>>Hey everyone, welcome to this event, HPE Compute Security. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Kevin Dee joins me next Senior director, future Surfer Architecture at hpe. Kevin, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Thanks, Lisa. I'm glad to be here. >>One of the topics that we're gonna unpack in this segment is, is all about cybersecurity. And if we think of how dramatically the landscape has changed in the last couple of years, I was looking at some numbers that H P V E had provided. Cybercrime will reach 10.5 trillion by 2025. It's a couple years away. The average total cost of a data breach is now over 4 million, 15% year over year crime growth predicted over the next five years. It's no longer if we get hit, it's when it's how often. What's the severity? Talk to me about the current situation with the cybersecurity landscape that you're seeing. >>Yeah, I mean the, the numbers you're talking about are just staggering and then that's exactly what we're seeing and that's exactly what we're hearing from our customers is just absolutely key. Customers have too much to lose. The, the dollar cost is just, like I said, staggering. And, and here at HP we know we have a huge part to play, but we also know that we need partnerships across the industry to solve these problems. So we have partnered with, with our, our various partners to deliver these Gen 11 products. Whether we're talking about partners like a M D or partners like our Nick vendors, storage card vendors. We know we can't solve the problem alone. And we know this, the issue is huge. And like you said, the numbers are staggering. So we're really, we're really partnering with, with all the right players to ensure we have a secure solution so we can stay ahead of the bad guys to try to limit the, the attacks on our customers. >>Right. Limit the damage. What are some of the things that you've seen particularly change in the last 18 months or so? Anything that you can share with us that's eye-opening, more eye-opening than some of the stats we already shared? >>Well, there, there's been a massive number of attacks just in the last 12 months, but I wouldn't really say it's so much changed because the amount of attacks has been increasing dramatically over the years for many, many, many years. It's just a very lucrative area for the bad guys, whether it's ransomware or stealing personal data, whatever it is, it's there. There's unfortunately a lot of money to be made into it, made from it, and a lot of money to be lost by the good guys, the good guys being our customers. So it's not so much that it's changed, it's just that it's even accelerating faster. So the real change is, it's accelerating even faster because it's becoming even more lucrative. So we have to stay ahead of these bad guys. One of the statistics of Microsoft operating environments, the number of tax in the last year, up 50% year over year, that's a huge acceleration and we've gotta stay ahead of that. We have to make sure our customers don't get impacted to the level that these, these staggering number of attacks are. The, the bad guys are out there. We've gotta protect, protect our customers from the bad guys. >>Absolutely. The acceleration that you talked about is, it's, it's kind of frightening. It's very eye-opening. We do know that security, you know, we've talked about it for so long as a, as a a C-suite priority, a board level priority. We know that as some of the data that HPE e also sent over organizations are risking are, are listing cyber risks as a top five concern in their organization. IT budgets spend is going up where security is concerned. And so security security's on everyone's mind. In fact, the cube did, I guess in the middle part of last, I did a series on this really focusing on cybersecurity as a board issue and they went into how companies are structuring security teams changing their assumptions about the right security model, offense versus defense. But security's gone beyond the board, it's top of mind and it's on, it's in an integral part of every conversation. So my question for you is, when you're talking to customers, what are some of the key challenges that they're saying, Kevin, these are some of the things the landscape is accelerating, we know it's a matter of time. What are some of those challenges and that they're key pain points that they're coming to you to help solve? >>Yeah, at the highest level it's simply that security is incredibly important to them. We talked about the numbers. There's so much money to be lost that what they come to us and say, is security's important for us? What can you do to protect us? What can you do to prevent us from being one of those statistics? So at a high level, that's kind of what we're seeing at a, with a little more detail. We know that there's customers doing digital transformations. We know that there's customers going hybrid cloud, they've got a lot of initiatives on their own. They've gotta spend a lot of time and a lot of bandwidth tackling things that are important to their business. They just don't have the bandwidth to worry about yet. Another thing which is security. So we are doing everything we can and partnering with everyone we can to help solve those problems for customers. >>Cuz we're hearing, hey, this is huge, this is too big of a risk. How do you protect us? And by the way, we only have limited bandwidth, so what can we do? What we can do is make them assured that that platform is secure, that we're, we are creating a foundation for a very secure platform and that we've worked with our partners to secure all the pieces. So yes, they still have to worry about security, but there's pieces that we've taken care of that they don't have to worry about and there's capabilities that we've provided that they can use and we've made that easy so they can build su secure solutions on top of it. >>What are some of the things when you're in customer conversations, Kevin, that you talk about with customers in terms of what makes HPE E'S approach to security really unique? >>Well, I think a big thing is security is part of our, our dna. It's part of everything we do. Whether we're designing our own asics for our bmc, the ilo ASIC ILO six used on Gen 11, or whether it's our firmware stack, the ILO firmware, our our system, UFI firmware, all those pieces in everything we do. We're thinking about security. When we're building products in our factory, we're thinking about security. When we're think designing our supply chain, we're thinking about security. When we make requirements on our suppliers, we're driving security to be a key part of those components. So security is in our D N a security's top of mind. Security is something we think about in everything we do. We have to think like the bad guys, what could the bad guy take advantage of? What could the bad guy exploit? So we try to think like them so that we can protect our customers. >>And so security is something that that really is pervasive across all of our development organizations, our supply chain organizations, our factories, and our partners. So that's what we think is unique about HPE is because security is so important and there's a whole lot of pieces of our reliance servers that we do ourselves that many others don't do themselves. And since we do it ourselves, we can make sure that security's in the design from the start, that those pieces work together in a secure manner. So we think that gives us a, an advantage from a security standpoint. >>Security is very much intention based at HPE e I was reading in some notes, and you just did a great job of talking about this, that fundamental security approach, security is fundamental to defend against threats that are increasingly complex through what you also call an uncompromising focus to state-of-the-art security and in in innovations built into your D N A. And then organizations can protect their infrastructure, their workloads, their data from the bad guys. Talk to us briefly in our final few minutes here, Kevin, about fundamental uncompromising protected the value in it for me as an HPE customer. >>Yeah, when we talk about fundamental, we're talking about the those fundamental technologies that are part of our platform. Things like we've integrated TPMS and sorted them down in our platforms. We now have platform certificates as a standard part of the platform. We have I dev id and probably most importantly, our platforms continue to support what we really believe was a groundbreaking technology, Silicon Root of trust and what that's able to do. We have millions of lines of firmware code in our platforms and with Silicon Root of trust, we can authenticate all of those lines of firmware. Whether we're talking about the the ILO six firmware, our U E I firmware, our C P L D in the system, there's other pieces of firmware. We authenticate all those to make sure that not a single line of code, not a single bit has been changed by a bad guy, even if the bad guy has physical access to the platform. >>So that silicon route of trust technology is making sure that when that system boots off and that hands off to the operating system and then eventually the customer's application stack that it's starting with a solid foundation, that it's starting with a system that hasn't been compromised. And then we build other things into that silicon root of trust, such as the ability to do the scans and the authentications at runtime, the ability to automatically recover if we detect something has been compromised, we can automatically update that compromised piece of firmware to a good piece before we've run it because we never want to run firmware that's been compromised. So that's all part of that Silicon Root of Trust solution and that's a fundamental piece of the platform. And then when we talk about uncompromising, what we're really talking about there is how we don't compromise security. >>And one of the ways we do that is through an extension of our Silicon Root of trust with a capability called S Spdm. And this is a technology that we saw the need for, we saw the need to authenticate our option cards and the firmware in those option cards. Silicon Root Prota, Silicon Root Trust protects against many attacks, but one piece it didn't do is verify the actual option card firmware and the option cards. So we knew to solve that problem we would have to partner with others in the industry, our nick vendors, our storage controller vendors, our G vendors. So we worked with industry standards bodies and those other partners to design a capability that allows us to authenticate all of those devices. And we worked with those vendors to get the support both in their side and in our platform side so that now Silicon Rivers and trust has been extended to where we protect and we trust those option cards as well. >>So that's when, when what we're talking about with Uncompromising and with with Protect, what we're talking about there is our capabilities around protecting against, for example, supply chain attacks. We have our, our trusted supply chain solution, which allows us to guarantee that our server, when it leaves our factory, what the server is, when it leaves our factory, will be what it is when it arrives at the customer. And if a bad guy does anything in that transition, the transit from our factory to the customer, they'll be able to detect that. So we enable certain capabilities by default capability called server configuration lock, which can ensure that nothing in the server exchange, whether it's firmware, hardware, configurations, swapping out processors, whatever it is, we'll detect if a bad guy did any of that and the customer will know it before they deploy the system. That gets enabled by default. >>We have an intrusion detection technology option when you use by the, the trusted supply chain that is included by default. That lets you know, did anybody open that system up, even if the system's not plugged in, did somebody take the hood off and potentially do something malicious to it? We also enable a capability called U EFI secure Boot, which can go authenticate some of the drivers that are located on the option card itself. Those kind of capabilities. Also ilo high security mode gets enabled by default. So all these things are enabled in the platform to ensure that if it's attacked going from our factory to the customer, it will be detected and the customer won't deploy a system that's been maliciously attacked. So that's got >>It, >>How we protect the customer through those capabilities. >>Outstanding. You mentioned partners, my last question for you, we've got about a minute left, Kevin is bring AMD into the conversation, where do they fit in this >>AMD's an absolutely crucial partner. No one company even HP can do it all themselves. There's a lot of partnerships, there's a lot of synergies working with amd. We've been working with AMD for almost 20 years since we delivered our first AM MD base ProLiant back in 2004 H HP ProLiant, DL 5 85. So we've been working with them a long time. We work with them years ahead of when a processor is announced, we benefit each other. We look at their designs and help them make their designs better. They let us know about their technology so we can take advantage of it in our designs. So they have a lot of security capabilities, like their memory encryption technologies, their a MD secure processor, their secure encrypted virtualization, which is an absolutely unique and breakthrough technology to protect virtual machines and hypervisor environments and protect them from malicious hypervisors. So they have some really great capabilities that they've built into their processor, and we also take advantage of the capabilities they have and ensure those are used in our solutions and in securing the platform. So a really such >>A great, great partnership. Great synergies there. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about compute security, what HPE is doing to ensure that security is fundamental, that it is unpromised and that your customers are protected end to end. We appreciate your insights, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. >>We've just had a great conversation with Kevin Depu. Now I get to talk with David Chang, data center solutions marketing lead at a md. David, welcome to the program. >>Thank, thank you. And thank you for having me. >>So one of the hot topics of conversation that we can't avoid is security. Talk to me about some of the things that AMD is seeing from the customer's perspective, why security is so important for businesses across industries. >>Yeah, sure. Yeah. Security is, is top of mind for, for almost every, every customer I'm talking to right now. You know, there's several key market drivers and, and trends, you know, in, out there today that's really needing a better and innovative solution for, for security, right? So, you know, the high cost of data breaches, for example, will cost enterprises in downtime of, of the data center. And that time is time that you're not making money, right? And potentially even leading to your, to the loss of customer confidence in your, in your cust in your company's offerings. So there's real costs that you, you know, our customers are facing every day not being prepared and not having proper security measures set up in the data center. In fact, according to to one report, over 400 high-tech threats are being introduced every minute. So every day, numerous new threats are popping up and they're just, you know, the, you know, the bad guys are just getting more and more sophisticated. So you have to take, you know, measures today and you have to protect yourself, you know, end to end with solutions like what a AM MD and HPE has to offer. >>Yeah, you talked about some of the costs there. They're exorbitant. I've seen recent figures about the average, you know, cost of data breacher ransomware is, is close to, is over $4 million, the cost of, of brand reputation you brought up. That's a great point because nobody wants to be the next headline and security, I'm sure in your experiences. It's a board level conversation. It's, it's absolutely table stakes for every organization. Let's talk a little bit about some of the specific things now that A M D and HPE E are doing. I know that you have a really solid focus on building security features into the EPIC processors. Talk to me a little bit about that focus and some of the great things that you're doing there. >>Yeah, so, you know, we partner with H P E for a long time now. I think it's almost 20 years that we've been in business together. And, and you know, we, we help, you know, we, we work together design in security features even before the silicons even, you know, even born. So, you know, we have a great relationship with, with, with all our partners, including hpe and you know, HPE has, you know, an end really great end to end security story and AMD fits really well into that. You know, if you kind of think about how security all started, you know, in, in the data center, you, you've had strategies around encryption of the, you know, the data in, in flight, the network security, you know, you know, VPNs and, and, and security on the NS. And, and even on the, on the hard drives, you know, data that's at rest. >>You know, encryption has, you know, security has been sort of part of that strategy for a a long time and really for, you know, for ages, nobody really thought about the, the actual data in use, which is, you know, the, the information that's being passed from the C P U to the, the, the memory and, and even in virtualized environments to the, the, the virtual machines that, that everybody uses now. So, you know, for a long time nobody really thought about that app, you know, that third leg of, of encryption. And so a d comes in and says, Hey, you know, this is things that as, as the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, you, you have to start worrying about that, right? And, you know, for example, you know, you know, think, think people think about memory, you know, being sort of, you know, non-persistent and you know, when after, you know, after a certain time, the, the, you know, the, the data in the memory kind of goes away, right? >>But that's not true anymore because even in in memory data now, you know, there's a lot of memory modules that still can retain data up to 90 minutes even after p power loss. And with something as simple as compressed, compressed air or, or liquid nitrogen, you can actually freeze memory dams now long enough to extract the data from that memory module for up, you know, up, up to two or three hours, right? So lo more than enough time to read valuable data and, and, and even encryption keys off of that memory module. So our, our world's getting more complex and you know, more, the more data out there, the more insatiable need for compute and storage. You know, data management is becoming all, all the more important, you know, to keep all of that going and secure, you know, and, and creating security for those threats. It becomes more and more important. And, and again, especially in virtualized environments where, you know, like hyperconverged infrastructure or vir virtual desktop memories, it's really hard to keep up with all those different attacks, all those different attack surfaces. >>It sounds like what you were just talking about is what AMD has been able to do is identify yet another vulnerability Yes. Another attack surface in memory to be able to, to plug that hole for organizations that didn't, weren't able to do that before. >>Yeah. And, you know, and, and we kind of started out with that belief that security needed to be scalable and, and able to adapt to, to changing environments. So, you know, we, we came up with, you know, the, you know, the, the philosophy or the design philosophy that we're gonna continue to build on those security features generational generations and stay ahead of those evolving attacks. You know, great example is in, in the third gen, you know, epic C P U, that family that we had, we actually created this feature called S E V S N P, which stands for SECURENESS Paging. And it's really all around this, this new attack where, you know, your, the, the, you know, it's basically hypervisor based attacks where people are, you know, the bad actors are writing in to the memory and writing in basically bad data to corrupt the mem, you know, to corrupt the data in the memory. So s e V S and P is, was put in place to help, you know, secure that, you know, before that became a problem. And, you know, you heard in the news just recently that that becoming a more and more, more of a bigger issue. And the great news is that we had that feature built in, you know, before that became a big problem. >>And now you're on the fourth gen, those epic crosses talk of those epic processes. Talk to me a little bit about some of the innovations that are now in fourth gen. >>Yeah, so in fourth gen we actually added, you know, on top of that. So we've, we've got, you know, the sec the, the base of our, our, what we call infinity guard is, is all around the secure boot. The, you know, the, the, the, the secure root of trust that, you know, that we, we work with HPE on the, the strong memory encryption and the S E V, which is the secure encrypted virtualization. And so remember those s s and p, you know, incap capabilities that I talked about earlier. We've actually, in the fourth gen added two x the number of sev v s and P guests for even higher number of confidential VMs to support even more customers than before. Right? We've also added more guest protection from simultaneous multi threading or S M T side channel attacks. And, you know, while it's not officially part of Infinity Guard, we've actually added more APEC acceleration, which greatly benefits the security of those confidential VMs with the larger number of VCPUs, which basically means that you can build larger VMs and still be secured. And then lastly, we actually added even stronger a e s encryption. So we went from 128 bit to 256 bit, which is now military grade encryption on top of that. And, you know, and, and that's really, you know, the de facto crypto cryptography that is used for most of the applications for, you know, customers like the US federal government and, and all, you know, the, is really an essential element for memory security and the H B C applications. And I always say if it's good enough for the US government, it's good enough for you. >>Exactly. Well, it's got to be, talk a little bit about how AMD is doing this together with HPE a little bit about the partnership as we round out our conversation. >>Sure, absolutely. So security is only as strong as the layer below it, right? So, you know, that's why modern security must be built in rather than, than, you know, bolted on or, or, or, you know, added after the fact, right? So HPE and a MD actually developed this layered approach for protecting critical data together, right? Through our leadership and, and security features and innovations, we really deliver a set of hardware based features that, that help decrease potential attack surfaces. With, with that holistic approach that, you know, that safeguards the critical information across system, you know, the, the entire system lifecycle. And we provide the confidence of built-in silicon authentication on the world's most secure industry standard servers. And with a 360 degree approach that brings high availability to critical workloads while helping to defend, you know, against internal and external threats. So things like h hp, root of silicon root of trust with the trusted supply chain, which, you know, obviously AMD's part of that supply chain combined with AMD's Infinity guard technology really helps provide that end-to-end data protection in today's business. >>And that is so critical for businesses in every industry. As you mentioned, the attackers are getting more and more sophisticated, the vulnerabilities are increasing. The ability to have a pa, a partnership like H P E and a MD to deliver that end-to-end data protection is table stakes for businesses. David, thank you so much for joining me on the program, really walking us through what am MD is doing, the the fourth gen epic processors and how you're working together with HPE to really enable security to be successfully accomplished by businesses across industries. We appreciate your insights. >>Well, thank you again for having me, and we appreciate the partnership with hpe. >>Well, you wanna thank you for watching our special program HPE Compute Security. I do have a call to action for you. Go ahead and visit hpe com slash security slash compute. Thanks for watching.

>>mhm Yes. Mhm. Mhm. >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world, the digital event experience. I'm your host lisa martin. I have alumni back with me and a new guest joining us. David Reed is back the Senior director of product management at Dell Technologies Devon welcome back to the cube. >>Hi there. Hi there, lisa. Having thanks for having me back. It's great to be here. >>Yeah, Virtual or not. It's great and some GT metal joins us the senior director of cloud product marketing at Dell Technologies. Some give me it's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you. Happy to be here lisa. >>So we're gonna be talking about Apex. This was a big announcement at Dell Technologies really 2020 also a digital experience just about six months or so ago talking about the future of dull and transitioning its platform to the as a service model that we want to dig into that, see what's going on there. So I'm doing the start us off embracing service rather the as a service model. That was a huge transition, huge step bold for Dell for its future from your lens, What does it mean? What's going on and with regards to the cloud, talk to me about some of the impacts? >>Yeah, no, it has it has been a multi year journey for us and uh it's really exciting to be part of this journey. We have done a lot of work to establish modern commerce and apex models. Um, you know, it really plays to our strength. We have led the infrastructure space for a number of years. So I really think with as a service, what we are doing is doing what we do really well but delivering more value to our customers at a much faster clip. So it puts us in a great position to continue to be that technology partner that our customers come to rely on and and frankly count us uh you know, as their true essential partners for their success. >>Devon talk to me about what it takes to engineer solutions like this. We mentioned this is a big big transformative strategic direction, directional shift. But how does this as a service model with apex differ from traditional models of infrastructure solutions that are in the data center? >>Yeah sure lisa. So I think at a very high level it differs a lot. And if I think about three major differences from how we build our traditional Capex business and our technology versus what we're doing it as a service. The first thing that comes to my mind is that we're trying to build outcomes for customers and what that really means. If you look back to how we sell infrastructure gear for the longest time, a customer would basically have to pick the technology, uh, price the technology, They would get a quote with a lot of different line items on it, with different pricing and then they would purchase the product outright and then they would have to manage that product themselves. And what we're really trying to do here is go to an outcome based model where the customer doesn't need to focus on the technology. They just need to focus on the business outcome that they're really getting in. The case that we're talking about here today is really around our apex cloud services. So they just have to choose whether they're getting a hybrid cloud service or a private cloud service and then pick their instances and then we, we ship them, uh, infrastructure right to their door. And that's another thing that we've had to do is we've had to change our processes because we need to make sure that these services are up and ready to be used in a very short amount of time. So we're targeting two weeks from the time that the order is dropped until the time that they can actually start operating on the gear um to shrink that time to value and really improve that uh that value statement for them. And then the third is that we really have to really partner with our customers on security and trust because we're managing this infrastructure for them as opposed to just uh sending the infrastructure on prem and having the customer deal with it all. So we we need to be a trusted partner uh in all of these infrastructure services. So there's a lot of a lot of differences in the way we engineer here, >>outcomes time to value and security. I want to pivot on that security front for second. We've been talking about it for a long time since you've talked to me as the senior director of product marketing. Where are your customers with respect to security comfort, confidence in apex and as a service? >>Yeah. No, I'm glad you asked that question lisa In fact, that is by far what we are seeing from a customer eagerness to learn perspective. We are seeing a lot of customers that are very cautious and we and our measured about their compliance needs. They are really thinking about, hey, how do I meet? How do I continue to deliver on my, on my business outcomes but also be compliant with the regulations that I'm responsible for. And, and we are seeing, um, you know, uh, like customers like as public cloud became a mainstream thing. A lot of customers moved to public cloud but quickly realized that it wasn't end all be all. And they had to think about their workloads differently. They have to think about the risk around some of their critical workloads differently. And this is where apex Hybrid cloud and apex private cloud are really helping them meet those compliance and regulatory needs for their business. And so with, with these offers in market, that's been a big part of most of our customer conversations that we are seeing today. >>Did you see any acceleration? You know, as we've all experienced a very disrupted market in the last 13 plus months, we saw a huge acceleration in digital transformation, out of necessity businesses that we're pivoting multiple times to try to survive and now thrive as this hopefully becomes a post pandemic world. So dana just question for you talk to me about some of the things that you saw in the market with respect to customers, maybe certain industries that really leaned heavily on this? >>Yeah, like within, within a day or two, most businesses had to pivot and and most of their workforce was trying to access their company information And company data from, from, you know, which was not part of what they have planned for. They probably thought about it, but they didn't have plans in place and so over the last 12 plus months I think what, what the customers have found themselves is the digital transformation became real for them and these solutions are no longer just an idea but are really getting to a place where they are starting to assess which workloads do I really use the private cloud and hybrid cloud environments for so that I continue to meet my needs. I continue to have the right performance that I'm looking for And and frankly enable my workforce to continue to be productive while they are in this um in this mode of working remotely um quite a bit. So if anything, the last 12 months we've seen heightened interest in these solutions because it's become real as opposed to an idea >>right, that reality set in overnight for so many organizations devon I want to get to you, you know, one of the things that we saw this, we talked about the rapid adoption of cloud um SAs applications like zoom being critical to personal life. Professional life, talk to me about the explosion of what we're seeing at the edge and what's going on in the data center and where Dell Technologies sees prime opportunity. >>Yeah, I mean, the the edge is definitely what we see as the next battleground for the infrastructure. So if you think about what's really happening, there are millions and millions of sensors and applications that are distributed throughout uh you know, throughout the world and throughout non data center applications especially at the edge and the far edge in the near edge. And there's large, large volumes of data being created that need to be processed, analyzed and then basically brought back into premises to make actionable insights onto it and what we've done. Um uh we're exciting too excited to announce that we have a manufacturing edge solution partnering with parametric technologies and leveraging our apex private cloud to offer a private cloud solution for manufacturing edge solution. So it's extremely important to us. >>That's huge as we have all seen and felt during the last year. The man, the challenges that the manufacturing industry has faced has been problematic globally. Talk to me more about that, devon and also the impetus for starting there with the pandemic, an impetus to go focus on manufacturing. I actually wanted >>to rewind the tape here a little bit and talk about the impact of the global pandemic on this as a service. Prior to the prior to the pandemic was definitely something in high demand, but as we started to progress through this global pandemic, uh it just started to explode and really you had a spectrum of customers on that cloud that transformation journey from a cloud perspective and it really started to accelerate and every time we started we kept looking at you know what what are people predicting for adoption of as a service? And every few months it was getting more bullish and more bullish. And it was really um not only from a cost savings perspective, but definitely the global pandemic has been driving a lot of this demand and we see it, we see it in some of our use cases from our customers, not any particular customer in particular but we do have a lot of customers that are doing that digital transformation to the work from home and they're finding they need that flexibility not only on prem for their desktops but off prem for their desktops as well. So they need a truly hybrid cloud solution and uh our apex hybrid cloud services are perfect for those types of use cases. So we're definitely seeing acceleration in this space. >>Yeah a lot of things. Very good. The one thing that I would at least you know um Devin talked about the manufacturing solution. Think of it as it's a it's a start of a journey because that same scenario of you know like we talked about manufacturing and their scenarios where they need that support on the edge and being able to connect to the private cloud, that same scenario or that similar scenario exists for other industries as well, whether you think about retail or healthcare, um you know, so that same model of building these edge solutions that connect into a cloud environment is something that Dell will continue to invest in manufacturing is the place where we are starting with >>Got it. You bring up a great point about all the other industries that have been so dramatically affected and continue to be, even though there's been multiple pivots surviving, surviving. Again, pivoting again, I want to talk to us about the customer conversations, you talked about the time to value, devon being really quick, we're talking about from order to in production in a couple of weeks, but I want to talk about how you in that time, in conversations with customers, help them identify which workloads are best suited for Apec solutions. Talk to me a little bit about devon starting with you. >>Yeah, so first and foremost, um 14 days is just where we're starting And um 14 days as a starting point and we will continue to shrink that over time we have aspirations to get too much lower that lower than that for on premises. We also announced a partnership with equinox today where we will be um providing these services not only on prem in the edge, but also in in near cloud facilities, in co location facilities and at that point we can get to near zero instant time to value from that perspective. So we will be increasing the, you know, the lowering the time to value for our customers for those types of solutions. Um so that's just yeah, the 14 days, just a starting point and the follow up to the second part of the question lisa, can you remind me please? >>Oh just how are you helping customers with their decisions on workloads? Which workloads are best suited for this or that hesitancy has been has not changed. Talk to me about this customer conversations. >>Yeah I think you know we're talking to a bunch of analysts today and it really kind of varies. People are asking like are there any particular customer types of industry verticals that are really and it's really broad based in terms of really helping customers, you know what workloads really are well suited. We have a bunch of tools and our apex console from a sizing perspective workload perspective that not only help our sales, our sales teams but also customers really decide which of the best places to uh to put these particular workloads and help them size their infrastructure for these solutions. >>Yeah. The one thing that I would add lisa to that is it really comes down to the every customer is unique and different and their tolerance for risk and and their objectives is different. And so I really believe, you know, there is a continuum and you will see customers lie across it where customers that are willing because a lot of customers jumped right into public cloud when public cloud was the big phenomenon. But they realized they were being risk. They were okay with taking on the risks that they did, but now that they have a little more um, you know, ground beneath them and and have some experiences, they are able to sort of write size, how they think about public cloud relative to the the hybrid cloud environment and and be able to think about which workloads are they willing to take the risks on and which which workloads? They're not willing to take the risks on. I come back to that compliance and regulatory risk is a big risk that customers are weighing it against. And and so I think those are those are the variables that the customers will think through as they think about um, investing in in a hybrid cloud environment is really thinking about how much I am I willing to take the risk on a particular workload and how much am I willing to give up the control by putting it in a public cloud environment? Those are the decisions that customers will make as they think about their rock loans, >>right, big decisions And to your point, every customer obviously there is a unique experience where we're almost out of time but devon I wanted to go to you and talk about from a good market perspective. So you you talked about the new culo agreement with Equinox. Congratulations on that giving customers choice here, give me just give the customers one idea where can they go to start this discussion with you guys? >>The first and best place to go to start having this discussion and start learning about Apex is our apex console. So our apex console will be the end and unified user experience that a customer will interact with these services. And from the time where a customer just wants to start kicking around the idea of an apex service, what are the services, what's the catalog to actually sizing it, quoting it, getting their bills there, there there, see what their metered subscriptions are and to actually operating their gear, it's all about the apex console and of course um you know, no better than the relationships that you have with your customers and partners. I I encourage you to reach out to uh you know, our sales folks and and our and our partners to get more information on Apex >>awesome guys, thank you so much for joining me this virtual experience to talk about what's going on with Apex very short time that it was announced, a lot of progress, looking forward to the next Dell technologies world. That's hopefully in person and we can sit down with some customers and really talk through this but Devin and send, jimmy, thank you so much for your time. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>you >>for Devin Read and some G B metal. I'm lisa martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world, the digital event experience.

>>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. Continuing coverage of del Tech World 2020. This is David Want, and I'm here with Sam. Grow Kat. Who's the senior vice president of product marketing? Adele Technology. Sam. Great to see you. Welcome. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, we're gonna talk generally about Cloud in the coming decade, but in really how the cloud models evolving. But I want to specifically ask them about the as a service news that Dell's making at DT W You know what those solutions look like? How they're gonna evolve. Maybe maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Is that sound good? >>Yeah, Sounds great. Let's dive right in. >>All right, let's do that. So, look, you've come from the world of disruptor. You know, when you joined Isil on that got acquired by M. C. And then Del So you've you've been on both sides of the competitive table and cloud is obviously a major force. Actually, you know, I'd say, the major disruptive force in our industry. So let's talk about how Dell's responding to the cloud trend generally. Then we'll get into the announcements. >>Yeah, certainly. And you're right. I've been on both sides of this, and there is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so, how customers are partners. We're really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the the value of moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen it happen over the last decade or so, and it's happening at a more frequent pace. And there's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. You know, kind of a new lifestyle, so to speak around as a service, because when you go to the cloud, that's the only way they roll is you get in as a service experience. Eso that really has started to come into the data centers organizations or moving specific workloads and applications to the cloud of Hey, how do I get that in a non premise experience? And I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic, and Kobe, 19 has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker room or gradually by moving some applications to the cloud. Because, frankly, on Prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they like to see. So we're seeing that macro trend accelerate. And, you know, I think we're in good shape to take advantage of that as we go forward. >>Well, that brings us to the hard news of what you're calling Project Apex year as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >>Yes. So Project Apex is one of our big announcements. And that's really where we're targeting how we're bringing together and unifying our product development or sales go to market, our marketing, go to market Everything coming together underneath Project Apex, which is our as a service and cloud like experience. Look, we know in that world where customers were constantly evaluating which applications stay on Prem, which applications and workloads should go to the cloud. I think the market has certainly voted clearly that it's gonna be both. It's gonna be a hybrid, multi cloud world, but what they absolutely or clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience, regardless of if their on primer off from. And that's where. Really, the traditional on premise solutions fall down because it's just too darn complex. Still, they've got many different tools managing many different applications that oversee their cloud operations, their various infrastructure, whether it's server or compute or networking. They all run different tools, so it's very, very complex. It also is very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast because they can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention toe by more you to think I got a get a sales rep in house to come in and, uh, extend your environment and grow your environment. And then, of course, the traditional method is very cap ex heavy. In a world where organizations air really trying thio preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility. Traditionally, um, are going forward that they'd like to see on that front. So what they want to see is a consistent operating experience for their on and off from, uh, environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage and report to grow and do commerce across that environment, regardless of its on or off friend. Uh, they want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on Prem, it's not gonna be a click of a button, but you should be able to buy and procure that with the click of a button and then very quickly, within less than a handful of days, that equipment should be stood up, deployed and running in their environment. And then, finally, it's got to deliver this more flexible finance model, whether it's leveraging flexible subscription models or optics friendly models. Customers were really looking for that more off X friendly approach, which we're gonna be providing with Project Apex so very, very excited about kind of the goals and the aspirations of Project Apex. We're going to see a lot of it come come to market early next year, but we're I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >>So when I was looking through the announcement in sort of squinting through it, the three things jumped out and you definitely hit on. Those. One is choice, but sometimes you don't wanna give customers too much choice, so it's gotta be simple, and it's got to be consistent. So It feels like you're putting this abstraction layer over your entire portfolio and trying to hit on those three items. Uh, which is somewhat of a balancing act. But is that right? >>Yeah. No, you're You're exactly right. The kind of the pillars of the project Apex value proposition, So to speak is simplicity, choice and consistency. So we've got to deliver that simple kind of end end journey view of their entire cloud and as his for his experience, that need span our entire portfolio. So whether it's servers or stores are networking or PCs or cloud, all of that needs to be integrated into essentially a large single Web interface that gives you visibility across all of that. And, of course, the ease of scale up and, frankly, scaled down. You should be able to do that in real time through the system, you know, choices a big, big factor for us. You know, we've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure anyway. They want clearly they consume consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure people customers on Lee pay for what they use So highly metered environment pay for pay as they go. Leverage subscriptions essentially give them that op X flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the rial key differentiator is that consistent operating experience. So whether you move workloads on or off, Prem, it's got to be in a single environment that doesn't require you to jump around between different application and management experiences. >>Right? So I gotta ask you the tough question. I want to hear your answer to it. I mean, we've seen the cloud model. Everybody knows it very well, But But why now? People going to say Okay, you're just responding to HP. What's what's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >>Yeah, so I think it really comes down Thio the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're gonna provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what we're what will really define ourselves against them in China, ourselves against them is that consistent operating experience we've got that opportunity to provide both an on prem edge and cloud experience that doesn't require them to move out of that operating experience to jump between different tools. So whether you're running a storage as a service environment, which will have in the first after next year, um, looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year is Well, you're gonna be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. It also be able to move workloads from on Prem and off Prem without breaking that consistent experience. I think that is probably the biggest differentiator we're going to have when you when you ladder that onto just the General Dell Technologies value of being able to meet and deliver our solutions anywhere in the world at any point of the data center at the edge or even cloud native. We've got the broadest portfolio to meet our customer needs wherever we need to go. >>So my understanding is the offering is designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio from applying solutions I s G etcetera, not VM where specifically But that Zraly, that whole Dell Technologies portfolio correct. >>Yeah. And look, over time we totally expectable transacted VM ware through this so way. Do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. Eso Yeah, it is across. You know, PCs. A service storage is a service infrastructure. As a service, our cloud offers all of our services traditional services, um that are helping to deliver this as a service experience. And even our traditional financial flexible consumption models will be included in this. Because again, we want to offer ultimate choice and flexibility. We're not gonna force our customers to go down any of these pads, but we want to do is present thes pads and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breath of the portfolio in the offers. Thio, Get them there. >>Okay, so it's it's really a journey. You mentioned storage as a service coming out first, and then Aziz. Well, if I understand it, the idea is that I'm gonna have visibility and control over my entire state on Prem Cloud edge. Kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the chute. But that's the vision. >>Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue thio iterating over time and bring mawr environments more applications, more cloud environments into this. But that is absolutely the vision of Project Apex is to deliver that fully integrated core edge cloud. Uh, partner experienced thio all of the environments, our customers to be running it. >>I wanna put my my customer had on my CFO CEO had Okay, What's the fine print? You know, one of the minimum bars to get in. What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are the some of those? Those nuances? >>Yeah. So you know both the storage is a service which will be our first offer of many in our portfolio and the cloud console, which will give you that single web interface to kind of manage report and kind of thrive in this as a service experience. All that will be released in the first half of the next year. So we're still frankly defining what that will look like. But we wanna make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments from small business, the media business to the biggest enterprises out there globally. Goal expansion through our channel partners, we're gonna have gos and Channel Partners fully integrated as well service providers as well as a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience for our customers. So the fine print day will be out early next year. Is we G A. These releases and bring in the market. But ultimate flexibility and choice up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal of the intent. We plan to deliver that. >>Can you add any color to the sort of the sort of product journey, if you will, I even hesitate Sam to use the word product because you're really sort of transferring your mindset into a platform mindset in the services mindset as opposed to bolting services. On top of a product you sell a product is okay, service guys, you take it from here. It's really you have to sort of re think you know your how you deliver on DSO You say you start with storage on then So what can we expect over the next midterm? Long term? >>Yeah. I'll give you an example. Look, we sell a ton of as a service and flexible consumption today. We've been at it for 10 years. In fact, in Q two, we sold Our annual recurring revenue rate is 1.3 billion growing at 30% Very, very pleased. So this is not new to us. But how you described Dave is right. We adopt products customers in pick their product. They pick their service that they want a bolt on. Then they pick their financial payment model. They bolted on, so it's a very good, customized way to build it. That's great, and customers are going to continue to want that will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of the big easy button they want to focus on an outcome. Storage is a service is a great, great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is. Part of that, um, they want it fully managed by Dell Technologies or one of our partners. They don't want to manage it themselves. And of course, they want it to be paid for use on an op X plan that works for, works their business and gives them the flexibility. So when customers going forward want to go down this as a service outcome driven path. They're simply going to say, Hey, what data service do I want? I want file or block unified object. They pick their data service based on their workloads. They pick their performance and capacity tear. There is a term limit. You know, right now, we're playing 1125 years, depending on the amount of terms you want Dio. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies on bits, of course. Leveraging our great technology portfolio to bring that service and that experience to our customers. So the service is the product now it really is making that shift that we are. We're moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio on solutions for our customers. >>So you actually have a lot of data on this? I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business, uh, maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. Uh, you know, I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers, but what I'm really interested in the learnings and the feedback and how that's informed your strategy? >>Yeah. I mean, you're right again. We've been at this for, you know, many, many years. We have over 2000 customers today that have chosen to take advantage of our flexible consumption and as a service offers that we have today never mind, kind of as we move into these kind of turn key easy button as a service offers that air to come that early next year. So we've leveraged all of that learnings, and we've heard all of that feedback. And it's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the project. APEC strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest power max or the latest power store. They want to choose their network. They wanna choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service they they want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they wanna maybe leverage additional, more traditional means to acquire that based on their business goals. That feedback has been loud and clear, but there is that segment that is a no No, no. I need to focus more on my business and not my infrastructure. And that's where you're going to see these more turnkey as a service. Solutions fit that need where they want to just define s l. A's outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them so they can really thick focus on their applications in their business, not their infrastructure. So things like metering tons of feedback and how well wanna meter this, uh, tons of feedback on the types of configurations and scale they're looking for? The applications and workloads that they're targeting for this world is very different than the more traditional world. So we're leveraging all of that information to make sure we deliver our infrastructure as a service and then eventually solutions as a service you think about S A P is a service vb isa service ai machine learning as a service will be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >>So I wanna ask you so I mean, you've given us a couple of data points, their billion dollar plus business couple 1000 customers is this? I mean, you've got decent average contract values. If if I do my math right s so it's not just the little guys. I mean, I'm sorry. It's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle is, well, that they're taking this up. Is that fair to say >>totally? I mean, I would say frankly, you know, in the enterprise space, it's the mid the larger sides have historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best a breed apart. Best debris to products, best of breed services. Best to breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape. There were very competitive, very, very confident or competitive and competing in that space. Today, I think going into the turkey as a service space that will play up market. But it will really play downmarket mid market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there where they don't have. The resource is to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or backup infrastructure, compute infrastructure. They're gonna frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think are as a service offers will really play stronger in that mid and kind of lower end of the market. >>So tell us again the sort of availability of the actual, like the console, for example, when when can I actually get? I mean, I can get I could do as a service today. I could buy subscriptions from you. This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and roll out details? >>Sure. So as we look to move, move to our integrated kind of turn key as a service offers the console or announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So for organizations of customers that want to start using it, they can start using it. Now, Uh, the storage, as a service offers gonna be available in the first half of next year. So we're rapidly kind of working on that now, looking to early next year to bring that to market so you'll see the console and the first as a service offered with storage, is a service available in the first half of next year, readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. So we're We're not that far off right now, but we felt it was really, really important to make sure our customers, our partners and the industry really understands how important this transformation to as a service and cloud is for Dell Technologies. That's why you know, frankly, externally and internally, Project Apex will be that North Star to bring our end end value together across the business, across our customers across our our teams. And that's why we're really making sure that everybody understands Project Apex and as a services is the future for Dell. And we're very much focused on that. >>So I mean, is the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset of cultural change, really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing. In a way, How are you guys thinking about you know, that mindset shift? >>What? Really, it's it's How am I thinking about it? How is the broader marketing organization thinking about it? How is engineering Clearly thinking about it? How is finance thinking about it? How its sale like this is transformative across every single function within Dell Technologies has a role to play to do things very differently. Now it's going to take time. It's not gonna happen overnight. You know, various estimates have. This is a fairly small percentage of business today in our segments. But we do expect that to start to and it has started to accelerate. Ramp. You know, we're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires some changes in how we sell changes in how we mark. It clearly changes in how we build products and so forth, and then ultimately, have you know how we account for this has to change. So we're approaching it, I think the right way, Dave, where we're looking at this truly end. And this isn't a a tweak and how we do things or in evolution, this is a revolution for us to kind of move faster to this model again building on the learnings that we have today with our strong customer base on experience. We built up over the years. But this is a This is a big shift. This isn't an incremental turn of the crank. We know that. I think you expect that our customers expect that, and that's that's the mission we're on with Project date. >>Well, I mean with 30% growth. I mean that za clear indicator and people like growth. We're going. I've no doubt that clients are. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. And and I think many folks wanna buy this way. And I think increasingly, that's how they buy SAS. That's how they buy Cloud. You know, why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts, Sam. What are the big takeaways? >>Yeah, Big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together or as a service and cloud capabilities into a easy to consume, simple, flexible offer that provides ultimate choice to our customers. Look, the market has spoken. We're gonna be living in a hybrid, multi cloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak, that they want that to be in as a service experience, regardless of its on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that he's that simplicity and elegance to the on Prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. Eso That's the mission that we're on with Project Apex and I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're gonna We're gonna be after this for the next couple of years to refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >>Well, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to the Cuban. We were seeing the cloud model. I mean, it's extending on Prem Cloud, multi clouds going to the edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same same direction. So, Sam, good luck with this. And thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >>Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Everyone. Take care. >>All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The Virtual Cube will be right back right after this short break

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World del Tech, World 2020. Jeff Clark is here. He is the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me today. Appreciate it. >>Yeah, you're very welcome. When my first question is, when do you have time to be vice chairman? Well, >>you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries. And unless you establish some boundaries so I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally, but also allows me to look after the company and, uh, kind of keep things moving and making progress of Dell. So pretty exciting times. It's certainly been a challenge finding new ways to break through new ways to get things done. But our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. >>Well, you know, a Z. You know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and do it going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew you were obviously, but you have been able to see you know, how you operate in the decision making on how you rally the troops. Your several years now into the new Dell, you had to do a lot of tactical things, you know, including product portfolio rationalizations. But I wanted to start with the macro picture in a particular Can you share some of the acceleration points and the levers that you're really pulling in the operation? >>Well, clearly, if you look back at the company's strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform if you think about the first tenet of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our court marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the course server market in the course storage market, and clearly what we've been able to do and certainly been at this now for Gosh, I think it's three years now that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the I s g side and to the point you referenced earlier. We've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all the power brand and now represents new, fresh modern architecture er modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire eyes. T portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy, which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell Technologies portfolio, we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years, particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our I S G portfolio with the M R. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side will quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace work workspace one are leading services and are leading PC products to be able to bring a different change experience for end users on the PC side on the side. This all started with getting again this competitive portfolio. It started with Dell Technology Cloud a little over a year ago. It now is in joint collaboration around the edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around five g going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out. We now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VM, are now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. >>So it sounds like I mean, covitz change so many things, but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed your thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is gonna pre cove in Post Cove. It you kind of sort of approaching the same playbook, if you will. >>Well, a covert in many levels. While it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world, which we shouldn't, that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and many parts of the world. If you step back and what I try to mention the keynote, what cove it has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations, but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote learning remote the world as we look at it going forward, data driven. It's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade. In many cases the first three years, Uh, this nomenclature that I've talk about is the future is now, and what it's really done is actually reinforced. The points that we thought were going toe happen brought them sooner and has made us believe mawr double down, if you will, that the path we're on is the right path, and we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting? If you look at customers who embrace digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders. They're actually breaking away from the pack, sort of speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector. We think that's a great, obviously proof point of digital transformation. But what all companies will have to go through to compete >>Well, it's interesting we saw early on in the US locked down worldwide, locked down you have you have such a broad portfolio that yeah, maybe some parts of the portfolio or, you know, directly negatively affected. Certainly. For instance, your you know your airline customers or your hospitality customers, etcetera. But the work from home was was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio somewhat, you know, one part of the business that cushioned you, maybe the other part of the business, You felt that. But on balance, you're able to get through that, and part of that was your supply chain. And some of your competitors struggled, you know, for instance, with laptop supplies. But you guys really have done a good job, sort of navigating through that, almost like you've been through it before. But nobody's been through this before. >>No, you know, David, thanks for recognizing it. One of the benefits of the Indian portfolio we have, which no one else has. The Indian portfolio that we do. We're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors, whether it's different parts of the business. And we've been able to do that on our our supply chain has performed well. It's been unbelievably resilient. We think it's appointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace. You couple that with our global service footprint, the two of them working together we designated those capabilities is essential. Very early in the pandemic, we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers and a pretty non disruptive way. Now, behind the scenes are teams were doing all sorts of things to bring, uh, that continuity supply and those expectations we sent to our customers to the forefront. But I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded, and it set us up to where things were going to go. When we think about the future and migrating tomb or integrated solutions, I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed with that services in the supply chain play a key role. >>I guess so much to talk to you about. What? I wanna come back to digital transformation For a minute. I was talking to the C i o the other day and I asked him what was the digital transformation mean to you? He said, David, I got a 15 year old s a P system. Digital transformation means to me I My business has changed in the last 15 years, but my s a P system Hasn't I gotta bring it up to speed. I have to modernize. So there's a spectrum. On the other hand, if if you're not digital today and you're, say, a restaurant, you can't do business. So what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? >>Well, I think your examples were very good. I mean, our industries as a long reputation of overhyping, different constructs. The fact is, the world is rapidly digitizing. It's undeniable. If you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors air now being placed in everything, all of the data that's being collected as a result, That's certainly the forefront of what's happening. And every business has to deal with that. You mean you can't We talked about hospitality. You got hotel rooms that have sensors in them for lights, for water, for a temperature. You think about what's happening in the finance sector in the amount of data that's being created on the edge of that has to be processed on the edge. You think about smart factory smart hospitals in the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront. So in my mind. Digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going. We know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world, and as that acceleration, mhm goes faster and faster and faster, which I absolutely we absolutely believe this happening. Companies have to change the business. They have to change their models. They have to figure out how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes. We tend to get into this digital transformation and everyone to talk about this piece of gear, this piece of gear, this piece of gear. I actually don't spend any time on that. It's where customers are going. What are they doing to really instrument, if you will, the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors. That's where we come in. We help them help them with certainly the gear part of it, but more importantly, the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them, to help them get to where they want to go. Does that help? >>Yes, and it does, and it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud multi cloud. To me, it's edges all part of that and it's critical for your customers. Digital transformations. I mean, what I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on, whether you're on Prem when you're in a public cloud, whether you're at the edge, so multi cloud is part of that. You know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational. It seems to becoming more and more really. Where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? >>Well, I love the way you described it. What we see is the notion of Cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about earlier on when I got this job was the public cloud. No, there's Public Cloud. There's private clouds, and clearly the edge is going to be a cloud operating a model. In fact, we see the world of five G edge and cloud, those three circles intersecting toe high degree. So we're gonna bring a cloud operating model to the edge. We're gonna bring new advanced connectivity data driven connective ity to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created that will have toe have real time analytics done, uh, at the edge we think, is this opportunity to really step back and go well. Those cloud things can't be separate. They have to be a set of systems. In fact, it has to become an integrated system. And we think that integrated system has to be able to move data, be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrate and consistently Dr Operations across those three cloud environments, I think we have gone. Probably the best characterization is early innings. We're certainly not in the first inning. We're not in the ninth inning, but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multi cloud hybrid cloud environment. If you think about what we've done with VM wars enablement or interaction with the public domains, the work that we've done from our private area, we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time, I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us as this spends very quickly and the edge of balls we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself. We have to bring it together. We're bringing into the public and private cloud domains that we have today, >>and I definitely wanna hit on as a service. But since we're on this topic, I wanna I wanna talk about five G and Telco a little bit. Let me just spiel for a bit and then you can respond. So I mean, this seems to be a lot of confusion around five G. There's very high expectations. There's there's a there's a lot of talk, but if it's hard toe sort of identify the true impact, that's that's tangible today, anyway. And then you got the telecom telco transformation going on. We've been We've been hearing this for a long, long time. Meanwhile, you got the over over the top providers. They're living off the infrastructure. The telcos price per bit is declining, but the usage is exploding. And so what do you make of all this? You know, the telcos air reinventing themselves. Five g is a part of that consumers Airway waiting for that. There's a lot of, you know, mixed marketing messages going on. What's your take on this and what's tells role? >>Well, look, I I tend to try to break it down into things. At least I can understand. If I look at five G is the next generation Cellular, which I believe it's far more than that. I mean, I think it's the next data fabric for the data era. I think it's going to be this intersection, as I mentioned moments ago of five g Cloud and Edge, all coming together. But I think about it from the infrastructure side that you describe. What we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before. And I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector, and this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster. So now if you bring a cloud operating model to this which I believe five g enables, there is now the opportunity to bring, I think, um, or standard based infrastructure rather than the proprietary ones. In the past, we now can bring a industry standard set of architectures was softer to find layers in the stack. And for the first time in the telcos space, you have the ran going through significant transformation. And on my mind, Iran is one of the significant control points in the telco or five g stack, and that is going to be more open. And then we have to think of five. G is just more than a cellular network. I mean, we're gonna have private private five G. So to the degree that it displaces why, if I will be interesting to see and unfold. But there's a huge opportunity now. Is those sensors that I talked about in the digitization of hospitals and factories and cities, all interconnected by a bunch of private five G networks, all working in an interactive combined system way. I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation, a standardization orientation, a cloud model, and that's sort of what we do. So I get excited. All of what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point. You've been hearing this discussion for some time, but the opportunity is large for us. It's one of the single biggest largest opportune, single biggest opportunity that we see for Delon View more and we're going to pursue it together. And we think we can take our at scale technologies that we brought to the Enterprise Data Center and bring those to the telco providers in the private five g build out. >>It's amazing, Jeff, when you think about the when you and I started in this business and how far we've come, it's It's just just mind boggling, isn't it? It >>really is. We've been at this a while and things have changed. But again, it's been on this consistent technology curve, this consistent standardization curve, and it's now applying to new sectors >>I want to end with as a service. You mentioned that before and and so you've got actually really growing business in subscriptions? Uh, you got a lot of options for customers, which is good, but sometimes it's confusing. What's the strategy around as a service? What can we expect there? >>Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right, we've made a lot of progress. We launched L Technology on demand last year. We have 2000 plus customers of $1.3 billion revenue run rate, it's growing at 30% so we're pleased. But at the same time, all the data suggest customers we're gonna want to deploy even at a greater rate. So I think I made reference during our keynote. Today, about 75% of the world's data is gonna be created outside of the data center, 75% off the edge. Build out is going to be done as a service, as is half of the infrastructure. So we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level. We announced Project Apex, Project Apex for us to take all of the properties that we have across the company, all of the different activities and to unify them a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward for our entire portfolio. We think the timing is right. We think we have to be able to, if you will project APEC should be translated as the easy button for our customers. It's a way to make things simpler. It's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model, and that's the path Ron, we're pretty excited about this unification, if you will. Galvanizing across the entire organization with Project Apex. >>Awesome. Listen, I know you're super busy. Appreciate all the time you've given us your You're a fun executive toe. Hang around with a mission, man. I wish we were together, but hopefully, hopefully sometime soon we can We could see each other face to face. >>I would like that very much. I missed the interactions themselves. I appreciate the time today. Thank you, Dave. >>All right, We'll see you, Jeff. Thanks again. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there. We're back with our next guest. It del Technology World 2020. You're watching the Cube.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of Dell technologies world digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of Dell technology world. Dell tech world 2020, Jeff Clark is here. He's the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me today, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Well, my first question is when do you have time to be vice chairman? >> Well, you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries unless you establish some boundaries. So I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally but also allows me to look after the company and kind of keep things moving and making progress at Dell. So pretty exciting times, it's certainly been a challenge, finding new ways to break through, new ways to get things done, but our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. >> Well, you know as you know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew who you were obviously but you know, been able to see how you operate and the decision making and how you rally the troops. You're several years now, into the new deal. You had to do a lot of tactical things you know, including product portfolio rationalizations but I wanted to start with the macro picture. And in particular, can you share some of the acceleration points and the leavers that you're really pulling in the operation? >> Well, clearly if you look back at the company strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform, if you think about the first tenant of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our core marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the core server market and the core storage market, and clearly what we've been able to do, and certainly been at this now for, gosh, I think it's three years now that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the ISG side. And to the point you referenced earlier we've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all of the power brand it now represents new fresh, modern architecture, modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire ISG portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell technologies portfolio we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our ISG portfolio with VMware. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side real quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace, workspace one are leading services and are leading PC products to be able to bring a differentiated experience for end users on the PC side. On the ISG side, this all started with getting again, this competitive portfolio, it started with Dell technology cloud a little over a year ago, it now is in joint collaboration around the Edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around 5G going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out, we now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VMware or it now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. >> So it sounds like, I mean, COVID changed so many things, but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed your thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is going to pre COVID, post COVID. You kind of sort of approaching the same playbook if you will. >> Well, COVID many levels, well, it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world which that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and in many parts of the world if you step back and what I try to mention the keynote, what COVID has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote, learning remote, the world, as we look at it, going forward, data driven, it's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade in many cases, the first three years. This nomenclature that I talk about is the future is now. And what it's really done is actually reinforced the points that we thought were going to happen, brought them sooner, and has made us believe more doubled down if you will, that the path we were on is the right path. And we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting, if you look at customers who embraced digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders. They are actually breaking away from the pack, so to speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector, we think that's a great obviously proof point of digital transformation, but what all companies will have to go through to compete. >> Well, it's interesting. We saw early on in the US lockdown, worldwide lockdown, you have such a broad portfolio that yeah maybe some parts of the portfolio were, you know, directly negatively affected, certainly for instance, you know, your airline customers or your hospitality customers, et cetera. But the work from home was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio, somewhat, you know, one part of the business that cushioned you maybe the other part of the business, you felt it but on balance, you're able to get through that. And part of that was your supply chain. And some of your competitors struggled you know, for instance, with laptop supplies but you guys really have done a good job sort of navigating through that. Almost like you'd been through it before, but nobody's been through this before. >> No, you know, Dave, thanks for recognizing that one of the benefits of the end to end portfolio we have which no one else has the Indian portfolio that we do, we're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors, whether it's different parts of the business and we've been able to do that. And our supply chain has performed well. It's been unbelievably resilient. We think it's a pointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace. You couple that with our global service footprint, the two of them working together, we designated those capabilities as essential, very early in the pandemic, we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers in a pretty non-disruptive way. Now behind the scenes, our teams were doing all sorts of things to bring that continuity of supply and those expectations we set to our customers to the forefront but I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded and it set us up to where things are going to go. When we think about the future and migrating to more integrated solutions, I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed but that services in the supply chain play a key role. >> Yeah, I got so much to talk to you about, but I want to come back to digital transformation for a minute. I was talking to the CIO the other day and I asked them what was digital transformation mean to you? He said, "Dave, I got a 15 year old SAP system, Digital transformation means to me, my business has changed in the last 15 years but my SAP system hasn't, I got to bring it up to speed. I have to modernize." So there's a spectrum, on the other hand, if you're not digital today and you're say a restaurant, you can't do business. So what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? >> Well, I think your examples were very good. I mean, our industries, has a long reputation of over hyping different constructs, the fact is the world is rapidly digitizing. It's undeniable. If you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors are now being placed in everything, in all of the data that's being collected as a result, that's certainly the forefront of what's happening and every business has to deal with it. You can't, I mean, we talked about hospitality, you got hotel rooms that have sensors in them, for lights, for water, for temperature. You think about what's happening in the finance sector and the amount of data that's being created on the edge that has to be processed on the edge. You think about smart factory, smart hospitals, and the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront. So in my mind, digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going. We know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world. And as that acceleration goes faster and faster and faster which I absolutely, we absolutely believe is happening, companies have to change the business, they have to change their models, they have to figure out, how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes. We tend to get into this digital transformation and every wants to talk about this piece of gear, or this piece of gear or this piece of gear. I actually don't spend any time on that. It's where customers are going, what are they doing to really instrument if you will, the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors. That's where we come in, we help them, help them with certainly the gear part of it, but more importantly the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them, to help them get to where they want to go. Does that help? >> Yes and it does. And it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, to me, it's the edge is all part of that. And it's critical for your customers, digital transformation. What I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on, whether you're on prem, whether you're in a public cloud, whether you're at the edge. So multicloud is part of that. You know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational. It seems to becoming more and more real. Where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? >> Well, I love the way you described it. What we see is the notion of cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about early on, when I got this job was the public cloud. Now there's public cloud, there's private clouds and clearly The Edge is going to be a cloud operating model. In fact, we see the world of 5G, edge and cloud, those three circles intersecting to a high degree. So we're going to bring a cloud operating model to The Edge. We're going to bring new advanced connectivity, data-driven connectivity, to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created. That we'll have to have real time analytics done at the edge. We think is this opportunity to really step back and go, well, those cloud things can't be separate. They have to be a set of systems. In fact, it has to be done in an integrated system. And we think that integrated system has to be able to move data, be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrated and consistently drive operations across those three cloud environments. I think we have gone probably the best characterization is early innings. We're certainly not in the first ending. We're not in the ninth inning but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multicloud hybrid cloud environment. If you think about what we've done with VMware's enablement or interaction with the public domain, the work that we've done from our private area, we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time. I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us, as this spins very quickly and the edge of evolves, we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself. We have to bring it together or bringing into the public and private cloud domains that we have today. >> And I definitely want to hit on, as a service, but since we're on this topic, I want to, talk about 5G and telco a little bit. Let me just spiel for a bit, and then you can respond. So, I mean, there seems to be a lot of confusion around 5G, there's very high expectations. There's a lot of talk, but if it's hard to sort of identify the true impact that's tangible today anyway and then you got the telco transformation going on, and we've been hearing this for a long, long time. Meanwhile, you've got over the top providers they're living off the infrastructure of the telcos, price per bid is declining, but the usage is exploding. And so what do you make of all this? You know, that the telcos are reinventing themselves. 5G is a part of that. Consumers are waiting for that. There's a lot of, you know, mixed marketing messages going on. What's your take on this and what's Dell's role? >> Well, look, I tend to try to break it down into things at least I can understand. If I look at 5G as the next generation cellular which I believe it's far more than that. I mean, I think it's the next data fabric for the data era. I think it's going to be this intersection as I mentioned moments ago of 5G cloud and edge all coming together. But you think about it from the infrastructure side that you described. What we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before. And I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector. And this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster. So now if you bring a cloud operating model to this, which I believe 5G enables, there's now the opportunity to bring I think, a more standard based infrastructure rather than proprietary ones of the past. We now can bring a industry standard set of architectures with software defined layers in the stack. And for the first time in the telco space you have the RAN going through significant transformation. And on my mind the RAN is one of the significant control points in the telco or 5G stack. And that is going to be more opened. And then we have to think of 5G is just more than a cellular network. I mean, we're going to have private 5G. So to the degree that it displaces wifi will be interesting to see an unfold but there's a huge opportunity. Now, as those sensors that I talked about in the digitization of hospitals, in factories, in cities, all interconnected by a bunch of private 5G networks all working in an interactive and combined system way, I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation, a standardizations orientation, a cloud model, and that's sort of what we do. So I get excited all in what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point. You've been hearing this discussion for some time, but the opportunity is large for us. It's one of the single biggest opportunity that we see for Dell and VMware, and we're going to pursue it together. And we think we can take our at scale technologies that we brought to the enterprise data center and bring those to the telco providers and the private 5G build out. >> Yeah, it's amazing Jeff, when you think about the, when you and I started in this business and how far we've come, but it's just it's mind boggling, isn't it? (laughing) >> It really is. We've been at this a while and things have changed but again, it's been on this consistent technology curve, this consistent standardization curve and it's now applying to new sectors. >> I want to end with, as a service. You mentioned that before. And so you've got actually a really growing business in subscriptions. You got a lot of options for customers which is good, but sometimes it's confusing. What's the strategy around as a service? What can we expect there? >> Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right we've made a lot of progress. We launched Dell technology on demand last year, we have 2000 plus customers at $1.3 billion revenue run rate. It's growing at 30%. So we're pleased but at the same time, all the data suggests customers are going to want to deploy even at a greater rate. So I think I made reference during our keynote today about 75% of the world's data is going to be created outside of the data center, 75% of the edge build out is going to be done as a service as this half of the infrastructure. So we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level. We announced project APEC, project APEC for us to take all of the properties that we have across the company, all of the different activities and to unified them, a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward, for our entire portfolio, we think the timing's right. We think we have to be able to if you will, project APEC should be translated as the easy button for our customers. It's a way to make things simpler. It's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model. And that's the path we're on. We're pretty excited about this unification, if you will galvanizing across the entire organization with project APEC. >> Awesome, listen, I know you're super busy. I appreciate all the time you've given us, you're a fun executive to hang around with a mission man. I wish we were together, but hopefully sometime soon we can see each other face to face. >> I would like that very much. I miss the interactions themselves. I appreciate the time of day. Thank you Dave. >> All right we'll see you Jeff, thanks again. All right, Thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there, will be back with our next guest at Dell technology world 2020. You're watching The Cube. (lighthearted music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Magento Imagine 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, live at The Wynn Las Vegas, for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a really buzzy event. All e-commerce innovation, tech talks, with about 3,500 folks, and we're excited to welcome to The Cube Tina Mulqueen, CEO of Kindred PR Marketing Agency as well as contribute with Forbes, Digital Trends, expert on e-commerce, I would say. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> So we were talking about influencer marketing before we went live. And you have been doing, been working in that kind of before it was even a concept. We were just saying how much marketing has changed in the last few years alone, and how brands have had to to survive and be profitable, evolve with that. Give us a bit of a perspective, first on kind of Kindred PR, what you're doing, how you got involved in influencer marketing. >> Sure, so I was really fortunate to have some great mentors early in my marketing career that kind of ushered me along in the right direction and said hey, I think we should really pay attention to this whole Twitter thing and what's happening with these real, everyday people that are amassing a following on Twitter, and that's really where it started was on that platform. So I ended up on a team for CBS that did some of the influencer marketing for Vanity Fair and for their coverage of The Insider and Entertainment Tonight, and we would work with them to get event coverage to trend online. And as you mentioned, that was before, really, we knew what influencer marketing was. It wasn't really, it didn't have to a name, so to speak, at that time. And so I learned a lot from then, and we have kind of come full circle with influencer marketing, where it, I was at first working with these sort of micro influencers, as we would call them now. And then it was a lot of brands working with more of the celebrity influencers, like the Kim Kardashians of the world, and now it's gone back to brands are really interested in these micro influencers again because of the concept of authenticity, which is a big one right now, that marketers are paying attention to. >> Exactly what I was going to say. >> So how do they dance around the authenticity? It's such an interesting and knife edge, right? Because you want people to promote your products because they like them, and that's the original celebrity endorsement back in the early days, right? People actually did use the product that they endorsed. But now you get paid endorsements, and people can see through that. At the same time, it obviously has some results, or people would not continue to invest, and now it's come full circle, whereas you said because of the internet, I with some particular interest can reach a huge number of people around a really small interest set, because of the distribution of the internet. >> Right. So what's interesting is, influencer marketing, when we first really started talking about influencer marketing, we treated it as word-of-mouth marketing. And it had some incredible benefits over some more traditional kinds of marketing because it was word of mouth. And then because influencer marketing had a lot of investments, brands were investing heavily in influencer marketing, and we were dealing more with celebrity influencers, consumers became smarter as well during this time. And then they started looking at these celebrity endorsements and realizing that these are not real endorsements. And so I think that's where we're seeing this shift back to micro influencers, and people that are really using the products that these brands are touting. >> But how does a brand, how do they engage with the micro influencer? >> Actually, there's a really great case study that I always use as an example of this, and it's actually BECCA Cosmetics, which, BECCA's one of the, I think the number one, sales cosmetic line in Sephora. And they reached out, I think it was about a year ago, maybe a couple of years ago now. They reached out to an influencer because they realized that their website traffic was going up every time a certain influencer would go live on YouTube and was using their products. So BECCA reached out to this influencer that was organically using the products, and collaborated with the influencer to create a line of products of her own. And that really, I think they sold out within the first hour when they actually went live with the product line. So that's a great example of how to engage with an influencer that is organically using your brand, and making sure that you're also including their audience, in, like, the iteration of the product, because then the audience of the influencer is also invested. >> And what defines influencer versus a micro influencer? I imagine the sheer volume of followers, but there's got to be more to it than that, because there's this really cool example that you gave, what BECCA Cosmetics found was much more probably authenticity. So talk to us about not just the number drivers there, but some of the other, I mean, it's one thing to be able to blast something to 100,000 people. It's a whole other thing to actually be able to engage their followers and convert it to a transaction. >> Right. So I think that often when we hear brands talking about micro or macro influencers, they really are talking about the number of followers, but I think you bring up a really great point with respect to that level of engagement of that following and how to really tap into somebody that is engaging their following. So I think brands are going toward actual experts in their field, or actual experts in the product line in a bigger capacity now because they know that what they say is going to be more meaningful to their audience and more engaging to their audience, rather than based on number of followers alone. So there's a lot of different things that are going into play to create a better context for marketing. >> I'm curious how other metrics have evolved beyond just the transaction. So there's the followers, and then, you know, there's obviously transactions, as you said, there's website traffic. But as people, as brands are starting to realize that engagement, ongoing engagement, interaction with content is part of the relationship, separate from and a value to the actual transaction. How have their metrics changed? How are they reviewing these programs? I'm sure a lot of it at first was, "Well, we hope it works, we think it's working." But how has that matured over time? >> It definitely has matured, and there are some platforms out there that will try to quantify influencer marketing in different ways than we've seen in the past. It's gotten a lot more sophisticated. That said, marketers still have a real challenge ahead of them in terms of quantifying their efforts in a meaningful way, because it's still hard to put a number to brand sentiment. And that's a lot of what influencer marketing is. >> Right. And is it, from an investment point of view, I always think of people with a large bucket of money, right, they put a very small piece in their venture fund, which has a real low probability of a hit, but if it hits, it hits big. And when they're budgeting for the influencer program, is it kind of like that? You know, we've got this carve-out that we are not quite sure what the ROI is. We think it's important. We don't want to miss out. Versus, you know, what I'm spending on print or what I'm spending on TV, or what I'm spending on kind of traditional campaigns. How are marketers looking at that within their portfolio? >> It is a great questions, and I think that marketers know that they need to invest in influencer marketing, so we're seeing an influx of investment coming in through influencer marketing. That said, I've been in a lot of conversations with brands that are talking about, do we go the macro influencer route or do we go with the micro influencer route? And right now I think that brands are starting to realize that if you get a lot of voices or a number of voices that are sharing the same sentiment and that are able to feed off of each other with respect to the conversation and amplify each other because even if you have micro influencers with smaller following count, they're going to amplify each other's content, and that ends up in the long run, as we talked about, being more authentic. So that's where a lot of the conversations are going right now in terms of how to spend that influencer marketing budget and weighing the pros and cons of those different options. >> Well, marketing is and should be a science these days. There is so much data about all of us from everything we do every day that brands need to be able to evaluate that, leveraging platforms from Adobe Magento for example, going back to the BECCA Cosmetics and thinking well, if they evaluate these micro influencers and the lift and the traffic that they get, if they're actually using that data appropriately then that should be able to inform how they're actually carving up their investment dollars into which influencers, macro or micro, they know that is going to make the biggest impact on revenue. So it behooves marketing organizations to become scientific and actually use all this consumer data that we are all putting out through our phones, on social devices, constantly. >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point. And I hear often from clients too that they have, they've invested in these platforms that will sort of try to analyze the data, but they're not doing anything with that data. So a lot of e-commerce merchants and retailers, if you don't have a strategy on how you're going to implement that what you're learning from your consumers, then it ends up falling flat. >> What's the biggest surprise you hear from marketers today in terms of this influencer marketing? Are they confused, they're getting it, are there any, I mean you had one really good success story, are there any other, you know, kind of success stories you can share that this is a very different way to get your message into the marketplace? >> You know, one thing that I think people should do more of, that it kind of surprises me that we aren't seeing more of is using media as a channel for e-commerce merchants to have an affiliate strategy. So basically utilizing influencers in collaboration with a media channel to be able to have a new revenue stream. I think that that's something that we haven't seen very often. It's something that when I was working as the CMO for a public trading company called Grey Cloak Technologies, we worked with Sherell's, which is a company that we were acquiring at the time to consult with Marie Claire on how to incorporate influencers into their e-commerce strategy as a publisher. And that's something that I think that people could take more advantage of. >> Even just with affiliate codes or coupon codes and those types of things? They're just not really executing on it that well. >> Right, right. And I think that part of it is a technological component, like the technology isn't quite there to be able to implement, well, to be able to implement that on a wide scale. Like Marie Claire, Sherell's ended up creating the technology for them to be able to incorporate influencers into their e-commerce strategy. But I think that we're going to see more of that. >> Right, because for the influencer, that's one of many sources of revenue that they need to execute on if they're actually going to build, you know, a lifestyle business around being, you know, quote-unquote influencer. They need that affiliate revenue on top of their advertising revenue and all these other little pieces, selling t-shirts, etc. >> Right, right. And we're seeing some companies that are coming to the table to try to provide solutions. One company that I've been watching for a while is called COSIGN, and their platform basically allows influencers to integrate on the platform and link things through social media so that people can buy through a picture, on Facebook for example. So I think we're going to see more of those types of technologies as well. >> Let's talk kind of on the spirit of trends and some of the things that you are seeing. There was this big trend in the last few years of everybody wanting to be able to, we can get anything through Amazon, right? And we can get in a matter of hours. But looking at, and seeing some big box stores that did not do a good job of being able to blend physical, digital, virtual, all these storefronts. What though are you seeing in terms of companies, maybe enterprises, needing to sort of still have or offer a brick and mortar experience? Like we were talking to HP Inc. this morning, he was on stage, and this click and collect program that they launched in APEC where depending on their region, people need to be able to start and actually transact online, but actually fulfill in store. In terms of like, maybe, either reverse engineering online to brick and mortar or hybridizing the two, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that businesses really need to start paying attention to? >> Sure, so I think that omnichannel has been a buzzword for some time, and the way that marketers are looking at omnichannel now, or the way that retailers are looking at omnichannel now is a little bit different. At first, when we started talking about the concept of create this sort of seamless interplay between brick and mortar and online storefronts, it was about taking the brick and mortar experience and putting it online. And now I think marketers are getting better at realizing that those are two completely different channels, and your customer's in a different place in both of those channels. So you need to give them an experience that is relevant for the channel, and it can be totally different than what we're used to in traditional retail stores. But brick and mortar obviously does have a place. We're seeing Amazon come out with their own brick and mortar locations, and we're seeing different e-commerce startups have brick and mortar locations and be very successful with them too as an e-commerce first storefront. So there's definitely a place for brick and mortar. I think people will always have to shop in brick and mortar storefronts, although we obviously are going to get more sophisticated delivery options, and that's coming as well. But I think that it's really an interplay and it's understanding what the channels are and where your consumers are at in that space. >> And then the whole next generation of that, which we're hearing about here, like shopping inside of Instagram. So now as opposed to a destination or I'm going to some place to buy something, whether it's online or a store, now it's actually just part of experiencing the media, as you said, and oh by the way, while I'm here, that looks interesting, I'll take one of those as well. Whole different level of experience that the retailers now have to support. >> Right, absolutely. There are other technology platforms too that, like one of them is basically producing video content that you can scroll over, or let's say you were just watching a commercial on your television, or maybe it's not even a commercial. Maybe it's like real long form content, and if you scroll over a product in the image, you can purchase it out of that video. And so these things are coming as well. It's really an exciting time. But it's an exciting time to be creative as well, because you have to have some creativity behind these strategies in order to make an impression on the consumer. >> It's exciting and creepy at the same time. (Jeff laughing) I don't know if my wallet can handle that. But we'll see. But one of the things I was wondering, when you were talking about, for example, Amazon going, starting as this online mega store and now having brick and mortar stores, the acquisition of Whole Foods. I can't go in there and shop without being asked if I'm a Prime member. But what are some of the sort of foundational customer experience expectations that, because I would think personalization would be kind of a common foundation that whether I'm shopping online with whatever, I want whoever I'm buying from, especially if I have a history, I want them to know what I've bought before, maybe my average order value, to be able to kind of incentivize loyalty. But I probably want the same thing if I'm in a brick and mortar. Are you seeing some sort of key foundations that businesses, whether they do one, the other, or both, need to put in place that can span both? >> Absolutely. So I think it's a great point. I think personalization and the experience. Obviously we're hearing so much about experience in terms of e-commerce, but in brick and mortar stores in particular. But I think that the personalization piece is such an important one. But I also think that it's now getting to where we need to personalize more on the marketing for no matter what channel it is. So you need to bring that physical experience with the customer to your e-commerce efforts as well so that you can, for example, if you're going to email market to me, I want it to be relevant. I want to know that you have been paying attention to my shopping habits, and it's kind of a fine line with respect to data, but if you're going to be using my data, I want to make sure that it's useful to me and it saves me time. >> And it kind of goes back to a point Jeff and I have heard a number of times today, and that's validating me as a consumer that you understand that what I'm interested in that you have to offer, you understand it, it's important to both of us. Well Tina, I wish we had more time to keep talking with you, but we thank you so much for joining us on The Cube this afternoon and talking with us about some of the things that you're seeing, your experiences. And now I know the difference between an influencer, macro and micro, and why they can be so important to brands of any size. So thank you for your time. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching us on The Cube live from Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back here on the Sands as we're at the AWS re:Invent day one of our coverage here. We're here Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday live here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage from the show. We're Hall D again, if you're in the area, come on by, say hi to Justin Warren and myself. Along with Justin, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Andy Langsam, who's the COO of N2WS. Say Andy, good to see you today. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for being here. And Danny Allan, who's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam Software. Danny, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you very much. >> Now we could talk about a lot of things, Canadian citizenship, fractional ownership, a lot of great conversation. So let's talk about data. And of course, the paramount need these days, right? Everybody's got to know I'm alright, I'm secure, I've got this big warm blanket around me. What are the two of you doing to give people with those kind of concerns the ability to sleep at night peacefully, knowing their data's safe? >> Well, you know N2W was founded on the premise of not to worry, that was the founder's vision. And if you could convince somebody that was doing the backup in disaster recovery not to worry, that was a great way to get started. But we're excited today, we've announced N2WS Version 2.4 and it's focused on taking your EC2 snapshots and putting them into S3's storage to lower your cost by up to 40% and 50% and so that's one of the things that we're talking about today. >> Danny. >> Yeah and so if you expand on that, so this is data protection for the cloud and one of the things historically we've focused on as well is data protection in the data center. So that brings the two together and gives you data protection holistically, across wherever your environment happens to be, and goes beyond that, not just data protection but how can I take the data and do more with it? And so we're excited and it seems to be resonating with customers. We have, what, 189% year over year growth on the cloud side. It's just huge, it's a booming business. >> I would assume that you don't have any problem getting people's attention these days, I would assume. >> No we don't, you know, at the booth, it's just amazing, you know, eight, nine thousand sign up batch scans and people all wanting demos and wanting trials of the software. You know, any time you can talk about cost reduction from five cents a gig on EC2's storage to two cents on S3, it's a tremendous savings for our customer base and so they're very excited. We did a survey recently and over 50% of our customers spent over $10,000 a month on storage cost in AWS. So if you think about that and if they can save 40% on that, that's real savings, more than the cost of the software alone. >> Sure. >> Yeah. >> One thing about cloud that often sort of went past people because they were used to the data center and they were used to how they protected their data in the data center. And cloud kind of changed the way that you had to do that and you have think about them in a slightly different way. So clearly N2WS is part of the solution to that. But when you have people who have a bit of data in both of those systems, how do you help them understand which techniques they should use for data which is in the cloud compared to data that's in their data center? Or am I able to just use the same techniques and just go, "You know what? "I'll take care of you and we'll just "turn it on and it'll magically work for you"? >> It's not the same techniques but it's the same platform. And the reason I say that is in the cloud, here in AWS for example, you don't have access to the hypervisor so you can't do a snapshot of the hypervisor, you have to call an API and say, "Gimme a copy of the data." If you're in your own data center, you say, "Take a snapshot of the storage "level or at the hypervisor level." So there's different techniques but at the end of the day, it's still data protection, and with a single platform, that's what's so exciting about this release, Backup and Recovery 2.4, is you have a single platform that you can manage data protection both on and off premises so that you can leverage where is the best place, location, for this workload, and I can protect it across no matter where it chooses to live. >> Yeah, that is something that we've been hearing all day today here at theCUBE is that people are talking about putting their data wherever they want it to live. It could be in the cloud, it could be on their own data site, it could be out at the edge. So whatta you see as the vision, like, where are customers going with this, where do we want to put data? We heard for a long time that we should migrate all of our applications into the cloud. Clearly there are a lot of organizations who are doing that. There are some who have put some things into the cloud and they're actually taking them back out again. >> Sure. >> Where are you seeing customers moving their data around? >> Well, the answer to that, of course, is it depends. There's no single answer for everything. What I say is the cloud is excellent for certain things like variable based workloads or you need a mass amount of compute for a certain amount of time. What people have tried to do sometimes is just lift and shift, take what's on premises and move it to the cloud, and sometimes what ends up happening is they put it back on premises 'cause they realize hey, the cloud's not a charity, they're actually putting in margin there for that brick load. >> They're good. >> So there's use cases for all of this. I think actually what gets exciting is as people design for the cloud, use Lambda and serverless-type functionality, that will become a lot more sticky and so our focus is wherever the customer chooses to run the workload, we're not going to dictate it one way or the other. In fact, one of the great things that we enabled is portability. If you choose to be in point A today, you can move it to point B and back again, so we give that portability that ultimately allows the customer to solve what their business need is. >> You mentioned the customer growth, I think it was like 189% you were saying, is that net new customers to Veeam completely, is that Veeam customers who are growing into using this new product and putting their data in the cloud, where is growth coming from? >> So that growth, that growth has been since we've been acquired by Veeam back in December, it's almost been a year now we were acquired by Veeam and we've been, being acquired has allowed us to focus on the customer and innovation versus going out and raising money from investors as a small company, right? And so we've had 189% growth in our business in terms of revenue since we've been acquired. And it's really accelerating both on the growth side in all sizes of customers. We've got customers recently like Notre Dame and Cardinal Health. And then we have people getting into the cloud, you know, for the very first time and they go to the Amazon Marketplace, they search through the catalog, they find the N2W products, they download it and, well, they provision it and onward they go. >> Yeah, you mentioned Cardinal Health. >> Yep. >> Let's talk about the sector in general. I mean, very unique concerns, obviously, when it comes to whether it's protecting imaging or patient information or whatever it might be. What have you seen in terms of addressing the needs of that sector because obviously this is an area that's growing, there's more capability than ever, and yet our concerns in it are growing with that. So I mean, what do you guys see in that space? >> Yeah so I think, you know, in the health care sector in general, I think what they're really concerned about is the compliance requirements. It's not just backing up the data but it's the requirement that you have a back up and can restore and you can recover from a disaster or from internal hacking or from whatever, an outage, whatever it might be, and if they don't do it, the repercussions are very, very high. And I think that the whole world with GDPRS and things like that are all coming together to dramatically raise the requirement to be more secure than ever and your backup and disaster recovery strategy is paramount to them. They won't be talking about, "We're going to do this." Some customers say, "We're going to do this ourselves, "we'll write our own code." We won't see that in the health care space or the financial space. >> So I see kind of three interesting areas. One is, they typically will have very specific applications like APEC and Meditech that they need you to protect that are aware of that type of application, so that's one part of it. The second is, there's a lot of certifications required to deliver health care services, so you HIPAA and HITECH and, you know, BAA certifications and all these things, and that certainly comes into play when you're talking about the cloud, so you need to have that conversation. And then lastly, ransomware comes up a lot because there's been a lot of ransomware attacks and malware attacks specifically directed at the healthcare industry. So those are the three kind of areas that we have probably the most conversations about. >> Right, yeah malware has been the best advertisement for backup and recovery, ever. It's kind of fabulous, in a way, in a scary way and we don't actually want to encourage this kind of behavior, but for those of us who have lived and breathed backup for awhile, it's like, "Finally, "people can take this seriously." So that's something that people have realized that, okay, I need to have this. What are they looking at next? Where are customers looking to Veeam and to N2WS, what are they looking for you to add next? >> So I'd say the next kind of big step, so to date we've been very much reactive as an industry, right? "Help me protect my data." "Let me get it back" when they recover to the cloud or move from one cloud to another cloud. Now we're getting customers saying, "You have all this data, you understand the context of everything that I own, help me get smarter in my business so that I can drive the business to make decisions more quickly." So, "Give developers a copy of the data "so that they can iterate on it more quickly." "Give a copy of the data to my GDPR experts 'cause "they need to analyze the data and do something with it." And so we're moving away from just being reactive to business needs to being proactive and driving the business forward. And I think where it gets really interesting, as we go down the road and now this is buzz words, I admit, but around machine learning and artificial intelligence, we're actually, we leveraged a lot of the algorithms that are existing in clouds like AWS to help analyze the data and make decisions that they don't even know that they need to make. And that decision could be, "Hey, you need to "run this analysis at two in the morning "'cause the instances are cheaper." That type of predictive analysis helps the customer reduce cost but also drives the business forward. >> Yeah, so how do you move into that kind of advisory space from a more traditional that we'll protect your data. How do, do customers come to you and say, "Actually, you have our data anyway, "why don't you do this for us?" or are you going to customers proactively and saying, "Hey, we can do this for you, "we have access to this data and we can tell you that, "we can provide these insights to you, "would you like some more of this?" Which way does that conversation tend to go? >> It's a bit of a mix, what I'd say is that the data protection face or the storage, you know, the traditional IT person becomes kind of the help desk and then because they've enabled self service recovery, file level recovery, item level recovery, these other areas of the business come in and say, "Hey, can I use that self service to do X and Y?" So it's a new buyer, it's a new constituent, but they're actually looking to IT to enable them to do more stuff with the data. >> Okay, so it's basically, "I want to interact with you "in a similar way that I'm already doing it, "and you've proven your work in this area, "maybe you could do it over here as well." >> Exactly. >> Sounds like a great opportunity for growth. >> And not just on legacy, I mean, one of the interesting things with the N2W software is we enabled, for example, data protection on DynamoDB. So people think of databases and they think SQL Server and Oracle but we can do this, even in cloud RDS-type workloads with DynamoDB, to help them drive cloud hosted workloads faster for the business as well. >> Well, you mentioned Notre Dame, can we have any connections on the playoff ticket situation, can we -- (laughter) >> I wish. >> Just want to make sure. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us and let's get back in maybe three or four weeks, we'll talk about that, okay? >> It'll be great, yeah, it'll be interesting to see who the final four are going to be. >> That's for certain. Thank you both -- >> Thank you. >> Find the information, really enjoyed the conversation. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, we are live in Las Vegas, Nevada. (electronic music)