>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is "Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante". >> Black Hat 22 was held in Las Vegas last week, the same time as theCUBE Supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cyber and openly discusses its hard truths. It's a conference that's attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they've discovered, and, of course, by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, sessions, and data from a recent Black Hat Attendees Survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa, and we'll end with the discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the supercloud. Now, I personally did not attend, but as I said at the top, we reviewed a lot of content from the event which is renowned for its hundreds of sessions, breakouts, and strong technical content that is, as they say, unvarnished. Chris Krebs, the former director of Us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, he gave the keynote, and he spoke about the increasing complexity of tech stacks and the ripple effects that that has on organizational risk. Risk was a big theme at the event. Where re:Inforce tends to emphasize, again, the positive state of cybersecurity, it could be said that Black Hat, as the name implies, focuses on the other end of the spectrum. Risk, as a major theme of the event at the show, got a lot of attention. Now, there was a lot of talk, as always, about the expanded threat service, you hear that at any event that's focused on cybersecurity, and tons of emphasis on supply chain risk as a relatively new threat that's come to the CISO's minds. Now, there was also plenty of discussion about hybrid work and how remote work has dramatically increased business risk. According to data from in Intel 471's Mark Arena, the previously mentioned Black Hat Attendee Survey showed that compromise credentials posed the number one source of risk followed by infrastructure vulnerabilities and supply chain risks, so a couple of surveys here that we're citing, and we'll come back to that in a moment. At an MIT cybersecurity conference earlier last decade, theCUBE had a hypothetical conversation with former Boston Globe war correspondent, Charles Sennott, about the future of war and the role of cyber. We had similar discussions with Dr. Robert Gates on theCUBE at a ServiceNow event in 2016. At Black Hat, these discussions went well beyond the theoretical with actual data from the war in Ukraine. It's clear that modern wars are and will be supported by cyber, but the takeaways are that they will be highly situational, targeted, and unpredictable because in combat scenarios, anything can happen. People aren't necessarily at their keyboards. Now, the role of AI was certainly discussed as it is at every conference, and particularly cyber conferences. You know, it was somewhat dissed as over hyped, not surprisingly, but while AI is not a panacea to cyber exposure, automation and machine intelligence can definitely augment, what appear to be and have been stressed out, security teams can do this by recommending actions and taking other helpful types of data and presenting it in a curated form that can streamline the job of the SecOps team. Now, most cyber defenses are still going to be based on tried and true monitoring and telemetry data and log analysis and curating known signatures and analyzing consolidated data, but increasingly, AI will help with the unknowns, i.e. zero-day threats and threat actor behaviors after infiltration. Now, finally, while much lip service was given to collaboration and public-private partnerships, especially after Stuxsnet was revealed early last decade, the real truth is that threat intelligence in the private sector is still evolving. In particular, the industry, mid decade, really tried to commercially exploit proprietary intelligence and, you know, do private things like private reporting and monetize that, but attitudes toward collaboration are trending in a positive direction was one of the sort of outcomes that we heard at Black Hat. Public-private partnerships are being both mandated by government, and there seems to be a willingness to work together to fight an increasingly capable adversary. These things are definitely on the rise. Now, without this type of collaboration, securing the supercloud is going to become much more challenging and confined to narrow solutions. and we're going to talk about that little later in the segment. Okay, let's look at some of the attendees survey data from Black Hat. Just under 200 really serious security pros took the survey, so not enough to slice and dice by hair color, eye color, height, weight, and favorite movie genre, but enough to extract high level takeaways. You know, these strongly agree or disagree survey responses can sometimes give vanilla outputs, but let's look for the ones where very few respondents strongly agree or disagree with a statement or those that overwhelmingly strongly agree or somewhat agree. So it's clear from this that the respondents believe the following, one, your credentials are out there and available to criminals. Very few people thought that that was, you know, unavoidable. Second, remote work is here to stay, and third, nobody was willing to really jinx their firms and say that they strongly disagree that they'll have to respond to a major cybersecurity incident within the next 12 months. Now, as we've reported extensively, COVID has permanently changed the cybersecurity landscape and the CISO's priorities and playbook. Check out this data that queries respondents on the pandemic's impact on cybersecurity, new requirements to secure remote workers, more cloud, more threats from remote systems and remote users, and a shift away from perimeter defenses that are no longer as effective, e.g. firewall appliances. Note, however, the fifth response that's down there highlighted in green. It shows a meaningful drop in the percentage of remote workers that are disregarding corporate security policy, still too many, but 10 percentage points down from 2021 survey. Now, as we've said many times, bad user behavior will trump good security technology virtually every time. Consistent with the commentary from Mark Arena's Intel 471 threat report, fishing for credentials is the number one concern cited in the Black Hat Attendees Survey. This is a people and process problem more than a technology issue. Yes, using multifactor authentication, changing passwords, you know, using unique passwords, using password managers, et cetera, they're all great things, but if it's too hard for users to implement these things, they won't do it, they'll remain exposed, and their organizations will remain exposed. Number two in the graphic, sophisticated attacks that could expose vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure, again, consistent with the Intel 471 data, and three, supply chain risks, again, consistent with Mark Arena's commentary. Ask most CISOs their number one problem, and they'll tell you, "It's a lack of talent." That'll be on the top of their list. So it's no surprise that 63% of survey respondents believe they don't have the security staff necessary to defend against cyber threats. This speaks to the rise of managed security service providers that we've talked about previously on "Breaking Analysis". We've seen estimates that less than 50% of organizations in the US have a SOC, and we see those firms as ripe for MSSP support as well as larger firms augmenting staff with managed service providers. Now, after re:Invent, we put forth this conceptual model that discussed how the cloud was becoming the first line of defense for CISOs, and DevOps was being asked to do more, things like securing the runtime, the containers, the platform, et cetera, and audit was kind of that last line of defense. So a couple things we picked up from Black Hat which are consistent with this shift and some that are somewhat new, first, is getting visibility across the expanded threat surface was a big theme at Black Hat. This makes it even harder to identify risk, of course, this being the expanded threat surface. It's one thing to know that there's a vulnerability somewhere. It's another thing to determine the severity of the risk, but understanding how easy or difficult it is to exploit that vulnerability and how to prioritize action around that. Vulnerability is increasingly complex for CISOs as the security landscape gets complexified. So what's happening is the SOC, if there even is one at the organization, is becoming federated. No longer can there be one ivory tower that's the magic god room of data and threat detection and analysis. Rather, the SOC is becoming distributed following the data, and as we just mentioned, the SOC is being augmented by the cloud provider and the managed service providers, the MSSPs. So there's a lot of critical security data that is decentralized and this will necessitate a new cyber data model where data can be synchronized and shared across a federation of SOCs, if you will, or mini SOCs or SOC capabilities that live in and/or embedded in an organization's ecosystem. Now, to this point about cloud being the first line of defense, let's turn to a story from ETR that came out of our colleague Eric Bradley's insight in a one-on-one he did with a senior IR person at a manufacturing firm. In a piece that ETR published called "Saved by Zscaler", check out this comment. Quote, "As the last layer, we are filtering all the outgoing internet traffic through Zscaler. And when an attacker is already on your network, and they're trying to communicate with the outside to exchange encryption keys, Zscaler is already blocking the traffic. It happened to us. It happened and we were saved by Zscaler." So that's pretty cool. So not only is the cloud the first line of defense, as we sort of depicted in that previous graphic, here's an example where it's also the last line of defense. Now, let's end on what this all means to securing the supercloud. At our Supercloud 22 event last week in our Palo Alto CUBE Studios, we had a session on this topic on supercloud, securing the supercloud. Security, in our view, is going to be one of the most important and difficult challenges for the idea of supercloud to become real. We reviewed in last week's "Breaking Analysis" a detailed discussion with Snowflake co-founder and president of products, Benoit Dageville, how his company approaches security in their data cloud, what we call a superdata cloud. Snowflake doesn't use the term supercloud. They use the term datacloud, but what if you don't have the focus, the engineering depth, and the bank roll that Snowflake has? Does that mean superclouds will only be developed by those companies with deep pockets and enormous resources? Well, that's certainly possible, but on the securing the supercloud panel, we had three technical experts, Gee Rittenhouse of Skyhigh Security, Piyush Sharrma who's the founder of Accurics who sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, who's the former Head of Product at VMware. Now, John Furrier asked each of them, "What is missing? What's it going to take to secure the supercloud? What has to happen?" Here's what they said. Play the clip. >> This is the final question. We have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll bring you guys back for sure after the event. What one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation and then the challenges for supercloud? Because remember, the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SaaS. They want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think, each of you? >> So I can start, and extending to the previous conversation, I think we need a consortium. We need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate on supercloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS, Slash, or TCP or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern, and that pattern is what is required for supercloud, in my opinion. Otherwise, security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything, and so on and so forth. It's not going to be possible. So they need a framework. They need a consortium, and this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements, and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or severe findings. So that's, in my opinion, should be the model. >> Great, well, thank you, Gee. >> Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model. We've seen in cloud that the scale matters, and once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coalesce around either a vendor, a business model, or whatnot to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry, I think, is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >> I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look, again, history repeating itself. The internet sort of came together around set of IETF, RSC standards. Everybody embraced and extended it, right? But still, there was, at least, a baseline, and I think at that time, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves, right? And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys, like Google, let's take an example. They're not going to win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody together. >> Okay, so Gee's point about a business model is, you know, business model being missing, it's broadly true, but perhaps Snowflake serves as a business model where they've just gone out and and done it, setting or trying to set a de facto standard by which data can be shared and monetized. They're certainly setting that standard and mandating that standard within the Snowflake ecosystem with its proprietary framework. You know, perhaps that is one answer, but Tony lays out a scenario where there's a collaboration mindset around a set of standards with an ecosystem. You know, intriguing is this idea of a consortium or a framework that Piyush was talking about, and that speaks to the collaboration or lack thereof that we spoke of earlier, and his and Tony's proposal that the cloud providers should lead with the security vendor ecosystem playing a supporting role is pretty compelling, but can you see AWS and Azure and Google in a kumbaya moment getting together to make that happen? It seems unlikely, but maybe a better partnership between the US government and big tech could be a starting point. Okay, that's it for today. I want to thank the many people who attended Black Hat, reported on it, wrote about it, gave talks, did videos, and some that spoke to me that had attended the event, Becky Bracken, who is the EIC at Dark Reading. They do a phenomenal job and the entire team at Dark Reading, the news desk there, Mark Arena, whom I mentioned, Garrett O'Hara, Nash Borges, Kelly Jackson, sorry, Kelly Jackson Higgins, Roya Gordon, Robert Lipovsky, Chris Krebs, and many others, thanks for the great, great commentary and the content that you put out there, and thanks to Alex Myerson, who's on production, and Alex manages the podcasts for us. Ken Schiffman is also in our Marlborough studio as well, outside of Boston. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hoff is our Editor-in-Chief at SiliconANGLE and does some great editing and helps with the titles of "Breaking Analysis" quite often. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search for "Breaking Analysis Podcasts". I publish each on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me, get in touch with me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts, and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year, we noted in a breaking analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the idea or notion of multi-cloud. We've said for years that multi-cloud is really not a strategy but rather a symptom of multi-vendor. And we coined this term supercloud to describe an abstraction layer that lives above the hyperscale infrastructure that hides the underlying complexities, the APIs, and the primitives of each of the respective clouds. It interconnects whether it's On-Prem, AWS, Azure, Google, stretching out to the edge and creates a value layer on top of that. So our vision is that supercloud is more than running an individual service in cloud native mode within an individual individual cloud rather it's this new layer that builds on top of the hyperscalers. And does things irrespective of location adds value and we'll get into that in more detail. Now it turns out that we weren't the only ones thinking about this, not surprisingly, the majority of the technology ecosystem has been working towards this vision in various forms, including some examples that actually don't try to hide the underlying primitives. And we'll talk about that, but give a consistent experience across the DevSecOps tool chain. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon, Cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to share some recent examples and direct quotes about supercloud from the many Cube guests that we've had on over the last several weeks and months. And we've been trying to test this concept of supercloud. Is it technically feasible? Is it business rational? Is there business case for it? And we'll also share some recent ETR data to put this into context with some of the players that we think are going after this opportunity and where they are in their supercloud build out. And as you can see I'm not in the studio, everybody's got COVID so the studios shut down temporarily but breaking analysis continues. So here we go. Now, first thing is we uncovered an article from earlier this year by Lori MacVittie, is entitled, Supercloud: The 22 Answer to Multi-Cloud Challenges. What a great title. Of course we love it. Now, what really interested us here is not just the title, but the notion that it really doesn't matter what it's called, who cares? Supercloud, distributed cloud, someone even called it Metacloud recently, and we'll get into that. But Lori is a technologist. She's a developer by background. She works at F-Five and she's partial to the supercloud definition that was put forth by Cornell. You can see it here. That's a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers, et cetera. And that the supercloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate and terminate resources... And can span all major public cloud providers as well as private clouds. Now, of course, we would take that as well to the edge. So sure. That sounds about right and provides further confirmation that something new is really happening out there. And that was our initial premise when we put this fourth last year. Now we want to dig deeper and hear from the many Cube guests that we've interviewed recently probing about this topic. We're going to start with Chuck Whitten. He's Dell's new Co-COO and most likely part of the Dell succession plan, many years down the road hopefully. He coined the phrase multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And he provides a really good business perspective. He's not a deep technologist. We're going to hear from Chuck a couple of times today including one where John Furrier asks him about leveraging hyperscale CapEx. That's an important concept that's fundamental to supercloud. Now, Ashesh Badani heads products at Red Hat and he talks about what he calls Metacloud. Again, it doesn't matter to us what you call it but it's the ecosystem gathering and innovating and we're going to get his perspective. Now we have a couple of clips from Danny Allan. He is the CTO of Veeam. He's a deep technologist and super into the weeds, which we love. And he talks about how Veeam abstracts the cloud layer. Again, a concept that's fundamental to supercloud and he describes what a supercloud is to him. And we also bring with Danny the edge discussion to the conversation. Now the bottom line from Danny is we want to know is supercloud technically feasible? And is it a thing? And then we have Jeff Clarke. Jeff Clark is the Co-COO and Vice Chairman of Dell super experienced individual. He lays out his vision of supercloud and what John Furrier calls a business operating system. You're going to hear from John a couple times. And he, Jeff Clark has a dropped the mic moment, where he says, if we can do this X, we'll describe what X is, it's game over. Okay. So of course we wanted to then go to HPE, one of Dell's biggest competitors and Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at Hewlett Packet Enterprise. And so given Jeff Clarke's game over strategy, we want to understand how HPE sees supercloud. And the bottom line, according to Patrick Osborne is that it's real. So you'll hear from him. And now Raghu Raghuram is the CEO of VMware. He threw a curve ball at this supercloud concept. And he flat out says, no, we don't want to hide the underlying primitives. We want to give developers access to those. We want to create a consistent developer experience in that DevsSecOps tool chain and Kubernetes runtime environments, and connect all the elements in the application development stack. So that's a really interesting perspective that Raghu brings. And then we end on Itzik Reich. Itzik is a technologist and a technical team leader who's worked as a go between customers and product developers for a number of years. And we asked Itzik, is supercloud technically feasible and will it be a reality? So let's hear from these experts and you can decide for yourselves how real supercloud is today and where it is, run the sizzle >> Operative phrase is multi-cloud by default that's kind of the buzz from your keynote. What do you mean by that? >> Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, multiple public clouds, On-Premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was, it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an On-Premise cloud, On-Premise clouds are not going away, I mentioned edge clouds, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design as you heard. >> Really great question, actually, since you and I talked, Dave, I've been spending some time noodling just over that. And you're right. There's probably some terminology, something that will get developed either by us or in collaboration with the industry. Where we sort of almost have the next almost like a Metacloud that we're working our way towards. >> So we manage both the snapshots and we convert it into the Veeam portable data format. And here's where the supercloud comes into play. Because if I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere. I can move it from physical to virtual, to cloud, to another cloud, back to virtual, I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer. There are things that we do when we go between cloud some use BIOS, some use UEFI, but we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format, that's theirs, but we have it in backup format that we can move around and abstract workloads across all of the infrastructure. >> And your catalog is control in control of that. Is that right? Am I thinking about that the right way? >> Yeah it is, 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalog, Dave, the catalog is inside the backup. Yes. So here's, what's interesting about the edge, two things, on the edge you don't want to have any state, if you can help it. And so containers help with that You can have stateless environments, some persistent data storage But we not not only provide the portability in operating systems, we also do this for containers. And that's true. If you go to the cloud and you're using say EKS with relational database services RDS for the persistent data later, we can pick that up and move it to GKE or move it to OpenShift On-Premises. And so that's why I call this the supercloud, we have all of this data. Actually, I think you termed the term supercloud. >> Yeah. But thank you for... I mean, I'm looking for a confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. >> It is technically feasible and you can do it today. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that in what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> We have a number of platforms that are providing whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud they have an operational experience in the cloud and they now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality, we have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Electra and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proofpoint for it. >> Yeah. So I want to clarify something that you said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers. I use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to do. In fact, that's the last thing we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application. So that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the DevSecOp tool chain, the runtime environment which turns out to be Kubernetes and how you control the Kubernetes environment, how do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. And so really the VMware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements, number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. And number two, you can move faster. And number three, you can just spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we are trying to do. We are not... So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction. In terms of where are we? We are still, I would say, in the early stages. So if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these greenfield applications. And there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Kubernetes. There is still, Kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of Kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our Tanzu Application Platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time be entirely secure, et cetera. >> Well, look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds. They don't work together. Your data is siloed. It's locked up and it is expensive to move and make sense of it. So I think the word you and I were batting around before, this is an interconnected tissue. That's what the world needs. They need the clouds to work together as a single platform. That's the problem that we're trying to solve. And you saw it in some of our announcements here that we're starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. >> It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that CapEx investments. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the CapEx and then ultimately have the solutions machine learning as one area. You see some specialization with the clouds. But you start to see the rise of superclouds, Dave calls them, and that's where you can innovate on a cloud then go to the multiple clouds. Snowflakes is one, we see a lot of examples of supercloud... >> Project Alpine was another one. I mean, it's early, but it's its clearly where you're going. The technology is just starting to come around. I mean it's real. >> Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? >> Is that something that's, that supercloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective. >> I think it is. So for example Katie Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect which is another project. That's exactly part of the it's rationale, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers, using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the APEX console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them into tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So yes we are walking on all of those different aspects. >> Okay. Let's take a quick look at some of the ETR data. This is an X-Y graph. You've seen it a number of times on breaking analysis, it plots the net score or spending momentum on the Y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset on the X-axis, used to be called market share. I think that term was off putting to some people, but anyway it's an indicator of presence in the dataset. Now that red dotted line that's rarefied air where anything above that line is considered highly elevated. Now you can see we've plotted Azure and AWS in the upper right. GCP is in there and Kubernetes. We've done that as reference points. They're not necessarily building supercloud platforms. We'll see if they ever want to do so. And Kubernetes of course not a company, but we put 'em in there for context. And we've cherry picked a few players that we believe are building out or are important for supercloud build out. Let's start with Snowflake. We've talked a lot about this company. You can see they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. We see the data cloud as a supercloud in the making. You've got pure storage in there. They made the public, the early part of its supercloud journey at Accelerate 2019 when it unveiled a hybrid block storage service inside of AWS, it connects its On-Prem to AWS and creates that singular experience for pure customers. We see Hashi, HashiCorp as an enabling infrastructure, as code. So they're enabling infrastructure as code across different clouds and different locations. You see Nutanix. They're embarking on their multi-cloud strategy but it's doing so in a way that we think is supercloud, like now. Now Veeam, we were just at VeeamON. And this company has tied Dell for the number one revenue player in data protection. That's according to IDC. And we don't think it won't be long before it holds that position alone at the top as it's growing faster than in Dell in the space. We'll see, Dell is kind of waking up a little bit and putting more resource on that. But Veeam, they're a pure play vendor in data protection. And you heard their CTO, Danny Allan's view on Supercloud, they're doing it today. And we heard extensive comments as well from Dell that's clearly where they're headed, project Alpine was an early example from Dell technologies world of Supercloud in our view. And HPE with GreenLake. Finally beginning to talk about that cross cloud experience. I think it in initially HPE has been more focused on the private cloud, we'll continue to probe. We'll be at HPE discover later on the spring, actually end of June. And we'll continue to probe to see what HPE is doing specifically with GreenLake. Now, finally, Cisco, we put them on the chart. We don't have direct quotes from recent shows and events but this data really shows you the size of Cisco's footprint within the ETR data set that's on the X-axis. Now the cut of this ETR data includes all sectors across the ETR taxonomy which is not something that we commonly show but you can see the magnitude of Cisco's presence. It's impressive. Now, they had better, Cisco that is, had better be building out a supercloud in our view or they're going to be left behind. And I'm quite certain that they're actually going to do so. So we have a lot of evidence that we're putting forth here and seeing in the marketplace what we said last year, the ecosystem is take taking shape, supercloud is forming and becoming a thing. And really in our view, is the future of cloud. But there are always risks to these predictive scenarios and we want to acknowledge those. So first, look, we could end up with a bunch of bespoke superclouds. Now one supercloud is better than three separate cloud native services that do fundamentally the same thing from the same vendor. One for AWS, one for GCP and one for Azure. So maybe that's not all that bad. But to point number two, we hope there evolves a set of open standards for self-service infrastructure, federated governance, and data sharing that will evolve as a horizontal layer versus a set of proprietary vendor specific tools. Now, maybe a company like Veeam will provide that as a data management layer or some of Veeam's competitors or maybe it'll emerge again as open source. As well, and this next point, we see the potential for edge disruptions, changing the economics of the data center. Edge in fact could evolve on its own, independent of the cloud. In fact, David Floria sees the edge somewhat differently from Danny Allan. Floria says he sees a requirement for distributed stateful environments that are ephemeral where recovery is built in. And I said, David, stateful? Ephemeral? Stateful ephemeral? Isn't that an oxymoron? And he responded that, look, if it's not ephemeral the costs are going to be prohibitive. He said the biggest mistake the companies could make is thinking that the edge is simply an extension of their current cloud strategies. We're seeing that a lot. Dell largely talks about the edge as retail. Now, and Telco is a little bit different, but back to Floria's comments, he feels companies have to completely reimagine an integrated file and recovery system which is much more data efficient. And he believes that the technology will evolve with massive volumes and eventually seep into enterprise cloud and distributed data centers with better economics. In other words, as David Michelle recently wrote, we're about 15 years into the most recent cloud cycle and history shows that every 15 years or so, something new comes along that is a blind spot and highly disruptive to existing leaders. So number four here is really important. Remember, in 2007 before AWS introduced the modern cloud, IBM outpost, sorry, IBM outspent Amazon and Google and RND and CapEx and was really comparable to Microsoft. But instead of inventing cloud, IBM spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And so our view is that innovation rewards leaders. And while it's not without risks, it's what powers the technology industry it always has and likely always will. So we'll be watching that very closely, how companies choose to spend their free cash flow. Okay. That's it for now. Thanks for watching this episode of The Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who does some of the background research? Alex Morrison is on production and is going to compile all this stuff. Thank you, Alex. We're all remote this week. Kristen Nicole and Cheryl Knight do Cube distribution and social distribution and get the word out, so thank you. Robert Hof is our editor in chief. Don't forget the checkout etr.ai for all the survey action. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can check out all the breaking analysis podcasts. All you can do is search breaking analysis podcast so you can pop in the headphones and listen while you're on a walk. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. If you want to get in touch or DM me at DVellante, you can always hit me up into a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante. Thank you for watching this episode of break analysis, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Good evening, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We've been here two and a half days. We've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. Itzik Reich, the VP of the Technologist ISG at Dell and Magi Kapoor Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> So great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. But Itzik we want to, we want to start with you VP of the Technologists. That sounds like a, like you need to wear a cape or something. >> Right? Yeah. I wish I do sometimes >> Talk about that role and what you do. >> Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences or customer calls or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine they're a very large company. Not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we are doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy which has started couple of years ago which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, that's-- >> Got a side gig. My goodness. >> That's right. >> Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days. Great attendance here. Seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue and FY 22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers storage bringing it to the hyperscalers? >> Yeah. No lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face to face meetings and, you know, see the customers, have presentations in person. Like I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been incredible. Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones, you know, so just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of pan-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so, you know, we're at this cusp where there are, you know, customers that are on this journey of, you know, developers coming up to speed with multicloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about, you know, a multicloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multicloud for design by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi from different multi clouds, right? And develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together. Really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and Edge and everything that we've talked about. So project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announce and Chuck brought that up on Monday was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.dell.com which we announced and launched in January of this year. Right? It's think of that as our one stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having a API first approach to everything we're doing be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one stop shop but standardizing on APIs, which is really key. >> We just spoke to Shannon Champion and Gemma from Salesforce. And we talked about how we entered last decade for visioning lungs. And now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy. How did it start? How was it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? You know, where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in >> 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon their CTO went on stage and they explained their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12 factor way, designed to fail, storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data. Especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually, at the time, work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business. But Google took over the some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI. Which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for container storage interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors in order to ensure that our stands outs are part of the CSI stand out. And we start to providing CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes similarly in a way to the open stock days is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So seed side itself is not just the end of it. Many customer wants day to be working with VMware (indistinct) with zoo or with red OpenShift or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today but also in the future as well. >> Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was, you know, pretty immature. We were focused on simplicity. You had Mesos doing, you know, more sophisticated things, you know, cluster HQ, obvious. And now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm tackling all those, a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resilient resiliency equation? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think storages are key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do really take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in? And they love, and they need. I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide, right? Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance, they want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itzik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides but yet take advantage of cloudifying, if I can say, the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that we also have what we call our CSM modules which is the container storage modules which is so, you know, going back again, we, CSI industry stack spec standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was, this is great but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions. But what we have realized is that they're, the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules which is an extension of CSI modules but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency. These are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSM modules just like CSI are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source waiting, you know, and wanting them to contribute to the court. So it's not just us doing, you know and writing what we want but we also want the community to contribute. >> You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source? >> Exactly. >> That's the contribution. >> And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board not just for Dell customers. >> Is that a project going, is that your ideal? It that becomes a project within CNCF or is it? >> That's our goal. Yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. >> More committers. Just keep throwing committers at it. >> Support these day is done via slack channel. So if we're changing the way that we run interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via slack channel. You don't need to call 100, 800 Dell to get a support case. >> So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine, and it was very interesting to me to see that. You know, you guys talk about multicloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud and that's this abstraction layer. You know, some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multivendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, Jamoc Degani kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a defacto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? >> I think it is. So for example, Katie Gordon, which I believe you interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly power part of the its rational, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So, yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. >> Dell meeting the developers where they are. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Speaking of unpacking, Lisa. We're unpacking Dell tech world. >> They're packing up around us. Exactly. We better go. We want to thank you for watching The Cube's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies world. Dave it's been great to co-host with you, be back in person. >> Thank you Lisa. It was really a pleasure. >> Of course. My pleasure too. >> Let's do more of this. >> Let's do it! >> All right. >> We want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on replay on thecube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time. (soft music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, (gentle electronic music) brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Dave, I think first time we've co-hosted this week. >> Yeah. >> Excited to be with you. >> Very excited. >> Live wall to wall coverage. Two and a half days, two days and one evening. I'd say 7,000 plus people here, so really good showing. Caitlin Gordon is here, she's the vice president of product management for cloud solutions and tech alliances at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, always a pleasure to see you, thanks for coming on. >> It is really good to be back in a physical cube, with three dimensional humans. >> Yeah, so unbelievable. >> And it was good to see you up on stage today, so fantastic job. I think the keynotes have been good. I think it's funny, coming out of COVID, it seems like the keynotes are really tight. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> This year, you know. And, so I think that's good. You have a lot to say, so that's why we love theCube, so you can come back and. >> Caitlin: Nice to have a live audience, get the feedback, yeah. Yeah, they were, I tell you, the audience was engaged today, right? I mean, lots of hooping and hollering, so let's talk about multicloud. You know, it's, pre-COVID, post-COVID, feels like things have changed. Maybe, maybe due to COVID, maybe not, but what are you seeing, the patterns in customers around multicloud? >> Well it's been interesting. I've been in a multicloud world tour here over the last six to nine months, and you know, one thing is clear, for the first time as an industry, we agree on something, (Dave laughing) And that's multicloud. We don't agree on what it means, but we do agree that multicloud is our reality. And customers are having a lot of challenges with what that means. That means today reality is multicloud most of the time just means multi contract, alright. I know what hyperscaler's my primary, I have secondary, I probably brought someone that brought someone else in. I've got SaaS providers, I got my on-prem partners. But there's not a lot of continuity and consistency across that. It's really operational silos, data silos, being able to predict that spend is the challenge. And there's a lot of people challenges in there. Whether it's developer velocity, as Jen talked about earlier today. Or even just simply having enough people with the right skills, is a real big challenge because no matter what definition you have of multicloud, it means distributed, and it means a lot of different places, and that's a big challenge. >> I tagged you in my Tweet today, when you were up on stage, I don't know if you saw it. But basically you know, we use this term super cloud, and it was pretty clear to me anyway, an example of what I think of as what multicloud should be. An experience that spans location, that is the consistent experience with all my policies, and my security, my governance. Talk about what you guys are doing to map into the trends that you see. >> You used my favorite phrase, consistent experience. And really what we're doing is two things. We're building a portfolio of software and services, and that's really targeted at that consistent experience. You can have your data, and your workloads in the right place, but you can have a consistent experience with what you already have on-prem. We really need to have true hybrid cloud operations. We overused that term and we ruined it, and then we didn't use it anymore. But that's what we're talking about. On-prem to multiple public clouds have that consistency. But that's not enough because this is just such a complex landscape. The second part of what we're building is really an ecosystem of cloud partnerships. So whether it's the hyperscaler, certainly. But also colocation providers like Equinix. Or SaaS providers like Snowflake. The more we can partner with the key providers in the multicloud landscape, the more we can simplify that across. >> Yes, so you mentioned something that's key. Most people when they think about multicloud, they're not going into that because they really want to do the same thing nine different ways. So that consistency. >> Caitlin: It's not the design point. >> No, exactly. >> Caitlin: No. >> It's like, I want multi something. But not multi everything you offer. So the concept of using this well worn, well proven set of storage intelligence software titles, and putting them out into a variety of cloud providers, linking them with a unified experience is obviously powerful. And that seems to be what's behind Alpine? Is that the strategy? >> Yeah, it's absolutely right. Because you want that consistency because you have established multi lots of things. But you want to be able to get the consistency. But you want to be able to get that across all your data types. You can't just have consistency for file. You can't not only have consistency for object. You want to have that flexibility in who the providers are, and what type of data. And yet have, still have that operational consistency not so matter what. So that's that, that's the tough combination. Keeping flexibility, but also that simplicity and consistency. >> So Project Alpine, tell us more about it, what it is, why is is called a project, when will it be a product. >> (laughing) All of the things. >> Dave: Yeah. So Project Alpine, if you've been tuned in this week, you've heard this a few times. But it is our initiative to bring our block file and object storage software, to all of the major public clouds. So that is all about being able to really break the barriers between your data, and native public cloud services. The key thing, that you started off with it, operational consistency. If I have a power store on-prem, I can run our block software in the cloud, have that operational consistency, so it's the same UI, it's the same API's. Why that really matters, the undercurrent of that comes back to people. If you have the same tools, the same API's, you don't have to learn anything new. You don't have to re-skill or re-hire any people. And eventually you can drive that even more efficiently all through API's. So it's all about that consistent operations. I'm not going to ignore your project questions so I'll get to that as well. >> Thank you. >> It's a project because for a number of reasons, it's something we're working towards, and it's going to have deliverables and milestones over a number of months and years, to be honest. We actually first announced Project Alpine back in January as you know. And we have already extended that now in May to say what we're talking about and any news, started to show you what that's looking like. So original announcement as a project in January. Technology preview here in May. And then we're going to start to have early access for some of these to customers later this year. And then availability into next year. >> Excellent. So the primary value proposition I've been hearing is that operational consistency. Is there another dimension of value, in terms of function? In other words, I get why I'm not going to get that operational consistency across clouds and on-prem from a public cloud provider. Are there functional capabilities that you bring, I mean yes, help us understand that gap. >> Yeah. >> Between what you can offer as a long term, you know, the leader in storage, versus kind of the new entrance in the public cloud. >> Yeah, two things come to mind. The number one is data mobility. So having that very efficient and very simple data mobility. Because what's the most efficient way to send data from an on-prem storage appliance? Use the native mobility services that are already built into that platform. They're already there, you already know how to use them, and they're very efficient. So they're going to be very smart about what data you send to, and what data you send back from the cloud. Which is critical from a people standpoint, but also from a cost standpoint. Which is the other piece of this. We've been talking about the technology, but as you well know, the business requirements are pretty important. So being able to also, not only have your software in the cloud, but transact that through a public cloud marketplace, and in one case will actually be delivered as a native cloud service, is critical. So all the pre-committed spend that you have with any one of these hyperscalers, you can actually draw down against that credit to purchase these software and services, which is equally important to the technology value prop. >> Hence your expanding ecosystem kind of goes both ways. Okay, so when I'm on a console within one of the public clouds, I want to go into Alpine, and now I'm into a Dell experience. Is that correct? >> I talked about flexibility right, and choice. You have that consistency to say, if you want to standardize on one of the hyperscaler ecosystems, we'll inter-operate that through our API's. We're not going to force you into any single walled garden, but if you have chosen an ecosystem you want to be working through, you can abstract out our value through API's and still leverage that underneath the covers, really at the data layer. So we are really all about that consistency at the data layer, but inter-operating with whatever control planes, and whatever ecosystems you are working with. Which is, I've said it five times, but API's are a critical part of this. We love UI's, and they're pretty in a nice demo, but the reality is probably API's is where this is mostly going to be consumed. >> So, I have a question for you as a marketer. You mentioned technology versus business value. Clearly, outcomes, the actual business value associated with what we do in technology, is key. However, as an old time storage guy myself, (Caitlin laughing) I realize that what you're talking about here is decades of development, focusing on things like data protection, resiliency, performance, built originally in an environment that wasn't instrumented for high availability. >> Caitlin: Hmm. >> You needed things like clusters. There wasn't the concept of just JBOD in servers, one server fails, you throw it away, and it automatically goes to another. How do you balance, this is a very long question here, how do you balance the fact that your underlying technology is so good, with the desire to communicate the business value? Do you find yourself having to not talk about the technology as much anymore? Because there's so much impressive stuff there. >> Yeah, I'm a recovering marketing person myself. Um, it is really interesting having been at this show for many, many, many years. Not as many as Dave probably. (Dave laughing) >> Old man Dave. (Caitlin laughing) >> What can I say. >> I would say, a number of those years we spend most of our time talking about speeds and feeds. How many IOPS? What's the latency? What's our HERO number of the day? And we still care about that right, and data protection, what's your BD braid? How much can we save you? Still important. But it's a secondary conversation. What are we talking about now? Cloud native app mobility, and that modernization, and the underlying infrastructure isn't always going to be Dell's anymore, it's going to by in the hyperscalers in some cases. So it's a completely different conversation and different people we're talking to. It's very exciting, it's a little bit foreign to us, but we welcome it, and it's also still important that we understand the infrastructure side too. Because ultimately, even if this is being delivered as a service, someone is still delivering and managing that infrastructure and that is still critically important. >> So okay, Project Alpine, is it multicloud? Is it Apex? Is it subscription? Is it as a service? >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> We should be thinking about it. >> Yeah, all those things. Yes, check. (Dave laughing) All of the things. >> So they're coming together is the. >> It's coming together, right. You hit all of the right buzz words, bingo. But multicloud, the value prop is Project Alpine, multicloud data, and yes subscription is going to really be the model from an economic standpoint, that's really the key. But ultimately it all comes together. >> What are you seeing with data architectures? Kind of up leveling a bit these days, where you know, customers generally, they'll shove everything into a big data warehouse, or a single store, or cloud. You you guys talked about the edge a lot. We just had a great conversation with Lowes, and what they're doing with VxRail and their stores. How are you seeing the evolution of data architectures? >> I think the Snowflake announcement was a really really really good example. And it came through as an announcement but it's a partnership, right. And what's really interesting is it's very clear that what we've kind of inherently understood as an on-prem, primarily an on-prem vendor traditionally, is that data has a ton of gravity, and between data privacy, and just governance regulations, there's a lot of reason the data is not going to move. And what that means from a modern cloud based analytics standpoint like Snowflake, is they need to be able to support the data no matter where it lives. That doesn't mean pulling it into the cloud. Many customers including us will not do that. It means being able to access that data so that more distributed data architecture, but still being able to use those cloud based tools, is really where we're seeing, and why we've really announced this partnership this week. I think there's a ton more opportunity in that space. >> Well that's the epiphany of the Snowflake deal is you're able to access non-native Snowflake data, into the Snowflake data cloud, that's a first. >> Caitlin: Yup. >> Now there, I'm sure Snowflake is going to want to migrate it at some point. But to your point, you won't as a customer, a lot of customers to say, no. First of all, a lot of times, it's not a business case. If I don't have to move it, why should I move it? If it's cost effective, and it's protected. And then, there are constraints. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> To moving data, like legal constraints and so forth. >> Absolutely. And data regulations are not getting less stringent, right? >> Right. Alright, we got to go. Caitlin Gordon, thanks so much for coming back in theCube. It was great to see you. Congratulations for all the announcements, and awesome to see you face to face. >> Yes, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're very welcome. >> Good to have you. >> Thank you for watching, this is Dave Vellante, for David Nicholson, Lisa Martin, and John Furrier. You're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (gentle electronic music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell Technologies. Caitlin is great to see you again though virtually. >> This is good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well, global client executive at Equinix. Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin, let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we're trying to remember when did we last see each other of course it was virtual, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here. (all laughs) Go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had preannounced, but we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future, it really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in theCUBE, right? What's happening in IT. What's happening with our customers is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly, still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on, the management can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage-based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services. >> Talk to me a little bit Caitlin about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah, and it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about the product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything 'cause what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for, which is in the case of storage, they're looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier. So it was at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it. And I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing, and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services, this is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block storage of services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Store and Services, you've pick your type, you pick your tier, pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in this view and as little as 14 days, time to value. And for us, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage is really something it's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced some the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, let's start with you and then Tony will bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released the APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple of exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here in our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell-through. Our partners are really, really important, whether they're resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. Partner sell-through is another important piece. And of course, most important for our conversation today is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available on Equinix facilities all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this, to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell is doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to deliver, to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities storage as a service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprint of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix, talk to me about what the reception has been from from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We all already had been working together in many different ways and matters taking this partnership to the next level and what we've already seen actually all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us either first step first, it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that, right? We have the combination of the right infrastructure. And with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer and we were solving those separately and now we're solving those together. >> The spokes wanting to get out of the data center. If we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market. And as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data centers that we've seen in the last 18 months, help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier is a really important part of really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became out in rural America, out rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way for as an IT team to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible, my partners that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together? So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your least favorite way to do business. But the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are zooming with each other right now. Let's talk about, Tony I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one pro leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems. And those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading, also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large, and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank, trying to hire people and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool, the compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So some ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership, He said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that 'cause it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There were very short list to choose from. Once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony, you already hit on, the networking, the interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. 'Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of the data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that, oftentimes what actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects, the ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyperscalers and the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched. And that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base. >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for storage as a service, the next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going by directionally right now, the volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like a snowball, just going down the hill, it's just picking up speed. And with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focus teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last few months, or have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability in this partnership. >> Yeah, I would point to highly regulated industries thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a U.S. situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in is defined by the different governments around the world. You see the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted thankfully prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, the healthcare, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors we've got this covered. That's something we're able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries certainly. >> Got it, thanks for that Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed so single bill from Dell, where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex, you'll learn more about all things, APEX, really the APEX consoles, the experience. So you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner. Now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix, and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome to this "Cube" conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Management at Dell technologies. Caitlin it's great to see you again, though virtually. >> Yes, it's good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well. Global client executive at Equinix, Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we were trying to remember, when did we last see each other? Of course it was virtual. So APEX was announced product APEX, October 2021. Just about a year ago. Released it in may, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here, (all laugh) so go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. So in the fall of last year, we had announced Project APEX. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had pre-announced what we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, you know, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future? It really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in "theCube", right? What's happening in IT? What's happening with our customers? Is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on the management, can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services, which we're extending here this fall. >> Talk to me a little bit, Caitlin, about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah. And it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about a product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything. Because what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for. Which in the case of storage, they're all looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier, so it is at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it, and I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services. This is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block Storage as Services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Storage Services, you pick your type, you pick your tier, you pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in as few, and as little as 14 days time to value. And for us, you know, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage, is really something that's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value, is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about, with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, we'll start with you and then Tony we'll bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia, who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here, on our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell through. Our partners are really, really important, whether the resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. So partner sell through is another important piece. And of course the most important for our conversation today, is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available in Equinix facilities, all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is, now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony, talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell's doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities Storage as a Service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprints of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix. Talk to me about what the reception has been from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners, it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We already had been working together in many different ways and we're just taking this partnership to the next level. And what we've already seen actually, all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us, at first it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that. Right, we have the combination of the right infrastructure, and with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer. And we were solving those separately, and now we're solving those together. >> Those folks wanting to get out of the data center, if we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market, and as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data center that we've seen in the last 18 months. Help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So, you know, focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier, is a really important part of, really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became, you know, out in rural America, out in rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way as an IT team, to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible? My partners, that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together. So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your, you know, least favorite way to do business, but the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are Zooming with each other right now. (Caitlin and Tony laugh) Tony, I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah. We're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems and those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading. Also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank trying to hire people, and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool. The compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So it's an ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership. You said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that because it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There's a very short list to choose from once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony you already hit on, the networking. The interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that. Oftentimes actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects. The ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyper-scalers. And the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched, and that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base? >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for Storage as a Service. The next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent, who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going bi-directionally right now. The volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like that snowball just going down the hill. It's just picking up speed and with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, you know, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is, there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focused teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last, you know, few months, have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability and this partnership. >> Yeah. I would point to highly regulated industries. Thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a US situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer, is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in. It's defined by the different governments around the world. You know, you see, the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted, thankfully, prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done. Because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, that healthcares, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors, we've got this covered. That's something we were able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could, without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries, certainly. >> Got it. Thanks for that, Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed, so single bill from Dell. Where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. You'll learn more about all things APEX. Really, the APEX consoles, the experience, so you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner, now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching a "Cube" conversation. (soft music playing)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021-Virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021-Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host here on theCUBE. We've got Steve Gordon, Director of Product Management, Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Steve, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey John, thanks for having me on, it's great to be back. >> So soon we'll be in real life, I think North America show, this is for the Europe Virtual, I think the North American one might be in person. It's not yet official. We'll hear, but we'll find out, but looking good so far. But thanks for all your collaboration. You guys have been a big part of the CNCF we've been covering on theCUBE, as you know, since the beginning. But, I wanted to get into the Edge conversation that's been going on. And first I want to just get this out there. You guys are sponsoring Edge Day here at KubeCon. I want you to bring that together for us, because this is a big part of what Red Hat's talking about and frankly customers. The Edge is the most explosive growth area. It's got the most complexity, it's crazy. It's got data, it's got everything at the Edge. Everything's happening. How important is Kubernetes to Edge Computing? >> Yeah, it's certainly interesting to be here talking about it now, and having kind of a dedicated Kubernetes Edge Day. I was thinking back earlier, I think it was one of the last in-person KubeCon events I think, if not the last, the San Diego event where there was already kind of a cresting of interest in Edge and kind of topics on the agenda around Edge. And it's just great to see that momentum has continued up to where we are today. And really more and more people not only talking about using Kubernetes for Edge, but actually getting in there and doing it. And I think, when we look at why people are doing that, they're really leaning into some of the things that they saw as strengths of Kubernetes in general, that they're now able to apply to edge computing use cases in terms of what they can actually do in terms of having a common interface to this very powerful platform that you can take to a growing multitude of footprints, be they your public cloud providers, where a lot of people may have started their Kubernetes journey or their own data center, to these edge locations where they're increasingly trying to do processing closer to where they're collecting data, basically. >> You know, when you think about Edge and all the evolution with Cloud Native, what's interesting is Kubernetes is enabling a lot of value. I'd like to get your thoughts. What are you hearing from customers around use cases? I mean, you are doing product management, you've got to document all the features, the wishlist. You have the keys to the kingdom on what's going on over at Red Hat. You know, we're seeing just the amazing connectivity between businesses with hybrid cloud. It's a game changer. Haven't seen this kind of change at this level since the late '80s, early '90s in terms of inflection point impact. This is huge. What are you hearing? >> I think it's really interesting that you use the word connectivity there because one of the first edge computing use cases that I've really been closely involved with and working a lot on, which then grows into the others, is around telecommunications and 5G networking. And the reason we're working with service providers on that adoption of Kubernetes as they build 5G basically as a cloud native platform from the ground up, is they're really leveraging what they've seen with Kubernetes elsewhere and taking that to deliver this connectivity, which is going to be crucial for other use cases. If you think about people whether they're trying to do automotive edge cases, where they're increasingly putting more sensors on the car to make smarter decisions, but also things around the infotainment system using more and more data there as well. If you think about factory edge, all of these use cases build on connectivity as one of the core fundamental things they need. So that's why we've been really zoomed in there with the service providers and our partners, trying to deliver a 5G networking capabilities as fast as we can and the throughput and latency benefits that come with that. >> If you don't mind me asking, I got to just go one step deeper if you don't mind. You mentioned some of these use cases, the connectivity. You know, IoT was the big buzz word, okay IoT. It's an Edge, it's Operational Technology, or it's a dumb endpoint or a node on the network has connectivity. It's got power. It's a purpose built device. It's operating, it's getting surveillance data, whatever the hell it's doing, right. It's got Edge. Now you're bringing in more intelligent, which is an IT kind of thing, state, databases, caching. Is the database too slow? Is it too fast? So again, it brings up more complexity. Can you just talk about how you view that? Because this is what I'm hearing, what do you think? >> Yeah, I agree. I think there's a real spectrum, when we talk about edge computing, both in terms of the footprints and the locations, and the various constraints that each of those imply. And sometimes those strengths can be, as you're talking about as a specially designed board which has a very specific chip on it, has very specific memory and storage constraints or it can be a literal physical constraint in terms of I only have this much space in this location to actually put something, or that space is subject to excess heat or other considerations environmentally. And I think when we look at what we're trying to provide, not just with Kubernetes but also with Linux, is a variety of solutions that can help people no matter where they are along that spectrum of the smallest devices where maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or REL for Edge is suitable to those use cases where maybe there's a little more flexibility in terms of, what are the workloads I might want to run on that in the future? Or how do I want to grow that environment potentially in the future as well? If I want to add nodes, then all of a sudden, the capability that nannies brings can be a more flexible building base for them to start with. >> So with all of these use cases and the changing dynamics and the power dynamics between Operational Technology in IT, which we're kind of riffing on, what should developers take away from that when they're considering their development, whether they just want an app, be app developers, programming the infrastructure or they're tinkering with the underlying, some database work, or if they're under the hood kind of full dev ops? What should developers take into consideration for all these new use cases? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things is that we're trying to minimize the impact to the developer as much as we can. Now of course, with an edge computing use case where you may be designing your application specifically for that board or device, then that's a more challenging proposition. But there's also the case increasingly where that intelligence already exists in the application somewhere, whether it's in the data center or in the cloud, and they're just trying to move it closer to that endpoint, where the actual data is collected. And that's where I think there's a really powerful story in terms of being able to use Kubernetes and OpenShift as that interface that the application developer interacts with but can use that same interface, whether they're running in the cloud maybe for development purposes, but also when they take it to production and it's running somewhere else. >> I got to ask you the AI impact because every conversation I have or everyone I interview that's an expert as a practitioner is usually something along the lines of chief architect of cloud and AI. You're seeing a lot of cloud, SRE, cloud-scale architects meeting and also running the AI piece, especially in industries. So AI as a certain component seems to be resonating from a functional persona standpoint. People who are doing these transformations tend to have cloud and AI responsibility. Is that a fluke or is that just the pattern that's real? >> No, I think that's very real. And I think when you look at AI and machine learning and how it works, it's very data centric in terms of what is the data I'm collecting, sending back to the mothership, maybe in terms of actually training my model. But when I actually go to processing something, I want to make that as close as I can to the actual data collection, so that I can minimize what I'm trying to send back. Particularly, people may not be as cognizant of it, but even today, many times we're talking about sites where that connectivity is actually fairly limited in some of these edge use cases still today. So what you're actually putting over the pipe is something you're still trying to minimize, while trying to advance your business and improve your agility, by making these decisions closer to the edge. >> What's the advantage for Red Hat? Talk about the benefits. What are you guys bringing to the table? Obviously, hybrid cloud is the new shift. Everyone's agreed to that. I mean, pretty much the consensus is public clouds, great, been there, done that. It's out there pumping out as a resource, but now enterprise is goading us to keep stuff on premises, especially when you talk about factories or whatever, on premises, things that they might need, stuff on premise. So it's clear hybrid is happening. Everyone's in agreement. What does Red Hat bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? >> Yeah, I think I would say hybrid is really an evolving at the moment in terms of, I think, Hybrid has kind of gone through this transition where, first of all, it was maybe moving from my data center to public cloud and I'm managing most of those through that transition, and maybe I'm (indistinct) public clouds. And now we're seeing this transition where it's almost that some of that processing is moving back out again closer to the use case of the data. And that's where we really see as an extension of our existing hybrid cloud story, which is simply to say that we're trying to provide a consistent experience and interface for any footprint, any location, basically. And that's where OpenShift is a really powerful platform for doing this. But also, it's got Kubernetes at the heart of it. but it's also worth considering when we look at Kubernetes, is there's this entire Cloud Native ecosystem around it. And that's an increasingly crucial part of why people are making these decisions as well. It's not just Kubernetes itself, but all of those other projects both directly in the CNCF ecosystem itself, but also in that broader CNCF landscape of projects which people can leverage, and even if they don't leverage them today, know they have options out there for when they need to change in the future if they have a new need for their application. >> Yeah, Steve, I totally agree with you. And I want to just get your thoughts on this because I was kind of riffing with Brian Gracely who works at Red Hat on your team. And he was saying that, you know, we were talking about KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as the name of the conference. He's a little bit more CloudNativeCon this year than KubeCon, inferring, implying, and saying that, okay so what about Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes? Now it's like, whoa, CloudNative is starting to come to the table, which shows the enablement of Kubernetes. That was our point. The point was, okay, if Kubernetes does its job as creating a lever, some leverage to create value and that's being rendered in CloudNative, and that enterprise is, not the hardcore hyperscalers and/or the early adopters, I call it classic enterprise, are coming in. They're contributing to open source as participants, and they're harvesting the value in creating CloudNative. What's your reaction to that? And can you share your perspective on there's more CloudNative going on than ever before? >> Yeah, I certainly think, you know, we've always thought from the beginning of OpenShift that it was about more than just Linux and Kubernetes and even the container technologies that came before them from the point of view of, to really build a fully operational and useful platform, you need more than just those pieces. That's something that's been core to what we've been trying to build from the beginning. But it's also what you see in the community is people making those decisions as well, as you know, what are these pieces I need, whether it's fairly fundamental infrastructure concerns like logging and monitoring, or whether it's things like trying to enable different applications on top using projects like KubeVert for virtualization, Istio for service mesh and so on. You know, those are all considerations that people have been making gradually. I think what you're seeing now is there's a growing concern in some of these areas within that broad CNCF landscape in terms of, okay, what is the right option for each of these things that I need to build the platform? And certainly, we see our role is to guide customers to those solutions, but it's also great to see that consensus emerging in the communities that we care about, like the CNCF. >> Great stuff. Steve, I got to ask you a final question here. As you guys innovate in the open, I know your roadmaps are all out there in the open. And I got to ask you, product managing is about making decisions about what you what you work on. I know there's a lot of debates. Red Hat has a culture of innovation and engineering, so there's heated arguments, but you guys align at the end of the day. That's kind of the culture. What's top of mind, if someone asks you, "Hey, Steve, bottom line, I'm a Red Hat customer. I'm going full throttle as a hybrid. We're investing. You guys have the cloud platforms, what's in it for me? What's the bottom line?" What do you say? >> Yeah, I think the big thing for us is, you know, I talked about that this is extending the hybrid cloud to the edge. And we're certainly very conscious that we've done a great job at addressing a number of footprints that are core to the way people have done computing today. And now as we move to the edge, that there's a real challenge to go and address more of those footprints. And that's, whether it's delivering OpenShift on a single node of itself, but also working with cloud providers on their edge solutions, as they move further out from the cloud as well. So I think that's really core to the mission is continuing to enable those footprints so that we can be true to that mission of delivering a platform that is consistent across any footprint at any location. And certainly that's core to me. I think the other big trend that we're tracking and really continuing to work on, you know, you talked about AI machine learning, the other other space we really see kind of continuing to develop and certainly relevant in the work with the telecommunications companies I do but also increasingly in the accelerator space where there's really a lot of new and very interesting things happening with hardware and silicon, whether it be kind of FPGAs, EA6, and even the data processing units, lots of things happening in that space that I think are very interesting and going to be key to the next three to five years. >> Yeah, and software needs to run on hardware. Love your tagline there. It sounds like a nice marketing slogan. Any workload, any footprint, any location. (laughs) Hey, DevSecOps, you got to scale it up. So good job. Thank you very much for coming on. Steve Gordon, Director of Product Management, Clout Platforms, Red Hat, Steve, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John, really appreciate it. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021 Europe Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (serene music)

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think Virtual 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got three great guests here talking about IBM cloud satellite and AI operations, Lori G O G M of Global SisQo Alliance, Matthew, Engelstad, IBM partner. Lead client partner for Canada financial services and cooper on Kent Asami VP of personal insurance. That economical insurance folks. Thanks for coming on the cube. This great panel on cloud satellite and Ai Ops. Thanks for joining me. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you john. Good to see you. >>Well, first let's start with you. There's a general manager for the IBM Cisco Strategic Partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid. It's pretty much determined that's the standard and multi clouds right around the corner. The program ability of the infrastructure is critical and so obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that take us through the IBM Cisco strategic partnership. >>Mhm. Absolutely. So john as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25 year relationship between IBM and Cisco longstanding. Now if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company, but with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kendrell, our spin off of what we were previously calling Newco, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the red hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our satellite product which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So we're super excited about this >>real quick. Why have you brought up a couple key points? I just want to get too. I know we're gonna get to it later, but the operating model has shifted, you mentioned with the new co and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and mps are critical. This new cloud operating model is really a center of of that. That that equation, how does that relate into all that? >>So, the, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically and you take what Cisco is doing and you know, we've got a client here with us Today programme who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client, what are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place And then what are all those surrounding elements around software managing the apps and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco coupled together. Really bring value >>cooper. You got teed up beautifully there so I want to go to you then go to Matthew after but okay, tell us more about this IBM. Cisco dynamic. You guys are hot growth company um doing very well and continuing to grow and sure, post pandemic. It's looking good too. So take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco? >>Sure, sure john thank you. Um you know, to appreciate how we got here and why? We asked IBM and Cisco to help us. Let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet and M. V. P. Uh Sonnet is a fully automated director customer digital channel where customers can quote and buy home and all of his online without the need to engage anyone at economical. Then in 2018, we launched by another m. v. p. Wine is our simplified self serve and digitized broker channel where broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers again, without the need to engage anyone at economical. Both uh some wine have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences, given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And you know, we maintained platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro macro level. We we and and the way we did the enhancement where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered design results for our business. But as our excitement grew for our upcoming I. P. O. And our business started ramping up their growth plans. We needed to increase our focus on fine tuning key components which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our sonnet and wine platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level so that we can monitor the pulse of uh you know, every component of our users journey uh across both solid and wine. And we need to help with this. And this is where we engage idea Francisco to help us through this journey >>on that vision real quick. How does the A. I. Fit in more on the automation side or on the upside? I mean I can imagine what that growth in the I. P. O. You're thinking automation I'm assuming. Can you elaborate quickly? >>Absolutely. So I mean if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get like it's all digitized so we have a lot of data in there and this is where you know the ability to be able to actually mined that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting having predictability and all that. That's where the Ai Ops comes in but that's part of our journey through this. >>Yeah that's good. I mean the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the financial services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics uh with your clients and how are you responding? House IBM participating? >>Yeah, absolutely. And cooper and was touching on on this from economical perspective, they already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in vine with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year or so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that and then digital experience. So our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient. Right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco appdynamics around high hybrid, multi cloud and AI. >>So, if you don't mind if I don't mind following up on that app dynamics point, um can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that involved? >>Yeah, absolutely. So first off this was based again on our longstanding relationship with Cisco appdynamics that laura was speaking about and then unique to what cooper and and economical was seeking. Of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture. But leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that app dynamics brings to this scenario here is a market leading solution that does bring together those multiple datasets, but contextual ISeS them in a business context. So you can understand from a user perspective that end to end journey right from initiation in the application all the way through the technical infrastructure and it becomes very preventative uh in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >>So empty and this IBM services worked well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's >>absolutely. And that's the point is bringing to bear the best combination of, of solutions and services on behalf of our customers set. And this is where appdynamics and IBM uh, and our other partners work incredibly well together. >>We'll talk about the dynamics. Again, this is again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned, um what can other clients expect? I mean, this is gonna be the playbook. I mean you got the cloud satellite take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >>Yeah, absolutely. I'll start and maybe even laura can can add as as needed, but from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're gonna work with our partner ecosystem um in the hybrid, multi cloud world. So uh we've really evolved whether it's IBM cloud aws as some of our clients, including economical and others Microsoft, Azure, um google. Uh It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together and again, stitching together the data across those applications sets to drive value out of it. Uh This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM in our partner ecosystem and the evolution of IBM services as well. Awesome. >>Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco is trying to do, um they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring elements to the solution. When you look at networking we look at some of the security and then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for a client. >>I love the end to end story, actually hybrids, distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multi club, it's just subsystems and all gonna have to be operated together and the software all makes that happen. I could see tons of headroom opportunity there cooper and talk about what you guys are seeing as results now because this is where you start to see uh the conversation shift too. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really people want to see, can you share what you're seeing as a result? And where do you go from there? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um you know what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time, the team which really was composed of a cross functional and the highly collaborative group of people, uh they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line aside into what's going on for our business solution and you know, the implemented uh scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster, helping us reduce defect linkage through a quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where um implementations are driven by predetermined scope, we are changing the mindset specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together and our vision is to navigate yeah continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So you know to be able to have a robust self healing capability and this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability because now you can actually enable the self self healing capabilities and with afghan um is bringing in the uh uh dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Summit and Wine where it was a fully digitized end to end solution that provides services and value for excuse me for our customers. Right? So hopefully that changes the picture. >>That's awesome. Great insight, Laura Matthew Gordon? Thanks for coming on the cube in the last minute that we have, let's go down the line laura Matthew cooper on. We'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco relationship with the cloud satellite and a I guess what should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >>So as IBM invest more and more in these strategic cloud hybrid cloud solutions industry focused, it's really bringing an industry focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you heard from from Kobrin here, I mean we're bringing that value to our customers. >>All right Matthew, >>yeah, I just like to add and this is a great example here of being able to co innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, economical in this case to evolve these solutions And as cooper and had stated, uh, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come, >>come on, take us home. Final word. >>Thank you. What I would say is what we've learned from. This is really uh, standing this up more like a garage style kind of situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing RY very quickly. So that's the benefit. I've >>seen some great points. IBM and Cisco better together this ecosystem. The co creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks a lot john >>Okay. IBM think 2021. I'm John for with the Cube. Thank you for watching. >>Mm

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi lisa martin with the cube here covering some news from dell technologies i'm pleased to welcome one of its customers liam furlong the i.t manager from revelation software liam great to see you today thanks lisa it's fantastic to be with you and we're socially distant california you're down in australia i know it's early morning for you but we're pleased to be chatting with you so give me and our audience an overview of revelation software who are you and what do you do yeah sure revelation software is a software development company no surprises there and our primary product is a tool called revtrack and for all those sap users out there we help you get your changes navigated safely through the wide landscapes and the open seas of your sap environment so we're all about change management and delivering certainty in what is really rapidly changing landscapes uh in the it world so customers can go to you for all of their challenges with all their sap data and sort of offload that basically i mean that sounds lovely i'm sure many of them would take that so talk to me about your itune manager talking about your i.t environment i know you're highly virtualized just give us an overview of what your data environment looks like we um like a lot of software companies we give our development teams a lot of freedom and so over the years a lot has definitely built into our environment we have hundreds of vms and even more sap landscapes we are committed to our customers to provide a lot of previous version compatibility both in our product but also in sap we support more of sap's old versions than they do we just want to make sure that everyone is able to do their job and focus on what they're trying to do rather than worrying about you know do i have to upgrade am i going to be forced ahead uh in you know especially in a change management landscape and so we have a lot of history a lot of old environments and we manage that by using a lot of on-prem we have local data centers like everyone i guess but also we've got a great multi-cloud environment now and it helps us to really uh provide an excellent environment for our teams to develop in the way that they want to support our customers uh in an efficient way but also without us having to over commit to hardware and so on so you have highly virtualized environment about 150 vms nearly 500 sap landscapes so big administration of overhead talk to me about how you were protecting your data i'm assuming vms maybe some sap databases and servers how are you protecting that before using dell's new integrative approach yeah we uh used a targeted appliance uh style i guess we built up what we thought was the right solution we had a lot of legacy thinking really but uh tools we used a lot of scripts previously we used the veeam platform and that presented an ever increasing set of challenges as you can imagine with s s3 s4 hana rolling along the environment just had to change our backup load was increasing our backup windows weren't getting any larger and our backup targets weren't getting any larger so we really needed to ask some hard questions about what we were doing and whether it was working for us we had absolutely no cloud integration our off-site copies were completely inadequate and so as an i-team manager who is um the guy at the end of the road when it comes to rpo and rto and uh certainty of restorability i was not sleeping well it's fair to say well and that's something that obviously you you look to a company like dell technologies to help with sleep as a sleep aid but you guys i saw that after 20 years you were testing and a hosted version of your rev track insights product and needed cloud dr and you kind of talked about meeting customer slas and i was reading your case study and there was some big challenges there with respect to the sla front yeah definitely um i guess uh actually we were really fortunate to have started a conversation with dell even before we were bringing our cloud platform online we knew we were going to need to be able to address cloud dr it was on the horizon for us and so being able to talk with a vendor that had everything wrapped in uh the idea of an integrated appliance was really quite foreign to me the um the the thought that i could trust dell technologies to actually do this better than me i made that that sounds a bit uh arrogant but the truth is you know i knew my environment and they didn't but what was really stand out for us in the process is dell knew that too and they climbed into our environment and worked really hard they really actually wanted to understand well what were our challenges and what were our loads what was our environment really like and then work with us on a strong solution and i was amazed it felt really like the cavalry had arrived and they knew exactly what they were doing and then they worked overtime to help us find a great solution and it has been a fantastic solution not only solving the challenges we faced at that time of deployment but knowing what was on the horizon going into the cloud and having a sas platform uh we were future-proofed in a way that i was hopeful about but now that we're using it in that way i'm confident and every day i know that it's working properly for us that confidence is absolutely critical but you use the term that we hear so often in technology future proof talk to me about when you hear that as an i.t manager what does that mean to you and how is dell tech with the integrated approach delivering that yeah i think um i mean if i'm just being honest uh i generally dismiss that when i hear anyone say that they're future-proofed because no one knows what's coming i mean here we are living this year outright and uh we we knew 2020 was going to be a big year but not in the ways that it has been uh i think that even though we wanted to believe that this backup tool would cover us we weren't sure uh what it has meant is there are two real standout things one there's a suite of functionality and in the integrated appliance which we didn't need then but it was standing by and it was easy to turn on it wasn't like oh and now you'll have to pay this extra fee or now you'll have to deploy these extra tools it was all ready to go and so they've brought their years of experience and forecasting and built in a bunch of functions which you're not going to need and no one is going to need all of the tools out of the box but over time you can deploy it and the other really big one for us is all of the extra storage that we might need as our backup requirements grow shipped in the box which is a huge cost to the vendor um but it's just sitting there ready for us to consume as we need which is absolutely fantastic for me i don't need to take our backup system offline to upgrade i don't need to consume more rack space i don't need to use more power it's already doing everything it needs to and it's just about rolling forward easily as we move forward as a company so walk us through what the environment looks like now we mentioned 150 vms a big sap landscape give us a picture of the technologies and what dell is helping to protect in your environment yeah so um dell dell covers everything the the integrated appliance we're using um actually it meets all of our needs uh i'm a paranoid and in my job so we have extra bits and pieces kicking around but the power protect device is our go-to we know that it's going to be there it's going to be online it's going to have covered everything from our on-prem so we use a vmware environment locally and we're backing up all of those vms every night about 54 terabytes of data and we knock that out in about a 90 minute window which is absolutely fantastic so that backs up to local and then it ships up to our cloud environment so we've got our offsite covered in that same night then we've also got environment i guess using the amazon example we have a multi-cloud so we've got things in a couple of different cloud providers but to use amazon as an example we have production systems running up there we have our sas environment running up there and we capture that also with our power protect device and bring everything back down and so now we've got that covered as well and so no matter what our problem is i've just got one place to go to to say i need to restore this and i need to do it fast and we can get that done uh straight away it's fantastic and that's what i've been hearing i've spoken with a number of folks already including the vp of product marketing caitlin gordon and we're hearing a lot of that one-stop shop sort of description for the integrated appliance i'm wondering if you could give us a compare and contrast uh power protect the integrated appliance as you said and described the benefits that you've already achieved versus the targeted approach with theme that you had before yeah sure um what we came from was only being able to back up mission critical systems nightly and everything else had to be backed up weekly to achieve our backup windows even still monday morning was uh was a nerve wracking a few hours while the weekend back up kind of crawled through and finished and people are like oh systems are a bit slow this morning like oh yeah we're looking at that you know um we came from that to getting as i said earlier everything done every night which is a complete transformation for us it means that we don't need to worry about we used to have to supplement our veeam backup with scripts because we could get the scripted backup done uh much faster and so we would go oh we'll restore with veeam and then we'll lay a script over the top to recover everything up to last night but now um it's just all uh covered through that one appliance um again in our cloud environments we use the local tools to provide a local backup and that's great to have previously that was mission critical we had to have that working and we had to have our technicians up to speed with four or five different uh tool sets but now they it's great that they are aware of those tools but really it's just about understanding uh one application in regards to a targeted solution you end up having really all these building blocks that only one person really knows how they all string together but now not only do our whole team understand how it works together but it's one phone number to find a whole group of people who know how it works together and they can help us you know from upgrades deployments restores anything we need if i'm on leave then i know that someone else from deltek can step in and cover me for any of their questions it might normally bubble up to my level um one of my favorite numbers i'm sorry i feel like i'm ranting but one of my favorite numbers is you know we came from using a different hardware vendor's san and we were getting compression maybe of three to six times uh on data we get compression from a month view of 150 to 200 times and if we expand that out to an annual view we get compression rates of 300 times on our data which means instead of having literally 15 ru of storage we have two u of storage uh the cost per terabyte is down by hundreds of dollars it it makes me look really good and i haven't had to do anything all i did was just go yep you guys do it you guys deploy your solution so it's been those are huge deduplication numbers i know caitlin gordon shared with me on average 65 to 1 but you you basically at least double that and in terms of of making you look good that's something that's actually quite important in terms of i.t and the business uh making sure that what you can deliver to the business is the confidence and you and your team that their data is protected can you share a little bit about maybe the i.t business relations and how this technology has helped them just have that confidence yeah definitely um i mean as you say every part of the business sees a different thing our development team are paying attention to very different things to our accounting team these numbers definitely help me to make friends in both teams as a it manager if the backups do their job properly if this all works no one notices if this goes wrong i break the business so the stakes are pretty high with backup but even though that's true and we know that's true committing a big financial investment is still hard it's still a moment where you hold your breath and ask was it worth it but now that we've been able to show the numbers to our executive teams and they can see how much money they're saving how much money we would normally be reinvesting at this point but we can now make that available for other projects we can put that into further development we can put that into improving our sas platform that really works for us as a business we want to serve our customers better we don't want to waste our time and money on stuff that affects just our day-to-day we want to be really focused where our people are and with what they care about so by putting money back in the pockets uh that's a big win and by making our uh infrastructure teams more free their time is freer because they're not spending you know we do restores every week pardon me every week because those restores now run more smoothly and they are faster and there's less hunting around to try and find the backup that actually worked then that means our infrastructure teams are free to also now do other upgrades to work alongside say our developers they want to be running the current versions of the atlassian suite not you know a version from a year ago but we've got more time to do that work now it makes a big difference well that workforce productivity that you're alluding to it can be hugely impactful across the business it's not just that now you know you've got one solution one phone number to call if there's issues you've got more time back to be more innovative more strategic and so do the rest of the folks on your team so the business overall that workforce productivity can really be very widespread in a good way absolutely and it's well felt i think you know one of the things that it's really hard to put a dollar value on but it is really key is people don't like doing rework and backup recovery feels like reworking like i've been here before and so by mitigating particularly this aspect of our roles our teams are happier they generally are enjoying their work more because they're as i say they've got more time to work on things that are energizing and rewarding and across the business people feel better as well there are a lot of complications in anyone's job but certainly from the direction that hardware and storage and backup is being uh concerned we've taken away a big stress for me for example it's important that we test our dr scenario obviously everyone says that but now we can actually do it and now we can actually do a full dr production outage and go okay great let's shut it down and see what happens and we were able to do that a couple of times a year we don't have to pay for a cold dc or a warm dc in the wings we can recover to the cloud we our dr site is vmware cloud on amazon so we can spin it up and do the whole dr scenario our dr is engaged within about three hours from a full building loss and not only is that great peace of mind but also again it puts great data into the hands of my cio he's able to present on business continuity issues to the executive team and show that we're actually caring about the business and caring about the things that people do worry about and again makes people look good which is uh which is always helpful it is absolutely as you said it's really you know if you can't restore the data you're kind of stuck so now i know why you look so rested because you you have the solution you're sleeping better at night liam has been such a pleasure talking to you great work and we look forward to hearing more great stories to come from revelation software thanks so much lisa it's been a wonderful time per liam furlong i'm lisa martin you're watching the cube you

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of product marketing for Dell technologies, Caitlin, welcome back to the CUBE, we're excited to see you again. >> Caitlyn: I'm very excited to be here again. >> So data protection in the news what's going on? >> Yeah, it's been a busy year, we had obviously our Power Protect DD appliance launch last year. And then this year we've had announcements on the software side. We had announcements at VMworld, some more at Dell Technologies World. And now today we're announcing even more which is the new Power Protect the DP series appliances the new integrated appliances. And it's really exciting. So we now have our Power Protect DD, the next generation of data domain, and we have our power protect DP appliances integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protects and software in a single converge, all in one offering. That's really popular with our customers today, because of the simplicity the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the backup appliance market. >> Yeah, I have read that the integrated appliances our market is growing twice as fast as the targeted market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, it's not that dissimilar to actually our DD series from last year, which is there's four models in the new DP series. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency. We've got new hardware, assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups faster recovery, In fact, you get 38% faster up backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity, 65 to one deduplication which is just incredible and 60,000 IOPS for instant access. So really ups the game, both in performance and efficiency. >> Those are big numbers. You mentioned the DD launch last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now. What's the significance of the DP series? >> This is exciting for us because it does a couple of things. It expands our power protect appliance family, with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important Power Protect enhancements on the software side. Power Protect data manager which we've been enhancing and continuing to talk about all year also has some new improvements the ability to deploy it in Azure and AWS gov cloud for in-cloud protection. The enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about, not that long ago at VM world about being able to integrate with based policy management really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about kuberetes, right? And the ability to support kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us but it's also the marketing of yet even more enhancements on the Power Protect data manager side and all that together, it means that with Power Protect, you really have a one-stop shop for all of your data protection needs no matter where the data lives, no matter what SLA, whether it's a physical virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated, you've all got them in the Power Protect family now. >> Excellent. All right. Last question for you Caitlin, we know Dell technologies is focused on three big waves, it's cloud VMware and cyber recovery. Anything else you want to add here? >> Cyber resiliency, cyber recovery Ransomware has really risen to the top of the list. Unfortunately for many organizations and Power Protect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offering in market for a couple years with the exciting new enhancement here. So it is the first cyber recovery solution endorsed by sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with Power Protect cyber recovery it provides an automated air gaped solution for data isolation, and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing, and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from, recovering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news Caitlin. Thanks for sharing. What's new congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, >> For Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of product marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, we are excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. So data protection in the news, what's going on? Yeah, it's been a busy year, we had our, obviously our PowerProtect DD appliance launched last year. And then this year, we have announcements on the software side, we had announcements at vMworld, some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect DP series appliances, the new integrated appliances, it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DP, the next generation of Data Domain. And we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protection software in a single converged all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today, because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up, really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the backup appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the target market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, it's not that just similar to actually our DD series from last year, which is there's four models in the new DP series. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency, we've got new hardware assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery. In fact, you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity 65 to one deduplication, which is just incredible. And 60,000 IOPS for instant access, so really ups the game both in performance and in efficiency. >> Those are big numbers. You mentioned a DD launched last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now, what's the significance of the DP series. >> And this is exciting for us because it does a couple things, it expands our PowerProtect appliance family, with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. on the software side, PowerProtect Data Manager, which we've been enhancing and continuing to talk about all year, also has some new improvements, the ability to deploy it in Azure, in AWS Govcloud for in-cloud protection, the enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about not that long ago at VMworld, about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes, right? And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marking of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect Data Manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one stop shop for all of your data protection needs, no matter where the data lives. No matter what SLA, whether it's a physical virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated. You've all got them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent, all right, last question for you Caitlin. We know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, its cloud, VMware, and cyber recovery. Anything else you want to add here? >> cyber resiliency, cyber recovery, ransomware has really risen to the top of the list unfortunately for many organizations, and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offering and market for a couple years, but the exciting new enhancement here. So it is the first cyber recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news Caitlin, thanks for sharing what's new. Congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> Okay Gordon. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. (soft music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin, with theCUBE here, talking with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing, at Dell technologies. Caitlin how are you? It's great to see you. >> I'm doing very well Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Nice to see you back on theCUBE. So lots of stuff going on in the news the last few months or so. A lot of stuff with respect to Cyber Recovery, Cyber Security, but talk to us about what's happening in the Purpose-Built Appliance Backup Appliance market. This market is growing. What's happening there, and talk to me about Dell's leadership role. >> Yeah, we've kind of come full circle. I've been in the data protection space for a while and I would say that, you know now we're looking at this as a $4 billion industry and security and protection has bubbled backup to the top of the list from an IT perspective. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve data protection is leveraging Backup Appliances. And there's really two segments within that. There's what I'll refer to as the target appliances and the integrated appliances. And we actually have had leadership in this space, since really the beginning. You know 50 cents of every dollar in this market is spent on Dell equipment. Where we see massive growth is really in that integrated appliance market. And those integrated appliances really simplify the deployment of not only the protection storage, but the protection software. So you can modernize your data protection, get much faster recovery, faster backups, as well as really get a smaller footprint, better efficiency, all in one single solution. And that's really where we've seen a lot of growth in the appliance market recently. >> Yeah. So as that, an integrated appliance market is growing twice as fast as targeted, give us a picture. You mentioned a few things, but kind of dig deeper into why customers are opting more and more for the integrated approach. >> Yeah that comes back to kind of a lot of the trends we see in IT overall. It's simplicity. It's ease of, how can you get to a better solution, a better outcome faster. And when it comes to integrated data protection appliances, it really it takes the guesswork out of it. You know, you have software and hardware, that's optimized to work together. You're really quick and easy to deploy, really simple to manage, 'cause it's all fully integrated and you get to a solution where you can get things like 65 one data reduction, get a very small footprint, get really fast improvements to not only backups, but probably even more importantly to recovery, get instant access to that data. And you really are able to with one purchase, transform all of your data protection. Now there's still a lot of great uses for target appliances as well of better flexibility. But, we've seen this overall you've seen this Lisa, every trend in probably IT and life, right? Simplicity. How can you get a faster, better answer? And integrated appliances really lean into that. It's as similar to what we see in the hyperconverged space, kind of in the primary storage and compute side of things. >> Yeah, I think we all want faster, simpler, better in every walk of life. One of the things this year that, in all of that lack of simplification, the complexity that we're living in that we've seen, is the rise of ransomware. It's not only on the rise, it's getting more personal. We've seen, you know, big companies, Garmin was attacked, one of the Cruise Lines was attacked, The New Zealand Stock Exchange, Facebook and Tik Tok were hacked. So we're starting to see so much more vulnerability and the ability of these hackers to expose more vulnerabilities. Have you seen that impacting your customers saying, "Hey, we need help here because now we have so many employees and devices, scattered." >> Yeah, unfortunately we have. You know, we've been talking about Ransomware Protection, Cyber Resiliency, Cyber Recovery with our customers for quite a number of years. And, now it's not a niche conversation just with financial institutions, it's a conversation with all of our customers. 'Cause either they've felt it or they've seen their competitors feel it and they need to protect themselves. So it has really become a conversation but it's not only our specialty sellers, but all of our sellers are having with our customers. And, it's really about not only being able to protect against them, which is an important part, but also recover from them. And that's really what our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution is all about. And the exciting thing for us is that we actually have recently become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. Which really gives you an idea of the level of investment that we've made to provide that secure, automated air gap solution to give our customers that peace of mind. Because unfortunately this is becoming table stakes for any data protection out there today. >> Well, and as more and more, we see every company either becoming a data company or needing to become a data company to not just survive these times, but become successful as time goes on. To a point, it's one thing about protecting the data, but the actual need is to recover it should anything happen. Tell us a little bit more about Sheltered Harbor and what you guys were the first there to receive? Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Okay a little bit more on overall our solution and Sheltered Harbor is actually a consortium of organizations, primarily financial institutions that have really come together to define the standards, of what we need or Cyber Resiliency for Cyber Recovery. And for us with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we've worked closely with that organization, to meet those standards. And with that work and with that actual deploying in with one of our customers, we were able to become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor to meet their standards there. And what's an important about our solution is that it's both that automated air-gapped solution for the data isolation, which is a part of it. But it's also, we have the CyberSense analytics and forensic tools that give you the ability to discover, to diagnose and to remediate against these attacks. So it gives you both sides of protecting that data air-gapping it, but also being able to intelligently discover and remediate against those attacks, if they do indeed happen. >> As VP of Product Marketing, I'm sure you're with customers often these days virtually. When you're having customer conversations, as you were singing out data protection and being able to recover and remediate, should anything like a ransomware attack happen, that's business critical. That's, you know, lifeline kind of stuff we're talking about. Have you seen the conversations within customer organizations shifts or is this now a board level or a C-level conversation in terms of data protection? >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's become a more frequent conversation. The people involved, are different. It's not just the backup administrators that are involved, it's really about the overall compliance strategy, the CSOs that are involved here. And it's becoming a corporate mandate as it really unfortunately needs to be at this point. So it's coming up more frequently, but also the types of people involved in that conversation have really changed the types of things we're having to talk about and build solutions for. So it's really changed that dynamic for us. And it's been great to really be on the front lines of that with our customers. You know, it started with those financial institutions and now it's really commonplace, to talk about this with everyone. >> So let's talk customers. Give us an example or two of some customers that are leveraging this new technology that are really achieving like the big deduplication ratio that you talked about, but also enabling their business to move forward. >> Yeah. One of my favorite ones for a couple of reasons I'll confess is, World Candy. Actually there are a World Corporation, but to me, they're a candy company. They actually make some chocolate out of Pennsylvania one of my favorites, chocolate covered pretzels. And they're a great example, right? 'Cause they're certainly not an IT specialty organization. They're trying to contract manufactured candy and they want to get things done as efficiently as possible. So they were looking a solution to overall modernize, their overall IT and that came with the combination of an Integrated Data Protection Appliance, as well as VXRail. And by implementing that, they were able to reduce their backup times from running overnight all night, to just two hours. They were able to get dedupe ratios of a 12O to one, 99.2% reduction, which is just incredible. And they were able to reduce their physical server footprint by 60%. So you can just imagine with an organization like this, that needs to run things as efficiently, as simply, as quickly as possible, how transformational that is. And, probably one of the other things that we find out of customers like this is, it's really about finding them a partner that can solve all of their problems in one place. And for data protection that's certainly one of the biggest things for PowerProtect is we now have a one-stop shop appliances software for all your data protection needs, large and small. And my favorite thing is actually our quote from this customer which is, he calls it a perfect partnership and that they have a single hand to high five. And we love to get those high fives from our customer and we really like to be that partner for them and to help them solve these challenges really no matter where their data is or what their challenges are. >> I like that a single can for a virtual high five. Speaking of partners, what's the channel play here? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for us, Dell Technology is overall channel partners are absolutely critical and in the data protection space, probably even more so. So channel partners are a huge part of our go-to-market. And one of the reason that channel partners really like to work with us, with Dell technologies on the data protection side, is because of the breadth of that portfolio. And now with our most recent enhancements on the appliance side, you now have a full PowerProtect portfolio. Target appliances, integrated appliances, physical, virtual, as well as modern data protection software with PowerProtect data manager. And for our partners, and for us, it's so important that they can have one vendor to offer all of these solutions because we know that our customer's challenges are complex, they're diverse, their data sets are diverse and they need to be able to partner with someone, leverage us as a vendor, leverage our partners, leveraging us as a vendor to really give our customers that answer. And that could be very different needs. They have traditional applications, they have new modern applications in Kubernetes and the growth of, and the importance of those types of applications. Our partners don't want and our customers don't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. Multiple vendors actually can increase risk, increase costs. They want to keep that simple, efficient. And that's why partnering with us, with Dell Technologies, why our channel partners really find us to be such a critical vendor to work with on the data protection side. >> So you've shared some impressive stats about what the technology is able to deliver. You gave us the great World Candy company example in terms of the things I heard a big workforce productivity there, they've got big deduplication there. They're able to sounds like reduce their on-prem footprint. From an economic value perspective, help us understand what the economic value of the DP series and even maybe feedback from the analyst community. >> Yeah, we've actually got a recent study which I'd encourage you guys to go read and I will just kind of give you the Cliffs Notes version of it. Which shows you the advantages of leveraging Dell Technologies portfolio for data protection. You can have your cost to protect as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, which is impressive. And that's that efficiency that you can get with PowerProtect. It's a reduction in the administration costs for data reduction of 22%, a reduction of 84% in your Cloud resources and services. We all know that people have moved to Public Cloud and probably one of the biggest concerns is the cost of that. By implementing the right data protection solutions, leveraging our in-cloud backup and protection, you can actually significantly reduce that because of the way that we've implemented it. And overall, you can't argue with anything that reduces costs by 98%. So you can reduce your storage resource costs by 98% by leveraging the PowerProtect portfolio. And again, it's a recent ESG study, which you can find on our website and read more about that study and the economic elements that lead into that. But you can just see the dramatic impact that can have, not only are you protecting your most valuable asset of data, but you're doing so in a way that saves the company money, and time and resources. And we all know that's never been more critical than ever. >> Those are very impressive, but compelling stats. Last question, talking about the three waves that we know Dell technologies is writing, we've got VMware, Cloud, Cyber Recovery, give us a flavor of the launch and the news and the new capabilities for this one-stop shop with perspective of what's happening in Cyber Recovery today. >> Yeah, so we've got enhancements on all fronts. So we, let me go in order there. So we've got on the Cloud front our PowerProtect data manager, which we've talked about a lot this year. We continued to really enhance that. Some recent enhancements, the ability to deploy that in Azure and AWS Cloud, to be able to do in-Cloud data protection. On the VMware side as we talked about just recently at VMworld, we've got new integrations with Storage Based Policy Management to really simplify and automate protection for the Vadmins as well as protection administrators. The ability to support, real mission critical applications and VMs, that are something we're working on to be able to more intelligently protect those VMs that have become more challenging to protect in traditional methods as well as integration with protect VCF. And then lastly, I think we've covered a bit today is certainly on that Cyber Recovery, Cyber Resiliency solution. First one to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor in providing that air gap solution, as well as that ability to discover to remediate from those attacks. And you can kind of get a sense of, where we're really focused on. Those are our big three areas in both our appliance as well as our software portfolio really focused on simplifying that for our customers. >> Well Caitlin, we thank you for joining us as per what theCUBE has seen for many years with Dell Technologies. Lots of innovation, continued innovation. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here, Lisa. >> Excellent. With Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is "theCUBE' conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to 'theCUBE' I'm excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. >> So data protection in the news, what's going on? >> Yeah you know, it's been a busy year. We had obviously our power protect DD appliance launched last year and then this year, we've have announcements on the software side. We had announcements at the VMworld some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect PP series appliances, the new integrated appliances. And it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DD,xx the next generation of data domain, and we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protecting software in a single converge, all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the back of appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the targeted market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, and it's not that dissimilar to actually our DD series from last year which is there's in four models in the new DP series. There's a 4,400 which is actually now taking the PowerProtect brand and putting that on the existing DP 4,400 and then three new appliances: the 5,900, the 8,400 and then the 8,900. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency. We've got new hardware, assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery, in fact you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity, 65 to one theater application, which is just incredible and 60,000 IOPS for instant access. So really ups the game, both in performance and an efficiency. >> Those are big numbers, you mentioned the DD launch last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now. What's the significance of the DP series? >> And that this is exciting for us because it does a couple things. It expands our PowerProtect appliance family with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. On the software side, PowerProtect data manager, which we've enhancing and continuing to talk about all year also has some new improvements. The ability deploy it in Azure, in AWS GovCloud for in-cloud protection. The enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about, not that long ago at VMworld about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes right And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marketing of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect data manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one-stop shop for all of your data protection needs no matter where the data lives, no matter what SLA, whether it's a physical, virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated, you've all bought them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent. All right. Last question for you, Caitlin we know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, it's cloud VMware and Cyber Recovery. Anything else you want to add here? Yeah, I'll pick up, especially on that last one, we talke%d a little bit about the enhancements we've done with cloud in cloud data protection, longterm recovery, disaster recovery, as well as what we've done on the VMware front, really important that we continue to have that automation at simplicity with VM-ware but cyber resiliency, cyber recovery ransomware has really risen to the top of the list. Unfortunately for many organizations and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offer in market for a couple of years, with the exciting new enhancement here. It is the first cyber recovery solution and endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. So it is the first Cyber Recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect data, PowerProtect, if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news, Caitlin. Thanks for sharing what's new congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> For Cait%lin Gordon I'm Lisa Martin. You're watch%ing 'theCUBE'. (calm music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience I'm John for your host of the Cube Cube. Virtual. We're not in person this year were remote We're doing The interviews were not face to face. So thanks for watching two great guests to talk about the Dell Technology Storage and data protection for the VM Ware environments got Caitlin Gordon, vice President, product management, Dale Technologies and Leak as well. Vice president of Cloud Platform Business Unit, also known as CPB. You for VM where Lee and Cable in Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me >>s So what? What a crazy year. We're not in person. Usually the the events Awesome. VM world recently went on and then you guys have the same situation role online now and it's >>really kind >>of highlighted the customer environments of cloud needed. But I've been saying this on all my reports and all the Cube interviews that the executives who are in charge and now saying, Look at our modern APS have to be cloud native because the obvious benefits are there and container ization has become mainstream. But yet I d c still forecast about 15% of enterprises are still fully containing rise, with a huge amount of growth coming around the corner. So you're seeing this mature market where containers are validated, they're being put into production. People are now moving hard core with containers. And you have the kubernetes. I gotta ask you, Li, I'm Caitlin. What does this mean for the customers? Are they getting harder pressure points to do things faster? What does it all mean for the customer? >>Yeah, I'll start. Only you can add to it. I mean, I think what we see is the trends that were already happening of now. Accelerated and modern APs were kind of the top of the priority list, but now it has is really expedited. But at the same time, traditional applications haven't gone anywhere. So there's this dichotomy that a lot of I t is dealing with of head Oh, accelerate those modern APs while also streamlining and simplifying my environment for my traditional laps. And not only do I need to the right infrastructure to have that for production workloads, modern, traditional, but also form a data protection standpoint. How to ensure that those are all secure and do all of that in a way that simplifies life for whether it's the data protection admin, the BM admin or even the developer right, all of the different folks involved and needing to make all of their lives simpler has just really exacerbated a challenge and really given us a lot of opportunity to try to solve that for customers together. >>Lee, What's your take on the landscape out there? >>Yeah, I'd emphasized that speed really matters today, right? That we're really looking at. How do you go and deploy new applications faster, right? New ways to get engaged with customers. I mean, it's not happening physically anymore. So how is it happening while it's happening largely through applications? And so as you now basically develop new applications more quickly, containers are a way to speed the pace of applications, and the theme that you know we continue to drive home is that that means infrastructure has to respond more quickly, and it means that for the teams that are managing infrastructure, it really helps if you have a consistent model where you can get mawr done with the same teams and leverage all the experience you have, as well as the security and infrastructure resiliency model that we're bringing together to our customers. >>This brings up the real question, and if this comes up, kind of you see more of the executive level like we need to have a modern application direction. They'll go. Everyone goes, Yeah, of course. Thumbs up. Then they go Try to make that a reality because even though Dev ops and Infrastructures Code is still the viable path, it's hard. It's like Caitlin, we're talking about EJ to core Data center hybrid the multi cloud. There's a lot going on under the hood there. So you guys are doing a lot of stuff together. VM Ware and Dell Technologies. What's the solution for customers? They gotta move faster. As lead pointed out, Caitlin, how are you guys working together to make that infrastructure more modern, faster, programmable and reliable, >>and make it simpler for the customers right? I think it really comes down to one of the most powerful things about the partnership is that from the dull technology standpoint, we have really a plethora of different solutions to support your VM or environment. Whether it's a three tier architecture with Power Edge power store or leveraging the X rail. Or very commonly, it's gonna be both of those. You have the right infrastructure to support the production workloads and have a consistent operating model between them leveraging devils and primary storage side and all the integrations we have with the ex rail. And then we have with power, protect data manager Great integrations in some recent enhancements that make that even better and are now able to protect Tan Xue, protect the VCF management domain and not only have the storage, but also the protection for that environment. But do it in a way that supports what the V A madman needs and also gives that consistent protection, consistent storage, consistent operating model for the rest of I T. And at the same time you're enabling the developers to move faster. >>Lee, You guys have been doing a lot of joint development, and we've been covering a lot of the news VM world. Ah, lot of joint engineering, a lot of joint integrations. You guys have been collaborating with Dell Technologies for a long time. Also, the relationship. Where is that Today? Can you expand on that a little bit and take a minute to explain the joint >>collaboration? I'll start with the fact that you know, good marketing is really easy when you have great engineering. And so the work that we're doing together, like between our companies. Now we have a lot to talk about, right? E mean the work scaling mentioned right around Devil's integration, for example, on power Max right on da npower store, right? I mean, you start looking at the integration work that we're doing together. It means that customers are getting the benefits of the joint integration work and testing right that comes and so you're guaranteed out of the box toe work. Also, you know, don't forget that contain owners and all of the things we're doing around containers. It's basically designed thio accommodate the fact that containers air spun up more quickly or destroyed more quickly, their shared across the hybrid cloud more frequently and without an inherent security model and built in data protection. It's really hard to go and see how you can deploy these with the enterprise resilience that's demanded at enterprise scale. And so that's what we're doing together, right? And, you know, we build great software, Uh, but without great hardware partnerships, it's one hand clapping, right. It's about getting our teams together, right? That really makes it sing at the customer level. >>You know, I think that's a really example of the business. Performance results have come in Vienna, where you guys were doing a great job. Go way back to the years ago when Pat and Raghu we're talking with from Amazon and all. Since then, it's been joint development, join integrations, and that's a great business model for you. And so, Caitlyn, I wanna get back to you. Because at VMRO we covered Project Monterey, the new initiative for the anywhere but a year before they had Project Pacific that came toe life with product results. Tan Xue specifically, you guys have the power protect data manager that we talked about in the summer, but now for Tan Xue supported and Tan Xue environments that super relevant, can you share any updates on your end on the power protect Data Manager and Tan Xue? >>Yeah, I li I couldn't agree more that great engineering mix our jobs a lot more fun and a whole lot easier. So we've been really lucky. And the partnership we've had has really never been stronger. So yeah, but the most recent release of power protect Data Manager introduces the support for that tan xue protection. It also introduces really important things like storage, storage based policy management. So in in biosphere, when you set up a storage policy, you have data protection as part of that and you have the integration with power protect data Manager. So you're able to automatically protect new VM that are created by that storage policy of being applied. >>But >>at the same time, it's also being tracked in power. Protect Data Manager. So you have that consistency across enabling your vitamins and enabling your data protection your i t. Team. To keep track of that, we also have ah tech preview that we did at VM World about how we're working as from Dell technology standpoint to innovate around. How do you protect some of these VMS that are so large and so mission critical that you need to be able to protect them in a new and innovative way that doesn't disrupt the business. And we did a tech preview of that, and it's something you'll hear more about from us, too. But it's PM traditionally would be in this category of unprotected ble because of the impact it could have on the environment and how we're really looking to do that in a more efficient and intelligent way. So we can actually protect those be EMS. And there's there's really a whole lot more. When you talk about objects, scale and everything else that we've done, it's really exciting. And you don't think Lee and I have ever talked as much as we do now. Ah, and it's been a lot of a lot of fun. >>It's been great following both of you guys on the keep interviews over the years. The success in the vision We had early conversations about what the plans where it's kind of all playing out. So I want to congratulate both of you of VM Ware Adele Technology. So good job going forward. The collaboration. I want to get to that in a second, you'll into it. But Caitlin Lee, I want to get your thoughts because one of the big themes this year besides covert and all the issues that that's highlighting. But in the cloud world, automation has been the number one conversation we've been hearing, and with that you got machine learning all the tech around that as you abstract away. The complexity of the infrastructure to make the modern APS automation has been great. The business cross connect is everything is a service we're seeing. This is the big wave coming. Could you guys share your vision on how all this stuff you mentioned V balls and all objects scale all these things? There's a >>lot of >>plumbing underneath and a lot of tooling, a lot of part piece parts. If that gets programmable, >>automation >>kicks in, which then enables everything is the service because you guys both share your vision of what that means in terms of what's going to change and what would it impact the customer? >>Yeah, and it's very relevant for this week, right? Dell Technologies world. That's a big part of what we've announced this week in our commitment to really bringing our portfolio as a service, and it's really interesting, especially for folks like Lee and I, who have been doing kind of mawr product marking and talking about speeds and feeds and thinking about how you make the product life simpler. And how do you automate that? Have the intelligence built in things like Biaro have been such an important part of that, especially with power store coming to market. But if you think about where that leads us, actually changes everything, which is when you have everything as a service and we're really delivering outcomes to our customers and no longer products. That automation is actually just a important and maybe even more important. But it's not the end user that cares about it directly is actually us, because as Dell Technologies, we become the ones managing that infrastructure, owning that infrastructure and the more automation we can bring in, the more intelligence we can build them for ourselves. The more insights we can give to our customers, the better that service can become. And it's really a flip from how we've always been thinking about and really rolling out automation. It's not actually about enabling our end users to do anything. It's actually about enabling them to not worry about any of it, but enable our own organization to support their outcomes better. So it really changes everything. >>Lee, what's your thoughts on this? Everything you've got, V Sphere V Center. You've got all the storage you got all the back up. All this stuff has to be automated. Makes sense. But as a service, how does that impact your world? >>You know, it really does. When you think about the VMRO Cloud Foundation, right, which is the integration of all of our V sphere with Visa. And with these, you know, our NSX products that will be realized. Management suite. Tom Zoo now, right, All of this pulled together. One of things that's interesting is when you go to the public cloud, we have some experience now where we always deliver that full stack together. And what that does is it frees up customers. Thio, go on, focus on the applications, I think and stop looking down the infrastructure. Start looking up at the APS. And so we're offering and bringing that same level of experience to the on premises data centers. And now bridging that across the hybrid cloud that all of a sudden gives you this sense that Hey, I'm future ready. No, matter where I am today. If I'm thinking about the hybrid cloud, I could go on move there, right. And with our partnership with Dell Technologies, there's such a great opportunity to bridge that uniquely, by the way across all of my on premises infrastructure, including common policy based management, back into storage through RV Valls efforts, right and then back in through objects scale right into objects based, uh, applications and through our DP efforts to data protection efforts, then back into, like, date full data protection. And so what you get now is we're helping customers realize that I got this. I could take new Cooper navies orchestrated applications and I could make them work and do it with the same operational model that I have today. Start spending more time on the applications, less time, basically configuring and managing underlying infrastructure. >>Caitlin you mentioned that earlier at the top of the segment, ease of use, making it easier, simpler, great stuff on the on on the future. Lee, I gotta ask you about Project Monterey. We did a lot of coverage on VM World on silicon angle in the Cube. I love how this comes out. It's always, You know, the brain trust that VM Ware lays out the future, they fill it in throughout the year, expect to see some meat on the bone there. But what is that gonna do from for new capabilities and how with Dell Technologies? Because, um, it's end to end, right this Michael Dell and I talked, I think, two years ago, a Dell Tech world. And then last year, he hit the point home hard and to end with Dell Technologies. It kind of feels like it's gonna be a good fit. Could you share how that Monterey project fits in with Dell Technologies? >>Yeah. We're so pleased to be showing this together with Dell Technologies at the VM World to showcase this new idea that you could basically go on, start offloading CPUs and using smart knicks as a way to basically now provide, um or let's call it a, You know, a architecture that allows you to, uh, be responsive to new application needs. So let me talk a little bit about that. So when we opened up Tansu, right, we got this complete inflow pouring of new container base kubernetes orchestrated APS. So what? We found was, Hey, they're driving a lot of CPU needs their driving a lot of scale out security needs for things like distributed firewalls. And so we started looking at this, and what's clear is we need to basically use the CPU very judiciously, So it's basically reserved for the APS. And so what we're doing now is we're basically saying there's an opportunity for us to go in, offload the CPU for things that look more like infrastructure, including S X, I and other things. And at the same time, then we could go and work together with Dell Technologies to be the deployment vehicle. And so, just like Project Pacific, which was going broad, if you will, this project moderate, which is going deep like the canyon, John not far from here, um is, you know, a source of all new discovery right where we'll be working together and over time, just like the Project Pacific name faded to black and became product Tan Xue vcf with Tom juvie sphere. With Hangzhou, we'll see that Project Monterey will evolve into new products coming together with Dell Technologies. >>Caitlin, can you elaborate on Take a min, explain the product how this renders into products because I can also imagine just the benefits just from a security standpoint. Efficiency. If the platform, um, there's a range of things, could you take a minute to >>explain the >>impact on products? >>Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot more about it, but we're obviously excited to be partners on this is Well, and I think it's It's just another example of the more intelligent the infrastructure can become than the rest of the entire I T organization can run more efficiently and that that can come in the form of the A. I built into power, Max, that can come in the form of the evils that we have both in Power Max and Power Store that can come in the form of even just the fact that we have now built a fully containerized S three compatible objects or platform called objects scale which we have no in early access. Um, that can run on the V sand data persistence platform, and it just gives you the ability to leverage this all of the right technology. And we can continue to really partner on that. I think Project Monterey really opens up even more opportunities to do that, and you'll certainly hear more from us on that in the future. >>I >>mean, you got compression, you got encryption. A lot of benefits across the board. Great to have you guys both on and your graduation. The great event. Final question for both of you, talk about this has been a crazy year. We're not face to face, so everything will be online. What should customers and partners and people watching know about the relationship between VM Ware and Dell Technologies this year? What's the big message to take away? What should people walk away with and and think about? >>I think it's It's never been stronger than ever, uh, than it's been than it is right now. We have never had >>more >>breath and more depth of integration. I think that the partnership on the engineering level, on the product management level on the marketing level, we have really never been in a better place. And you know what? What? My team is really enjoyed with VM world season and you're coming up on Deltek. World season is we've really enjoyed the fact that we've had so much richness >>of >>that integration to talk >>about, and >>we also know there's even more coming. So I, you know, from from my standpoint, if we really feel it and probably the best and most rewarding time we hear about that, is when we bring new things into market, we hear that back. And when Power Store came into the market and over the past few right kind of first months in market, one of the most resounding feedback that has come out as one of the most differentiated parts is that it? It's so incredibly integrated with VM ware. But we've even gotten questions from analysts asking, you know, did you purposely make it feel like you are really working similarly to a B M or environment? And you know what? That just shows how closely we have been working as organizations is that it comes a very seamless experience for our customers. >>Lee Final Word. >>What >>should people walk away with this year on the relationship between Be and we're in Dell Technologies? >>Well, I think the best partnerships right are ones that are customer driven. And what you're finding here is customers. They're actually encouraging us, right? We're doing a lot of three way meetings now, right where customers like, Hey, tell me how you're going to go involved this. How do I How do I basically modernized right and preserve my existing investment, perhaps Or, you know, update here, Or how do I grow like customers have really complex individual situations. And what you confined right is that we're helping jointly not, you know, just simply with the engineering side, which is awesome, but also with the idea that we're helping customers go on deploy responsibly in a time where it's very difficult to plan. And so if you come to us, we can help you jointly plan for the future in uncertain times and make sure that you're gonna be successful. And that's just a great feeling when you're a customer looking at, How do you deploy going forward in this? You know, with the amount of pace of change that we've got, >>I want to congratulate. Both of you have been following you guys. Success has been proven out on the business results and also the products and the enablement that you guys are providing customers been great. Thanks for coming on. Great to see both of you have a great event. Thanks for. Come on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>Okay, I'm John for your here with the Cube. Covering Del Technology Worlds Digital experience 2020 The Cube Virtual. >>Thanks for watching.