta ask you because this is always the case right. There's always one or two features that jump out the product, everything as a service clearly aligns with the market macro conditions in the marketplace and the evolution of the architecture in all businesses. That's clear, there's no debate on that. You guys got that nailed. What's the, what's the key thing if you had to kind of boil out the one thing that people are gravitating towards on the data storage service because um, everyone kinda is going here, right? So what if you get people that are watching it are learning what's popping out as the key product feature here or a few things that jump out. >>Sure. So, I mean really at the core, it's all about simplicity. Um, it's in terms of the console itself, which we've talked about it, you know, you have your infrastructure resources, your storage, your cloud services and it's all, it's just so simple. It's just, it's a matter of a few simple clicks and inputs that are pretty intuitive to meet your needs. It's the fact that its outcome based, you know, we're not focused on delivering a product, it's really truly delivering an outcome and a service to meet the customer's needs. So it's a whole new way of you know approaching the market and talking to our customers and making it intuitive and simple and seamless and really, you know, taking so much of the complexity off of the table for them. Um So it's the simplicity of the console, it's the being able to transition to more op ex model um from a financial aspect is huge and then you know aligning your expenses, you know with your actual versus and you know anticipated usage, so being able to manage that unpredictability, so that's necessary talking about a specific feature but really how we're driving towards really focusing on the customer needs. >>Now the business values right there, it's all about the outcome and you know, we're about getting charged on this variable, you know, over age on some service David. How about under the hood? If I look at the engine of this, how it fits into the kind of product architecture, you look at the product management, you're building the product and the engineers are cranking away what's the, what's the gear, what gears look like? What's the machinery look like under the hood? What's the cool tech, if any, um, you would share, if you can share. >>Yeah, it's interesting that you asked that, john and it's, it's really interesting that we got probably what, 12 minutes into this interview and we didn't even talk about a product, not one single product and that is really by design here. We're really, we're really selling the service. We're selling an offer. The product is the service, the service is the product and it's really about selling those outcomes. But then at the end of the day since we're talking talking shop here um we are introducing block services and that's powered by our new award winning power store mid range product and our file services are going to be powered by our um our award winning power scale and Ice alone systems as well. So we'll be interested you know introducing block and file services and we'll be extending that to object object services and data storage services. Uh >>huh, awesome. You know Alison and Devon I was talking to a friend we're running weren't on camera with the camera was turned on but we're just riffing about all the coolness around devops to have sex cops, how I. T. S go into large scale cloud apps and we're talking about all that and we were both kind of coming to the same conclusion that the next generation on top of all this automation is the excess of service, everything is a service. Because if you go that next level, that's where it is. Because the outcomes, the outcome is the services and that's underpinned by automation ai ops all the other stuff that's kind of hardened underneath still enables it. And you guys are already there. So congratulations. That's really cool reaction to that. That concept of automation powers X as a service. >>Yeah, I'll take that one, john. So, um while I talked only about playing storage technologies that power this there is a phenomenal amount of investment in um uh work and thought going into building out the underlying infrastructure and operations behind this because we need to provide um the operations and management of this infrastructure services, not only for storage but for compute and solutions and develops environment at scale. And it's crucial that we, we build out that infrastructure, that automation, that machine learning AI offers to really support this. So yeah, you're absolutely right. That is fundamental to getting this model. Uh nailed >>Alison. You're feeling pretty good about the product and the service. Now everything is a service that's your wheelhouse. It's happening. >>Yeah, here we are. We've got, we've got apex portfolio has arrived. So yeah, feeling good. Um, definitely excited. >>He was bright. Congratulations Allison David, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing the updates on the apex new data storage services, the new portfolio, the directionally correct action of everything as a service and all the automation that goes on the, that's really kind of a game changer. Thanks so much for sharing on the CUBA. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks a lot, john, >>thank you. Okay. >>Del Tech world cube coverage continues. I'm john Kerry, the host. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Mhm.

>> (upbeat music) [Narrator] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're bringing it together remotely. We're in the Palo Alto Studios with theCUBE and we're going remote for our guests this year. And I hope you can come together online enjoy the content. Of course, go check out the events site on Demand Live. And certainly I have a lot of great content. I've got a great guest Skyla Loomis Vice president, for the Z Application Platform at IBM. Also known as IBM Z talking Mainframe. Skyla, thanks for coming on theCUBE Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. So, you know, I've talked many conversations about the Mainframe of being relevant and valuable in context to cloud and cloud native because if it's got a workload you've got containers and all this good stuff, you can still run anything on anything these days. By integrating it in with all this great glue layer, lack of a better word or oversimplifying it, you know, things going on. So it's really kind of cool. Plus Walter Bentley in my previous interview was talking about the success of Ansible, and IBM working together on a really killer implementation. So I want to get into that, but before that let's get into IBM Z. How did you start working with IBM Z? What's your role there? >> Yeah, so I actually just got started with Z about four years ago. I spent most of my career actually on the distributed platform, largely with data and analytics, the analytics area databases and both On-premise and Public Cloud. But I always considered myself a friend to Z. So in many of the areas that I'd worked on, we'd, I had offerings where we'd enabled it to work with COS or Linux on Z. And then I had this opportunity come up where I was able to take on the role of leading some of our really core runtimes and databases on the Z platform, IMS and z/TPF. And then recently just expanded my scope to take on CICS and a number of our other offerings related to those kind of in this whole application platform space. And I was really excited because just of how important these runtimes and this platform is to the world,really. You know, our power is two thirds of our fortune 100 clients across banking and insurance. And it's you know, some of the most powerful transaction platforms in the world. You know doing hundreds of billions of transactions a day. And you know, just something that's really exciting to be a part of and everything that it does for us. >> It's funny how distributed systems and distributed computing really enable more longevity of everything. And now with cloud, you've got new capabilities. So it's super excited. We're seeing that a big theme at AnsibleFest this idea of connecting, making things easier you know, talk about distributed computing. The cloud is one big distribute computer. So everything's kind of playing together. You have a panel discussion at AnsibleFest Virtual. Could you talk about what your topic is and share, what was some of the content in there? Content being, content as in your presentation? Not content. (laughs) >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I had the opportunity to co-host a panel with a couple of our clients. So we had Phil Allison from Black Knight and Pat Lane from Allstate and they were really joining us and talking about their experience now starting to use Ansible to manage to z/OS. So we just actually launched some content collections and helping to enable and accelerate, client's use of using Ansible to manage to z/OS back in March of this year. And we've just seen tremendous client uptake in this. And these are a couple of clients who've been working with us and, you know, getting started on the journey of now using Ansible with Z they're both you know, have it in the enterprise already working with Ansible on other platforms. And, you know, we got to talk with them about how they're bringing it into Z. What use cases they're looking at, the type of culture change, that it drives for their teams as they embark on this journey and you know where they see it going for them in the future. >> You know, this is one of the hot items this year. I know that events virtual so has a lot of content flowing around and sessions, but collections is the top story. A lot of people talking collections, collections collections, you know, integration and partnering. It hits so many things but specifically, I like this use case because you're talking about real business value. And I want to ask you specifically when you were in that use case with Ansible and Z. People are excited, it seems like it's working well. Can you talk about what problems that it solves? I mean, what was some of the drivers behind it? What were some of the results? Could you give some insight into, you know, was it a pain point? Was it an enabler? Can you just share why that was getting people are getting excited about this? >> Yeah well, certainly automation on Z, is not new, you know there's decades worth of, of automation on the platform but it's all often proprietary, you know, or bundled up like individual teams or individual people on teams have specific assets, right. That they've built and it's not shared. And it's certainly not consistent with the rest of the enterprise. And, you know, more and more, you're kind of talking about hybrid cloud. You know, we're seeing that, you know an application is not isolated to a single platform anymore right. It really expands. And so being able to leverage this common open platform to be able to manage Z in the same way that you manage the entire rest of your enterprise, whether that's Linux or Windows or network or storage or anything right. You know you can now actually bring this all together into a common automation plane in control plane to be able to manage to all of this. It's also really great from a skills perspective. So, it enables us to really be able to leverage. You know Python on the platform and that's whole ecosystem of Ansible skills that are out there and be able to now use that to work with Z. >> So it's essentially a modern abstraction layer of agility and people to work on it. (laughs) >> Yeah >> You know it's not the joke, Hey, where's that COBOL programmer. I mean, this is a serious skill gap issues though. This is what we're talking about here. You don't have to replace the, kill the old to bring in the new, this is an example of integration where it's classic abstraction layer and evolution. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Absolutely. I mean I think that Ansible's power as an orchestrator is part of why, you know, it's been so successful here because it's not trying to rip and replace and tell you that you have to rewrite anything that you already have. You know, it is that glue sort of like you used that term earlier right? It's that glue that can span you know, whether you've got rec whether you've got ACL, whether you're using z/OSMF you know, or any other kind of custom automation on the platform, you know, it works with everything and it can start to provide that transparency into it as well, and move to that, like infrastructure as code type of culture. So you can bring it into source control. You can have visibility to it as part of the Ansible automation platform and tower and those capabilities. And so you, it really becomes a part of the whole enterprise and enables you to codify a lot of that knowledge. That, you know, exists again in pockets or in individuals and make it much more accessible to anybody new who's coming to the platform. >> That's a great point, great insight.& It's worth calling out. I'm going to make a note of that and make a highlight from that insight. That was awesome. I got to ask about this notion of client uptake. You know, when you have z/OS and Ansible kind of come in together, what are the clients area? When do they get excited? When do they know that they've got to do? And what are some of the client reactions? Are they're like, wake up one day and say, "Hey, yeah I actually put Ansible and z/OS together". You know peanut butter and chocolate is (mumbles) >> Honestly >> You know, it was just one of those things where it's not obvious, right? Or is it? >> Actually I have been surprised myself at how like resoundingly positive and immediate the reactions have been, you know we have something, one of our general managers runs a general managers advisory council and at some of our top clients on the platform and you know we meet with them regularly to talk about, you know, the future direction that we're going. And we first brought this idea of Ansible managing to Z there. And literally unanimously everybody was like yes, give it to us now. (laughs) It was pretty incredible, you know? And so it's you know, we've really just seen amazing uptake. We've had over 5,000 downloads of our core collection on galaxy. And again that's just since mid to late March when we first launched. So we're really seeing tremendous excitement with it. >> You know, I want to want to talk about some of the new announcements, but you brought that up. I wanted to kind of tie into it. It is addictive when you think modernization, people success is addictive. This is another theme coming out of AnsibleFest this year is that when the sharing, the new content you know, coders content is the theme. I got to ask you because you mentioned earlier about the business value and how the clients are kind of gravitating towards it. They want it.It is addictive, contagious. In the ivory towers in the big, you know, front office, the business. It's like, we've got to make everything as a service. Right. You know, you hear that right. You know, and say, okay, okay, boss You know, Skyla, just go do it. Okay. Okay. It's so easy. You can just do it tomorrow, but to make everything as a service, you got to have the automation, right. So, you know, to bridge that gap has everything is a service whether it's mainframe. I mean okay. Mainframe is no problem. If you want to talk about observability and microservices and DevOps, eventually everything's going to be a service. You got to have the automation. Could you share your, commentary on how you view that? Because again, it's a business objective everything is a service, then you got to make it technical then you got to make it work and so on. So what's your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. I mean, agility is a huge theme that we've been focusing on. We've been delivering a lot of capabilities around a cloud native development experience for folks working on COBOL, right. Because absolutely you know, there's a lot of languages coming to the platform. Java is incredibly powerful and it actually runs better on Z than it runs on any other platform out there. And so, you know, we're seeing a lot of clients you know, starting to, modernize and continue to evolve their applications because the platform itself is incredibly modern, right? I mean we come out with new releases, we're leading the industry in a number of areas around resiliency, in our security and all of our, you know, the face of encryption and number of things that come out with, but, you know the applications themselves are what you know, has not always kept pace with the rate of change in the industry. And so, you know, we're really trying to help enable our clients to make that leap and continue to evolve their applications in an important way, and the automation and the tools that go around it become very important. So, you know, one of the things that we're enabling is the self service, provisioning experience, right. So clients can, you know, from Open + Shift, be able to you know, say, "Hey, give me an IMS and z/OS connect stack or a kicks into DB2 stack." And that is all under the covers is going to be powered by Ansible automation. So that really, you know, you can get your system programmers and your talent out of having to do these manual tasks, right. Enable the development community. So they can use things like VS Code and Jenkins and GET Lab, and you'll have this automated CICB pipeline. And again, Ansible under the covers can be there helping to provision those test environments. You know, move the data, you know, along with the application, changes through the pipeline and really just help to support that so that, our clients can do what they need to do. >> You guys got the collections in the hub there, so automation hub, I got to ask you where do you see the future of the automating within z/OS going forward? >> Yeah, so I think, you know one of the areas that we'd like to see go is head more towards this declarative state so that you can you know, have this declarative configuration defined for your Z environment and then have Ansible really with the data and potency right. Be able to, go out and ensure that the environment is always there, and meeting those requirements. You know that's partly a culture change as well which goes along with it, but that's a key area. And then also just, you know, along with that becoming more proactive overall part of, you know, AI ops right. That's happening. And I think Ansible on the automation that we support can become you know, an integral piece of supporting that more intelligent and proactive operational direction that, you know, we're all going. >> Awesome Skyla. Great to talk to you. And so insightful, appreciate it. One final question. I want to ask you a personal question because I've been doing a lot of interviews around skill gaps and cybersecurity, and there's a lot of jobs, more job openings and there are a lot of people. And people are with COVID working at home. People are looking to get new skilled up positions, new opportunities. Again cybersecurity and spaces and event we did and want to, and for us its huge, huge openings. But for people watching who are, you know, resetting getting through this COVID want to come out on the other side there's a lot of online learning tools out there. What skill sets do you think? Cause you brought up this point about modernization and bringing new people and people as a big part of this event and the role of the people in community. What areas do you think people could really double down on? If I wanted to learn a skill. Or an area of coding and business policy or integration services, solution architects, there's a lot of different personas, but what skills can I learn? What's your advice to people out there? >> Yeah sure. I mean on the Z platform overall and skills related to Z, COBOL, right. There's, you know, like two billion lines of COBOL out there in the world. And it's certainly not going away and there's a huge need for skills. And you know, if you've got experience from other platforms, I think bringing that in, right. And really being able to kind of then bridge the two things together right. For the folks that you're working for and the enterprise we're working with you know, we actually have a bunch of education out there. You got to master the mainframe program and even a competition that goes on that's happening now, for folks who are interested in getting started at any stage, whether you're a student or later in your career, but you know learning, you know, learn a lot of those platforms you're going to be able to then have a career for life. >> Yeah. And the scale on the data, this is so much going on. It's super exciting. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it. Want to get that plug in there. And of course, IBM, if you learn COBOL you'll have a job forever. I mean, the mainframe's not going away. >> Absolutely. >> Skyla, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Vice President, for the Z Application Platform and IBM, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here for AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay Jenny, great to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> James Governor, nail on the Keynote there. Chat was phenomenal. That was pre-recorded but James is also in the chat stream. A lot of good conversations. That hit home for me that keynote. One, because memory lane was going down right into the 80s when it was a revolution. And we got him in the green room here. James Governor, welcome. >> James is here, hi James. >> Here we go. >> Fresh off the keynote. >> It's always a revolution. (John laughs) >> Well, in the 80s, I used to love your talk. A couple of key points I want to share and get your thoughts on was just to some highlights for the crowd is one, you walk through. Some of the key inflection points that I think were instrumental and probably some other ones depending on your perspective of where you were in the industry at that time. Whether you were a systems programmer or a networking guy, there was a proprietary world and it was a revolution back then. And UNIX was owned by AT&T if no one remembers. You couldn't even use the word. You had to trade market. So we actually had to call it XINU which is UNIX spelled backwards in all the text and whatnot. And even open source software freeware was kind of illegal. MIT did some work, Northeastern and Berkeley and other schools. It was radical back then so-- >> Yeah, we've come a long way for sure. I think that for me that was one of the things that I wanted to really point to in the keynote was that yes we have definitely come a long way and development culture is about open culture. >> I think the thing that I like to point out especially hate to sound like I'm old but I am. But I lived through that and the younger generation coming and have all these new tools. And I got to say not that I walked through to school in the snow with no shoes on but it's a pretty cool developer environment now. But remember things were proprietary back then. If you start to see the tea leaves now, I look at the world, you see these silos. You see silos that's kind of, they're not nestle proprietary but they might necessarily be open. So you kind of have a glimpse of open source on these projects and these companies. Whether they're tech companies, it feels open but it might not be. It could be walled garden. It could be data being hoarded. So as data opens up, this is interesting to me because I want to get your thoughts on this because in a way it feels proprietary but technically it's not proprietary. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is going to be the next 20 years of evolution. What's your thoughts? >> I think the productivity wins. Whoever packages technology in a way that makes it most productive for people. That's what wins. And open source, what's productive. It is very accessible. It enabled new waves. Get installed and you've got a package from... You got access to just a world of open-source. A world of software that was a big revolution. And I guess the cloud sort of came next and I think that's been one of the big shifts. You talk about proprietary. What matters is how easy you make things to people to do their work. And in that regard, obviously Amazon is in fact a bigger distribution network. Makes technology super consumable by so many people. I guess I would say that open is good and important but it's not the only thing. As you say, data is a lock-in and it's right and people are choosing services that make them productive. Nobody worries about whether Amazon Lambda is proprietary. They just know that they can build companies or businesses or business processes on it. >> You know it's interesting back in the day just to kind of segue with the next topic. We were fighting proprietary operating systems, UNIX and others. We're also fighting for proprietary Network protocol stacks. SNA was owned by IBM. DECnet was digital, the number one network. And then TCP/IP and OpenSan's interconnect came out. That's the OSI model for us old ones. That set the table. That changed the face of everything. It really enabled a lot. So when I see containers, what Docker did early on the pioneering phases of Docker containers, it unleashed a new reality of coolness and scale and capabilities. And then in comes Kubernetes and in comes micro services. So this path is showing some real strength for new kinds of capabilities. So how does a developer navigate all this because data lock-in does it a data plane seems to be a control point. What are we fighting now in your opinion? shouldn't say we're fighting but what are we trying to avoid if operating systems was for closing opportunities and network protocol stacks before closing in the past? What do you see as barriers that need to be broken down in the open source world around going down this great path of micro services, decomposed applications, highly cohesive architectures? >> Honestly there's enough work to be getting on with without like fighting someone in that regard. I mean we're fighting against technical debt. I just don't think that people are serrated about fighting against proprietary anymore. I think that's less than a concern. Open-source technology is great. It's how most work gets done in our industry today. So you mentioned Kubernetes and certainly Docker. Though we did a phenomenal job of packaging up and experience that map to see CICD. That map to the developer workplace people like do. Phenomenal job and I think that for me at least when I look at where we are as an industry, it's all about productivity. So there are plenty of interesting new platforms. I think in my keynote, that's my question. I'm less interested in microservices than I am in distributed work. I'm interested in one of the tools that are going to enable us to become more productive, solve more problems, build more applications and get better at building software. So I think that's my sort of focus. There will always be lock-in. And I think you will also have technologies mitigate against that. I mean clear messages today from Docker about supporting multiple clouds. For a while at least multiclouds seem like something only the kind waivers were interested in but increasingly we're seeing organizations where that is definitely part of how they're using the cloud. And again I think very often it's within specific areas. And so we see organizations that are using particular clouds for different things. And we'll see more of that. >> And the productivity. I love the passion, love that in the keynote. That was loud and clear. Two key points I want to get your reaction on that. You mentioned one was inclusion. Including more people, not seeing news. It's kind of imperative. And also virtual work environments, virtual events. You kind of made a highlight there. So again people are distributed remote first. It's an opportunity to be productive. Can you share your thoughts on those two points? One is, as we're distributed, that's going to open the aperture of more engagement. More people coming in. So code of conduct not as a file you must read or some rule. Culturally embracing a code of conduct. And then also, virtual events, virtual groups convening like we're doing here. >> Yeah I mean for me at least Allison McMillan from github and she just gave such a great demo at the recent sunlight event where she finished and she was like, it was all about, I want to be able to put the kids to bed for a nap and then go code. And I think that's sort of thinking people band around the phrase ruling this together but I mean certainly parenting is a team sport. But I think it's interesting we're not welcome. It was interesting that was looking at the chat, going through, I was being accused of being woke. I was being accused of being a social justice warrior. But look at the math. The graph is pretty clear. Women are not welcomed in tech. And that means we're wasting 50% of available resource to us. And we're treating people like shit. So I thought I underplayed that in the talk actually. Something like, "Oh, why is he complaining about Linus?" Well, the fact is that Linus himself admitted he needed to change his persona in order to just be more modern and welcoming in terms of building software and building communities. So look we've got people from around the world. Different cultural norms. All of the women I know who work in tech suffer so much from effectively daily harassment. Their bonafides are challenged. These are things that we need to change because women are brilliant. I'm not letting you signaling or maybe I am. The fact is that women are amazing at software and we do a terrible job of supporting them. So women of other nationalities, we're not going to be traveling as much. I think you can also grow. No we can't keep flying around as much. Make an industry where single parents can participate more effectively. Where we could take advantage of that. There're 200 million people in Nigeria. That hunger to engage. We won't even give them a visa and then we may not be treating them right. I just think we need an industry reset. I think from a we need to travel less. We need to do better work. And we need to be more welcoming in order that that could be the case. >> Yeah, there's no doubt a reset is here and you look at the COVID crisis is forcing that function there because one, people are resetting and reinventing and trying to figure out a growth strategy. Whether it's a business or teams. And what's interesting is new roles and new responsibilities is going to emerge and I think you're right about the women in tech. I completely agree and have evidence myself and reported on it ad nauseam. But the thing is data trumps opinion. And the data is clear on this issue. So if anyone will call you a social justice warrior I just say pound sand and tell them that go on their way. And just look at the data and clear. And also the field is getting wider. When I was in computer science major back in the day, it was male-dominated yes but it was very narrow. Wasn't as broad as it is now. You can do things so much more and in fact in Kelsey Hightower's talk, he talks to persona developers. The ones that love to learn and ones that don't want to learn anything. Just want to code and do their thing. And ones that care about just app development and ones that just want to get in and sling k-8 around like it's nobody's business or work with APIs, work with infrastructure. Some just want to write code. So there's more and more surface area in computer science and coding. Or not even computer science, it's just coding, developing. >> Well, I mean it's a bigger industry. We've got clearly all sorts of challenges that need to be solved. And the services that we've got available are incredible. I mean if you look at the work of companies like Netlify in terms of developer experience. You look at the emergence of JamStack and the productivity that we're seeing there, it's a really exciting time in the industry. >> No doubt about that. >> And as I say I mean it's an exciting time. It's a scary time. But I think that we're moving to a world of more distributed work. And that's my point about open source and working on code bases from different places and what the CapCloud can enable. We can work in a different way and we don't all need to be in San Francisco, London, or Berlin as I said in the Keynote. >> I love the vision there and the passion. I totally agree with it. I think that's a whole another distributed paradigm that's going to move up the stack if you will and software. I think it's going to be codified in cloud native and cloud scale creates new services. I mean it's the virtual world. You mentioned virtual events. Groups convening like the 67,000 people coming together virtually here at DockerCon. Large, small one-on-ones group dynamics are a piece of it. So share your thoughts on virtual events and certainly it's people are now just kicking the tires, learning. You do a zoom, you do a livestream. You do some chat. It's going to evolve and I think it's going to look more like a CICD pipeline and anything else. As you start to bring media together, we get 43 sessions here. Why not make it a hundred sessions? So I think this is going to be one of those learning environments where it's not linear, it's different. What's your vision of all this if you had to give advice for the folks out there? Not event plans, with people who want to gather groups and be productive. What's your thinking on this? >> Well, it sort of has to happen. I mean there are a lot of people doing good work in this regard. Patrick Dubois, founder of DevOps days. He's doing some brilliant work delineating. Just what are all the different platforms? What does the streaming platform look like that you can use? Obviously you've got one here with theCUBE. Yeah, I mean I think the numbers are pretty clear. I mean Microsoft Build had 245,000 registered attendees and I think something that might have been to begin. The patterns are slightly different. It's not like they're going to be there the whole time but the opportunity to meet people where they are, I think is something that we shouldn't ignore. Particularly in a world not everyone again has the privilege of being able to travel. You're in a different country or as I say perhaps your life circumstances mean you can't travel. From an accessibility perspective, clearly virtual events offer an opportunity that we haven't fully nailed. I think Microsoft performance in this regard has been super interesting. They were already moving that way and Kobe just slammed it up to another level. What they did with Build recently was actually, I mean they're a media company, right? But certainly developed a focused media company. So I think you'll be okay. You're about the business of software John. Don't worry Microsoft don't give you some space there. (John and James laughing) We're under the radar at theCUBE 365 for the folks who are watching this. This is our site that we built with our software. So we're open and Docker was instrumental and I think the Docker captains were also very instrumental and trying to help us figure out the best way to preserve the content value. I personally think we're in this early stage of, content and community are clearly go hand in hand and I think as you look at the chat, some of the names that are on there. Some of the comments, really there's a new flywheel of production and this to me is the ultimate collaboration when you have these distinct groups coming together. And I think it's going to just be a data dream where people aren't the product, they're actually a contributor. And I think this open source framework that you're talking about is going to be certainly just going to evolve rapidly. I think it's just not even scratching the surface. I just think this is going to be pretty massive. And services whatever you want to define that. It could be an API to anything. It's going to be essentially the scale point. I mean why have a monolith piece of software running something. Something Microsoft teams will work well here. Zoom will work well there but ultimately what's in it for me the person? This is the key question. Developers just want to develop. You're going to hear that throughout the day. Kelsey Hightower brings up some great points in his session and Amanda silver at Microsoft, she had a quote on one of her videos. She said, "App developers are the first responders "in this crisis." And that's the first time I've heard someone say that out loud and that hits home for me because it's true. And right now app developers are one of the front lines. They're providing the app support. They're providing to the practitioners in the field. This is something that's not really written about in the press. What's your reaction to app developers are the first responders in this crisis. >> Well I mean first I think it's important to pay tribute to people that actually are first responders. Writing code can make us responsive but let's not forget there are people that are lacking PPE and they are on the frontline. So not precise manner but I might frame it slightly differently. But certainly what the current situation has shown us is productivity is super important. Target has made huge investments in building out its own software development capabilities. So they used to be like 70% external 30% internal and they turn that round to like 80% internal 20 external. And they've been turning on a dime and well there's so much going on at the moment. I'm like talking about target then I'm remembering what's happening in Minneapolis today. But anyway we'll talk about that. But yeah organizations are responding quickly. Look at the numbers that Shopify is happening because all sorts of business is something like we need to be an online business. What's the quickest way to do that. And Shopify was able to package something up in a way that they they could respond to challenges. Huge social challenges. I'm a big believer the future's unwritten at this point and I think there's a lot of problems out there you point out and the first responders are there I agree. I'm just thinking that there's got to be a better path for all of us. And this brings up the whole new roles and responsibilities around this new environment and I know you're doing a lot of research. Can you share some thoughts on what you're kind of working on now James? That's important, I'll see what's trending here at DockerCon is. Compose the relationship with Microsoft, we've got security, Dockers now, multicloud approach, making it easier, that's their bread and butter. That's what they're known for. They kind of going back to that roots of why they pioneered in the first place. So as that continues ease-of-use, what's your focus area right now that you're researching that you could share with the audience? >> Well, I mean I'd say this year for me I've got probably three key areas. One is what's called GitOps. So it's the notion that you're using Git as a system of record. So that started off randomly making changes, you have an audit trail. You begin to have some sort of sense of compliance in software changes. I think the idea of everything has to be by a sort of a pull request. That automation model is super thing to me. So I've been looking at that. A lot of development teams are using those approaches. Observability is a huge trend. We're moving to the idea of testing and production. The kind of stuff that's been evangelized so successfully by charity majors honeycomb. It's super exciting to me and it's true because in effect, you're always testing in production, your dev environment. I mean we used to have this idea that you'd have a Dev and a Dev stage. You're have a staging environment. The only environment that really matters is where the rubber meets the road. And that is deployment. So I think that having having better tools for that is one of the areas I'm looking at. So how are tools innovating that area? And it won't be the thing that this is my own personal thing. I've been talking about progressive delivery which is asking a question about reducing risk by really understanding the blast radius of the service to be able to roll it out to specific use of populations first. Understanding who they are and enrolling it up so it's the idea that like maybe you brought something out to your employees first. Maybe you are in California and you roll something out in Tokyo knowing that not many people are using that service. It is a live environment but people are not going to be adversely affected if it happens. So Canary's Blue-Green deployments and also experimentation. This is sort of one of the areas I'm being sort of pulled towards. It's sort of product management and how that's really converging with software development. I feel like that's one of the things I haven't fully, I mean I think it's when they have research focused but you have to respond to new information. Anyhow, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the world of product management. It's those companies to be most respect in terms of companies that are crushing it in the digital economy. They have such a strong product management focused. Everything is driven by product managers that understand technology and that's an exciting shift. The one that I'm paying greater attention. >> You do some great work and I love the focus on productivity software development. Getting those app developers out there and it's interesting. I just think that it's such an exciting time. It's almost intoxicating. Some people drinking on Twitter online and having beers because they're in different time zone. But if you look up and down the action that's going on, you got at the application developers side, all the things you were mentioning services. But when you look at the cloud side, you got almost this operating system reset. It's a systems architecture. So you have the hall and that's up and down. The middle of the stack to the bottom, you have this operating systems thinking and evolution. And then you got at the top, the pure software developers. And this is again to me the big aha moment. For the industry there's a true opportunity to scale that in unbelievable ways. And you don't have to pick a side. You can do a top of the stack bottom stack. So I think kubernetes and micro services really bring this whole enablement piece to the table. And that fascinates me and I think that's going to change what the apps will look like. It'll give more productivity and then making the internet programmable unit, that's new systems. So that seems to be the trend. You're a systems guy, your girl or you're a developer. How do you see that evolving? Do you get to that level? >> Developer experience is not necessarily the key value of Kubernetes. It's supremely flexible sort of system. It does offer you that portability. But I think what I'm seeing now is how people are taking Kubernetes and kind of thinking, so you've got VMware, acquires Heptio, brings Pivotal into the fold, starting about what that platform looks like. I think Pivotal with cloud foundry did a great job of thinking through operator experience. Operator experience is not the same as developer experience. I think we're going to see a bit more specialization of roles. Meanwhile at that point, you've got the cloud players all doing pretty awesome job supporting Kubernetes. But it gives that portability promise. So I think for me, one of the things is not expecting everyone to do everything. It's like Kelsey said, some people just want to come into work and do their job and they're super important. And so VMware I think a history of certification of application environments. So of them it's sort of quite--and certification of humans. It's quite natural that they would be somebody that would think about how do we make Kurbenetes more consumable and packaged in a way that more people take advantage of it. Docker was such a phenomenon and now seeing how that sort of evolving into that promise of portability is beginning to be realized. So I think the specialization, the pendulum is going to swing back just a little bit. >> I think it's just great timing and congratulations on all the work and thanks for taking the time for participating in DockerCon with the Keynote. Taking time out of your day and coming in and doing this live interview. The chat looks good. Hit some great, get some fans in there. It's a great opportunity and I think Docker as the pioneers, pivoting in a new direction, it's all about developer productivity and James you've been on it. @monkchips is his Twitter handle, follow him, hit him up. I'm John Furrier here in the studio for DockerCon 2020. Ginebra CEO and you got Brett Fisher on the captain's channel. If you go to the site, you'll see the calendar. Jump into any session you want. They'll be live on the time or on-demand instantly. TheCUBE track has a series of enemies. You've got Amazon, we got Microsoft, get some great guests, great practitioners that are literally having an impact on society. So thanks for watching. James, thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you very much John. >> Okay James Governor, founder of Monkchips, great firm, great person-- >> RedMonk, RedMonk is the company. Monkchips is the Twitter. >> Redmonk, Monkchips. RedMonk, RedMonk. >> RedMonk is the company. >> RedMonk, RedMonk. >> @monkchips is his Twitter handle and RedMonk is the firm, thank you for the correction. Okay more coverage DockerCon after this short break. Stay with us. The next segment is coming up. Stay with us here at theCUBE DockerCon. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's the theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Alright, welcome to theCUBE coverage here at RSA Conference in San Francisco and Moscone Halls, theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, in a cyber security is all about encryption data and also security. We have a very hot startup here, that amazing guest, Dr. Ellison Anne Williams, CEO and Founder of Enveil just recently secured a $10 million Series A Funding really attacking a real problem around encryption and use. Again, data ,security, analytics, making it all secure is great. Allison, and thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> So congratulations on the funding before we get started into the interview talking about the hard news, you guys that are around the funding. How long have you guys been around? What's the funding going to do? What are you guys doing? >> Yeah, so we're about three and a half years old as a company. We just announced our Series A close last week. So that was led by C5. And their new US Funds The Impact Fund and participating. Other partners included folks like MasterCard, Capital One Ventures, Bloomberg, Beta 1843, etc. >> So some names jumped in C5 led the round. >> For sure. >> How did this get started? What was the idea behind this three years you've been actually doing some work? Are you going to production? Is it R&D? Is it in market? Give us a quick update on the status of product and solution? >> Yeah, so full production. For production of the product. We're in fact in 2.0 of the release. And so we got our start inside of the National Security Agency, where I spent the majority of my career. And we developed some breakthroughs in an area of technology called homomorphic encryption, that allows you to perform computations into the encrypted domain as if they were in the unencrypted world. So the tech had never existed in a practical capacity. So we knew that bringing seeds of that technology out of the intelligence community and using it to seed really and start the company, we would be creating a new commercial market. >> So look at this, right? So you're at the NSA, >> Correct >> Your practitioner, they're doing a lot of work in this area, pioneering a new capability. And did the NSA spin it out did they fund it was the seed capital there or did you guys bootstrap it >> No. So our seed round was done by an entity called Data Tribe. So designed to take teams in technologies that were coming out of the IC that wanted to commercialize to do so. So we took seed funding from them. And then we were actually one of the youngest company ever to be in the RSA Innovation Sandbox here in 2017, to be one of the winners and that's where the conversation really started to change around this technology called homomorphic encryption, the market category space called securing data in use and what that meant. And so from there, we started running the initial version of a product out in the commercial world and we encountered two universal reaction. One that we were expecting and one that we weren't. And the one that we were expecting is that people said, "holy cow, this actually works". Because what we say we do keeping everything encrypted during processing. Sounds pretty impossible. It's not just the math. And then the second reaction that we encountered that we weren't expecting is those initial early adopters turned around and said to us, "can we strategically invest in you?" So our second round of funding was actually a Strategic Round where folks like Bloomberg beta,Thomson Reuters, USA and Incue Towel came into the company. >> That's Pre Series A >> Pre Series A >> So you still moving along, if a sandbox, you get some visibility >> Correct. >> Then were the products working on my god is you know, working. That's great. So I want to get into before I get into some of the overhead involved in traditionally its encryption there always has been that overhead tax. And you guys seem to solve that. But can you describe first data-at-rest versus data-in-motion and data-in-user. data at rest, as means not doing anything but >> Yeah, >> In flight or in you so they the same, is there a difference? Can you just tell us the difference of someone this can be kind of confusing. >> So it's helpful to think of data security in three parts that we call the triad. So securing data at rest on the file system and the database, etc. This would be your more traditional in database encryption, or file based encryption also includes things like access control. The second area, the data security triad is securing data- in- transit when it's moving around through the network. So securing data at rest and in transit. Very well solution. A lot of big name companies do that today, folks like Talus and we partner with them, Talus, Gemalto, etc. Now, the third portion of the data security triad is what happens to that data when you go use or process it in some way when it becomes most valuable. And that's where we focus. So as a company, we secure data-in-use when it's being used or processed. So what does that mean? It means we can do things like take searches or analytics encrypt them, and then go run them without ever decrypting them at any point during processing. So like I said, this represents a new commercial market, where we're seeing it manifest most often right now are in things like enabling secure data sharing, and collaboration, or enabling secure data monetization, because its privacy preserving and privacy enabling as a capability. >> And so that I get this right, the problem that you solved is that during the end use parts of the triad, it had to be decrypted first and then encrypted again, and that was the vulnerability area. Look, can you describe kind of like, the main problem that you guys saw was that-- >> So think more about, if you've got data and you want to give me access to it, I'm a completely different entity. And the way that you're going to give me access to it is allowing me to run a search over your data holdings. We see this quite a bit in between two banks in the areas of anti-money laundering or financial crime. So if I'm going to go run a search in your environment, say I'm going to look for someone that's an EU resident. Well, their personal information is covered under GDPR. Right? So if I go run that search in your environment, just because I'm coming to look for a certain individual doesn't mean you actually know anything about that. And so if you don't, and you have no data on them whatsoever, I've just introduced a new variable into your environment that you now have to account for, From a risk and liability perspective under something like GDPR. Whereas if you use us, we could take that search encrypt it within our walls, send it out to you and you could process it in its encrypted state. And because it's never decrypted during processing, there's no risk to you of any increased liability because that PII or that EU resident identifier is never introduced into your space. >> So the operating side of the business where there's compliance and risk management are going to love this, >> For sure. >> Is that really where the action is? >> Yes, compliance risk privacy. >> Alright, so get a little nerdy action on this one. So encryption has always been an awesome thing depending on who you talk to you, obviously, but he's always been a tax associate with the overhead processing power. He said, there's math involved. How does homeomorphic work? Does it have problems with performance? Is that a problem? Or if not, how do you address that? Where does it? I might say, well, I get it. But what's the tax for me? Or is your tax? >> Encryption is never free. I always tell people that. So there always is a little bit of latency associated with being able to do anything in an encrypted capacity, whether that's at rest at in transit or in use. Now, specifically with homomorphic encryption. It's not a new area of encryption. It's been around 30 or so years, and it had often been considered to be the holy grail of encryption for exactly the reasons we've already talked about. Doing things like taking searches or analytics and encrypting them, running them without ever decrypting anything opens up a world of different types of use cases across verticals and-- >> Give those use case examples. What would be some that would be low hanging fruit. And it would be much more higher level. >> Some of the things that we're seeing today under that umbrella of secure data sharing and collaboration, specifically inside of financial services, for use cases around anti-money laundering and financial crimes so, allowing two banks to be able to securely collaborate with with each other, along the lines of the example that I gave you just a second ago, and then also for large multinational banks to do so across jurisdictions in which they operate that have different privacy and secrecy regulations associated with them. >> Awesome. Well, Ellison, and I want to ask you about your experience at the NSA. And now as an entrepreneur, obviously, you have some, you know, pedigree at the NSA, really, you know, congratulations. It's going to be smart to work there, I guess. Secrets, you know, >> You absolutely do. >> Brains brain surgeon rocket scientist, so you get a lot of good stuff. But now that you're on the commercial space, it's been a conversation around how public and commercial are really trying to work together a lot as innovations are happening on both sides of the fence there. >> Yeah. >> Then the ICC and the Intelligence Community as well as commercial. Yeah, you're an entrepreneur, you got to go make money, you got shareholders down, you got investors? What's the collaboration look like? How does the world does it change for you? Is it the same? What's the vibe in DC these days around the balance between collaboration or is there? >> Well, we've seen a great example of this recently in that anti-money laundering financial crime use case. So the FCA and the Financial Conduct Authority out of the UK, so public entity sponsored a whole event called a tech spread in which they brought the banks together the private entities together with the startup companies, so your early emerging innovative capabilities, along with the public entities, like your privacy regulators, etc, and had us all work together to develop really innovative solutions to real problems within the banks. In the in the context of this text spread. We ended up winning the know your customer customer due diligence side of the text brand and then at the same time that us held an equivalent event in DC, where FinCEN took the lead, bringing in again, the banks, the private companies, etc, to all collaborate around this one problem. So I think that's a great example of when your public and your private and your private small and your private big is in the financial services institutions start to work together, we can really make breakthroughs-- >> So you see a lot happening >> We see a lot happening. >> The encryption solution actually helped that because it makes sense. Now you have the sharing the encryption. >> Yeah. >> Does that help with some of the privacy and interactions? >> It breaks through those barriers? Because if we were two banks, we can't necessarily openly, freely share all the information. But if I can ask you a question and do so in a secure and private capacity, still respecting all the access controls that you've put in place over your own data, then it allows that collaboration to occur, whereas otherwise I really couldn't in an efficient capacity. >> Okay, so here's the curveball question for you. So anybody Startup Series today, but you really got advanced Series A, you got a lot of funding multiple years of operation. If I asked you what's the impact that you're going to have on the world? What would you say to that, >> Over creating a whole new market, completely changing the paradigm about where and how you can use data for business purposes. And in terms of how much funding we have, we have, we've had a few rounds, but we only have 15 million into the company. So to be three and a half years old to see this new market emerging and being created with with only $15 million. It's really pretty impressive. >> Yeah, it's got a lot of growth and keep the ownership with the employees and the founders. >> It's always good, but being bootstrap is harder than it looks, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> Or how about society at large impact. You know, we're living global society these days and get all kinds of challenges. You see anything else in the future for your vision of impact. >> So securing data and your supplies horizontally across verticals. So far we've been focused mainly on financial services. But I think healthcare is a great vertical to move out in. And I think there are a lot of global challenges with healthcare and the more collaborative that we could be from a healthcare standpoint with our data. And I think our capabilities enable that to be possible. And still respecting all the privacy regulations and restrictions. I think that's a whole new world of possibility as well. >> And your secret sauce is what math? What's that? What's the secret sauce, >> Math, Math and grit. >> Alright, so thanks for sharing the insights. Give a quick plug for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Honestly, $10 million in funding priorities for you and the team? What do you guys live in to do? >> So priorities for us? privacy is a global issue now. So we are expanding globally. And you'll be hearing more about that very shortly. We also have new product lines that are going to be coming out enabling people to do more advanced decisioning in a completely secure and private capacity. >> And hiring office locations DC. >> Yes. So our headquarters is in DC, but we're based on over the world, so we're hiring, check out our web page. We're hiring for all kinds of roles from engineering to business functionality >> And virtual is okay virtual hires school >> Virtual hires is great. We're looking for awesome people no matter where they are. >> You know, DC but primary. Okay, so great to have you gone. Congratulations for one, the financing and then three years of bootstrapping and making it happen. Awesome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for coming ,appreciate it. So keep coming to your RSA conference in Moscone. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching more after this short break (pop music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nations capitol. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost John Furrier. We have Allison Robinson joining us, she is the AVP IT operations at Cal Poly University. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, talk about your big announcement yesterday in terms of ground station. This is one of John's favorite topics, so tell us more about what you announced. >> So yesterday there was an announcement that Cal Poly through our digital transformation hub, and that hub exists to do innovated things with the greater good through the public sector and helping with challenges that they're trying to learn more about and solve problems. And so, through that group, we announced the initiative to do cube satellite in connection with ground station at AWS, to be able to help people that use these satellites be able to test these satellites and collect data and share it ultimately, with others. 'Cause there's a problem, they're not expensive satellites but that means you don't have a lot of money to work with. And so to be able to test and make sure your communications are good and the infrastructure is there, is kind of missing in the whole environment. And now, that's going to be solved. >> And you're able to get many more shots and pay as you go, not necessarily have to, as you said, put up your own satellite yourself. >> Exactly, you can put the satellite up. The problem was the infrastructure to communicate back with it. So, the ground station, those antenna are approximately located to AWS regions. So you can now bring the data, process it, store it, analyze it, and then ultimately share it. That, again, being for the public good, we want to make sure the date we're collecting is in the AWS registry, data set registry. So that people can access that information, that's important. >> Allison, talk about the relationship with AWS, how did it get started? I mean your involved with these cool projects like ground station, which I'm a big fan of. 'Cause I think the impact to IOT, just forest fires in California could be a real... >> Allison: Right. >> Saver right there. Just using data, back hauling data for whatever is going to be a great thing. But you got a relationship with AWS, that goes beyond, not just ground station, there's other things going on. Take a minute to explain the relationship with AWS. >> So, the vice president of IT at Cal Poly, Bill Britton, began his position with Cal Poly about two years ago. And took a look at the data center and had to ask the question, do we invest here on prem or do we have to look for something else? And that began the conversation of, we need to do something about our data center, it looks like Amazon has the tools we need to modernize our technical environment. Both in how we work, how people work, our processes and our technical infrastructure. And so, that began the work of, we announced two years ago, I didn't work for Cal Poly yet. They announced there, the President and Bill announced that we were all in. The data center was going to AWS. I happened to be presenting on a different topic, and we connected there, and a year later, we made a connection and I have been at Cal Poly now for a year to help them get to the AWS data center. >> Lot of smart people Cal Poly, I know, I looked at the university. Great computer science, great everything. You guys got a lot of smart people, so what was it like to actually, as this starts to evolve, the progression of the modernization. Take us through where you guys are on progress, what are some of the cool things going on. What's the result of this shift? What are some of the notable highlights? >> It's really exciting, because we really did take an approach of we've got to look at, not just as AWS and a new tool. Which you have to work so differently, in dev ops and agily. We said okay, then we've got to figure out our processes to be able to work that way. We have to change as an organization. So we were more structured around those technical silos. And we became a service management group for like, who do we serve and what are they trying to accomplish? And that's the focus of everything we do. So from idea to service we have a process to handle to that. And AWS, we're all in on their tools too.6 So they completely facilitate that process6. >> You have a lot of stake holders, so you have impact at the student body level, faculty, institution overall.6 >> Right. >> What are some of the game changers that you see? Obviously the ground station, you got great R and D coming in with Amazon. What's the impact? >> The digital transformation hub is part of the IT organization as well. And our community outreach and giving students actual hands on experience to work with the public sector, whether it be law enforcement, or maybe a city trying to deal with a homeless situation. They actually are engaged with professionals and learning about problems and solutions. And in ten weeks, we work on quarters, and our quarters are ten weeks, which align perfectly to exactly how long it takes an engagement with the digital hub to find what's possible in terms of solutions to problems. >> So talk about the students of today. I mean, we hear a lot about them. And I want to hear you, you're teaching them, you're helping to educate this new generation of people who we hope will make huge, great waves in industry, private industry, as well as state, local, and the federal government. >> Allison: Right. >> What do you see as their strengths, their weaknesses, and what are they looking at in terms of building careers? >> You know, they, I really do love working with the students. They are incredible. It makes me wonder sometimes, I don't think I'd get into college now, times have changed. And they really care, they care, that's why the public, being able to work through these to serve the greater good of the public and share that data after actually means so much more to them. Than if it were just a class project, because they want to make a difference. They care about social justice and making sure that we're green and efficient with how we use our earth resources. And so this maps around a lot of the challenges. The homelessness that I mentioned before, and how we've worked with that. Or making sure that we can make cities safer. They care about that deeply. And they have access to a lot of resources. This past fall's incoming class was born in the year 2000. They've never not known a time with computers. They do math homework, they're not reading, they're actually doing homework on their phones. Their very mobilely engaged, very digitally engaged. And we're going to see wonderful things from them, because they think so differently about these things. >> It sounds as though the education that you're providing is very practical, in the sense that you're having your students work with the state and local governments on these issues like homelessness and climate change. Can you talk about some of the projects that their doing? >> So our mantra is learn by doing. And you come in and you are admitted to a major. And you begin working in that major right away. Every student finishes their last quarter with a senior project. And you actually produce an outcome and have something you can talk about, both as the product and the process to get there. I was recently invited to the senior projects showcase for the graphic arts department. And, in common, they all had technology. And some where, one of the students we had just contracted for some software, and thank you so much you helped make the difference with that. So that's neat, when you get to see to make that difference. But even though it's graphic arts, in every way technology was key to what they do. And they have, really, you know students come from some great backgrounds too, where they've had some great access to information and technology and really think differently about it. Engineering students are winning awards and doing really great things. So it's fun to see and be a part of. Great energy. >> What about the culture within your department itself? I mean, you're not only educating the next generation but you're also doing research yourself. Can you talk about, particularly, as a partner, as working so closely with AWS, which has such a famous culture of innovation and of taking risks and tolerating failure, because the more failures you'll have, you'll ultimately get there someday. So can you talk a little bit about the culture within Cal Poly? >> It's hard, because IT people are usually very analytical and there's a right and a wrong. So that sense of it's okay to get it wrong, isn't popular generally. So, that starts with me, I had to get up and say we may not get it right, but rarely do we get it wrong. We might get parts of it wrong, we adjust. It's okay to get it wrong. We've got to figure things out, all of this is new. And as I've been there longer and really work with people through different things, they believe that from me now. There's not judgment. I once worked at a place where it'd go on your permanent record. Well, try and get somebody to try something innovated if you have a problem and it goes on your permanent record. So I don't have that now. >> Rebecca: It'd be a career ender. >> Yeah. >> Bill: Yeah. >> I have a lot of people getting it, and we're trying it. And you can work so fast in the AWS environment, that if it isn't right, blow it away and start over again. >> In some organization you were a renegade if you tried something new. You know, oh my God, don't touch that third rail. >> Allison: Yeah. >> Here, you guys are doing, it's progressive in the sense that you're trying new things. >> Learn by doing is a call to action, but it also gives you that space to try. >> Bill: Yeah, be creative. >> It's learning. >> What's your impression of the show here in DC? Obviously, it's our fourth year covering public sector. I've been following them a couple years earlier, but the first four years covering live broadcasting, reporting. But, besides the growth, what's your takeaway? >> I need to be cloned. (laughter) >> There are so many things happening here. >> You need a digital twin. >> There you go. >> You can solve that, Allison. >> There's going to be a lot of people that say, no don't clone her, don't do it. But there's so much information and the innovation that AWS does. Sometimes it's like exciting to hear, and it's like oh where was that a month ago when we were working on that? So we just have to stay on our toes and we have to keep engaged with AWS and what they're doing and what we can use from them to make our environment better. And move even faster. >> You got to keep, keeping pace is also a hard thing. Because they're introducing so many new things. At amazon. We're very fortunate again in our partnership, actually that does translate into the IT operations organization. That we've been working with them on some services that they do. We can tell them, hey this isn't quite working, and they honestly listen to us. And deliver what they ask on a road map, sometimes sooner than later too. So it's been a great partnership. >> That's interesting, a company that actually delivers on what you ask for. >> Exactly, exactly. And we have scaled, you know it's a small town there's 24,000 students, you have your faculty and staff. So when we try something with them, we have the opportunity for big impacts right away. >> That's awesome, well, congratulations, great work >> Thank you. >> On the DX hubs fascinating ground station. Great projects, students and you guys to play around and help that grow. Because that's going to be a great service. >> Yes, we're excited. We can't wait to get going. >> Rebecca: Thanks for coming the Cube Allison. >> Thank you. >> We will have more of the Cubes live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. Stay tuned. (upbeat beat music)

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world here live in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Stu minimun we have Jay Crone he is the senior consultant portfolio marketing at Dell EMC and Allison Langham consultant product marketing Dell EMC thank you so much for coming on the cube thanks for returning on so ricktum are we gonna talk today about cloud storage and data protection but I want to start with cloud and I'm gonna start with you Jay talk a little bit about what your customers what they want to do with the cloud well and so what one of the things we found is as cloud has been out there for a while and people have learned about what they can do with it it's not not the panacea that people thought there are about it about four or five use cases the big one is disaster recovery so a lot of people who can't won't don't care two don't have the money to set up a second data center will rent the cloud you know rent rent both capacity and computer in the cloud so disaster recovery is the big one we'll talk about that more in terms of some specific announcements the other ones make make sense it's really sort of the rent instead of buy test and development you know you want you want to spit up a test environment and run it for three hours find out what it what it tells you and then tear it down and not have to pay for it back up an archive is kind of a related to the disaster recovery but it's a little bit different use case because often people want to put the clout you two put the data some place to store it regular regulatory requirements that's an example which is different than disaster recovery analytics a big again it's this like what we used to call high performance computing where you need a lot of compute and a lot of storage for a short period of time and you don't want to you have a data center full of stuff that you're paying for or not using and then the last one there's lots of words for this the polite marketing term is workload migration also known as lift and shift which is these are the people that actually do want to take a workload from on-premises and pick it up and move it to the cloud wholesale so those are those are the ones disaster recovery is still far and away the most popular so Allison you know our observation coming in this week is there's a lot of discussion about that hybrid and multi cloud a lot of that focus gets put on you know the public clouds I mean you bring Satya Nadella to the show we're gonna talk a lot about Microsoft Azure and even when we get into the data center you know we we've seen the ascendancy of VX rail and that's an underlying component for many of the solutions that were all doubt but I know you're gonna help bring to us is help fill out some of the rest of the portfolio is you know from the EMC side and as Dell EMC comes in there's a large storage portfolio does that get left behind when we talk about cloud or pulled into the entire discussion yeah and a great question so you know when we think about our you know cloud strategy as a whole for Dell Dell technologies you know there's really there's two there's two pieces to that and so a lot of what you heard about yesterday and the big announcements around the Dell technologies cloud that's really helping customers really just completely transform to a cloud operating model and a lot of like the people processes technology implications of doing so the other piece of that is around our cloud enabled infrastructure which is really complementary to a lot of what we talked about yesterday and our cloud enabled infrastructure you know that's more of what we heard about today and what we're doing across both our storage and data protection portfolios to help customers modernize their existing infrastructure to be able to extend their data centers to the cloud so and it's you know these are there's our complementary pieces it's not really um it's not an aura conversation it's really an an conversation both pieces are really important when thinking about your cloud strategy just depending on you know workload and transformational readiness and where you're at to be able to do that so that's where a lot of our storage cloud capabilities come come into play all right okay maybe we could bring us down a little a little bit of level as to you know how I explain how cloud cloud enabled isn't cloud watching you know something like power Mac's you know well and that is that's interesting in fact I had that we just walked out of the booth was talking one of the product managers who had presiding to a customer that had one of some gear from a distinguished competitor shall we say was interested in PowerMax partly because of the cloud story so and PowerMax is is is just joining the cloud family and one of the things that we are have announced here that was talked about in the keynote is cloud storage services which is an offering that we have through a cloud service provider that allows you for example is an existing PowerMax customer to use s rdf to use native replication to replicate into the cloud and then in a VMware environment here's that disaster recovery use case coming in a VMware environment use Site Recovery Manager to perform a failover and then this service provider well you will read will spin up those VMs and VM works out on AWS so what you basically get is an automatic failover for VMware environments with power max so it's an extreme and unity by the way so both are a nice launch so we get we get that disaster recovery use case enabling you know our bread-and-butter our industry-leading storage platform so that's that's that's a big piece of the news and that wasn't that was announced here the other thing I do want to point out with that announcement is there's a multi cloud capability the the one I just discussed is that the automatic VMware use case but there's also the ability through our service provider to connect to regular AWS in addition to vm worked on an AWS Google and Azure which we might have heard a little about yesterday and we're excited about that as well Alison this is a very competitive market and customers really expect a lot they want new capabilities they want the latest and greatest what is the strategy and the messaging behind why Dell is the is the choice right so no I talked a little bit about they are speaking specifically around our cloud enable the infrastructure you know we had a lot of great announcements today but really we've been having we've been incorporating these cloud capabilities and functionality with on our storage and data protection portfolio for a long time and it's been around and we just we haven't really been talking about it but we have a lot of you know comprehensive cloud features and you know we sort of look at that in you know there's three specific areas where we really look for it to innovate with the cloud in our in our storage and data protection portfolio so that's areas like our cloud connected system so that's like data mobility our ability to tear data from on-prem to the cloud then we also have as Jay was just talking about Platte Lake we have our Cloud Data Services which includes our new cloud storage services offerings but it's also things like being able to deploy in the cloud and as opposed to extending to the cloud so things like cloud edition or data domain virtualization where you're deploying a software-defined version in the cloud and then spanning across the top of that from on-prem in the core to the cloud we have our cloud data insights so that's things like cloud IQ or clarity now that really enable you to proactively monitor and manage not just your infrastructure but also your data and really use that the artificial intelligence built into those to you know get you know good insights to manage manage and monitor your data from on-prem to the cloud so really that but those three areas we really bring together you know a comprehensive set of features to cloud enable your your infrastructure ok wondering if you can bring us inside some of the conversations you're having with customers you're wearing the shirt I see around a lot of the booths yeah you know you know what what are some of the you know top kind of business challenges and you know how are things different now than they might have been back when we called this EMC world well so the there's the disaster recovery use case which is which as I said is new the other thing that's happening is there's that five years of learning that people have had around the public cloud I was talking with a reseller yesterday and one of the value propositions that we have for this particular offering especially the cloud storage services is because the storage is at a service provider that is not the cloud provider shall we say they can offer a different economic model so what we're finding is people are finding new ways to go to the cloud for less money so and that's and that works out really really well because it makes the cloud more affordable for everybody it makes it gives them it gives us some additional business opportunity and most importantly it gives customers the ability to use the cloud consumption model the effects model and the outsourcing of the resources that they couldn't do before so that's the big thing is we were basically enabling the public cloud in ways that we couldn't have done to your point five years ago in addition to the cost benefits of that just building on the multi cloud piece with our cloud storage service is offering it's also about you know some concerns that like big concerns around public clouds like security and having control of your data their cloud storage services offering your data is actually sitting on external storage so it's directly connected to the cloud you have like a high-speed connection into the public cloud to be able to run your applications but and you can connect to multiple clouds move data between clouds you know as as it suits the business needs there's different workloads but at the same time you're still maintaining control of that data on you know durable persistent Dell EMC storage right it's on the gear you know and love and as I said all of our native replication this is this is wonderful because if you're a customer with gear on site you don't perceive any change your your s RDF pipe if you will it leaves the building like it used to it just goes to a cloud provider instead of a data center across the Hudson River so to speak well data protection and data security are it's a big theme this year for good and for good reason where do you think cuz the customer mindset is right now our customers appropriately concerned about the the threats that they face and the requirements that are that are bearing down or are they are they head in the sand I mean how would you describe where customers are right now in terms of thinking through these things everybody is concerned about security so the answer is it's right up there you know and we look at you know the the security is some of it is off site but it's it's things like Allison said we offer a model where your data is it it's in the lockbox that you know of as a unity or a nice loan or a Max and it's not in some amorphous place you know up there in the in the cloud as it were and that that gives people a lot of a lot of a warm warm fuzzy feeling and things like data at rest encryption at work on the storage arrays still work on the storage arrays when it's in the cloud so those features are still available to customers that they already know and love all right Alison one of the other things we've been talking a lot about this week is the VMware and Dell EMC pieces have come together more than ever before you know I think back you know when we used to rank how does EMC storage do with VMware well how many integrations does it have now many of the solutions you know VX rail it's got VCF sitting on it can you talk about how they did the VMware and the LMC storage pieces have been coming together even more yeah absolutely so specifically what one of the solutions that Jay was talking about earlier that automated disaster recovery feature from for our cloud storage services that's all about that's all about VMs it's all about VMware integration and it it really offers that if you get this disaster recovery as a service model for VMware environments who are running VMware cloud on AWS and they get you get that complete operational consistency so it's that's a huge benefit to our customers so there's that where it's you're leveraging for the automated disaster recovery it's either power max or unity including the new unity XT which was recently announced being able to completely have operational consistency within your VMware environment from on-prem to the cloud addition to that in addition to that we talked a lot about yesterday about the Dell tech cloud which VX rail is a key component of that we also have our storage our key storage platforms are also validated with VMware Cloud foundation for you know some more like high-performance workloads so we really have so things like power max and unity are also validated with VMware Cloud foundation to be able to get that Best of Breed storage as part of that stack as well it's something that you asked what's changed something that's kind of interesting so we're in the storage division we're in the storage business unit and we have weekly meetings bi-weekly meetings with the VMware cloud folks so that just tells you what's important there's VMware and cloud you know in that word and here we are as you know some of your prime your primary and unstructured storage people working on a regular basis with it with the VMware folks and that is an example of how the companies are coming together and doing doing things differently than we did before how are you finding this show this is the 10th year that the cube has been at at Dell Dell technologies world but back then Dell EMC world what are you how are you finding the vibe this year what's what is the tone of things very cloud focused on which has been a huge huge tip this year that's everything that we're hearing about is very cloud centered which is well it's nice to see you I wouldn't that wouldn't say it's so much of a victory lap bike but there's a lot of excitement certainly in our area on the floor there's a lot of work that has been done over the last couple of years to to get things aligned and put some new processes in place and get some new products out so you let you listen to the you know the Jeff Clark portions of the keynote in particularly yesterday and today he just goes this this this this and this and that's where customers want to see you know we have folks coming up they want to see the new power max they what they want to see the new unity XT of course you know that was it was fun last night it was just kind of sitting there on a pedestal and nobody pointed it out today people want to pull a cult that covers off and say show me the nvme slots so so there's that kind of vibe and excitement the partner vibe is there as well we've we have VMware and some other partners that we're working with so is there it's it's very exciting this year yeah that's great well Allison and Jay thank you both so much for coming on the cube it was great how are you I'm Rebecca night force 2 minimun and we will have so much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world live from Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit [Music]