(upbeat tech music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas of Dell Technologies World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my esteemed co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC and Muneyb Minhazuddin, who is the VP solutions of product marketing at VMware. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE. You guys are veterans. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're going to talk about the VMware, Dell EMC storage portfolio. It is better together, which sounds like it's a theme for a political campaign. Walk our viewers through, give us some examples of how you are jointly coming up with solutions. >> Yeah, I'll start if that's all right. I think that a lot of what we've seen is that the Dell Technologies cloud strategy is such an important thing about what we're talking about today, but what we've also seen is that when we're looking to use the cloud, external storage is an important part of that strategy, so what we've already done is we've collaborated together to validate VCF with both unity and power max. And that's really the beginning of our journey together, to enable that external storage to be part of the workload domain, to have SDDC manager not just manage the other parts of the infrastructure, but to manage external storage and that you can have resiliency and performance for those workloads that need it, those kind of high value workloads that need it, and that's really the beginning. We think it's going to get much broader, much deeper integration as we continue to work together. >> Yeah and I think as a continued theme, and our solutions as, you know, Caitlin was pointing out, again, you know, what's most important and what's customers want out of this and their evolution of, you know, workloads, which are very data center centric and, you know, clients of our architecture with a very specific infrastructure, design, application, shifting towards more cloud native and public cloud hybrid applications. So, that has a different nature of storage requirements that got to evolve from block storage, file storage, object storage. That evolution needs to happen and not only happens better together with VMware and Dell EMC, so. >> So, Caitlin, I think back to this is the 10th year we're having theCUBE here, what used to be EMC World and it used to be you talked about VMware and storage and it was okay, let's go through the integration points that we had and EMC would say "we're as good or better "than everybody out there" and check all the boxes here. There's a shift today when we're talking about not just working with it, but, you know, integrations of products really it looks more like joint solutions. We know in VxRail, there's, you know, joint development that happens on, so give us a little bit about that difference about, you know, 2019 storage with Dell EMC and VMware versus the past. >> Yeah, and there is a shift, right? We're here together. (laughs) >> Absolutely. And our teams, our product management teams, our organizations are coming together, they're spending a lot of time together collaborating on what our strategy is together. How do we best approach that so we can bring solutions to our customers that provide that level that Dell Technologies can really provide that no one else can? And it's truly something unique and differentiated and what we're talking about today is really just the beginning. There's a lot more to come on that front. >> And you know, I think also the integrations in the past where I would call them API, interface driven, now like you point out, it's co-engineered starting with the solutions like VxRail, cloud foundation, and the co-engineering makes a big difference because we're sharing road maps. We're sharing hey, what are we thinking about performance? What are we thinking about, you know, application requirements? And that's very different to just, I'm going to partner with you, I'm going to pass from APIs, you going to call some APIs, and that has an impact on like ready solutions, it is cloud foundation, a full stack with life cycle, SDDC Manager. That kind of integration only happens with co-engineering. >> Talk a little bit about the partnership and this better together. We talked about the products and the solutions, but I want to hear about the cultural, the cultures of the two companies. We know, I mean they're both technology powerhouse, both technology optimists. How would you describe the different cultures and how you can reflect each other and collaborate with each other in different ways? >> You want to start with that one? >> Sure, I think it's very interesting coming from, you know, west coast software, agile, we're like hey, we'll have VMworld in a few months, but you know, we're still from a software agile world. We're coming out with new services for Vmworld, we're not defined yet. And then working with, you know, Dell EMC folks who are, you're already looking at performance, infrastructure, planning, so the road map alignment of, you know, every three months, I'm going to come out with software innovation, whereas you have to put a lot of thought process into how to do this. It's actually had been quite interesting. You know, it's I would call it interesting because it was tough. It was tough initially to kind of figure out how do you kind of, you know, bring a cohesive road map where you're making 12 months, you know, infrastructure, investment in road map to three months of software cycle, but I think it's actually come together really well. >> And at the end of the day, we're talking the same customers and we're solving the same problems and in a lot of ways, that kind of legacy Dell EMC's side has come from the infrastructure, from the bottom up, and then the VMware kind of has come from the top down, and bringing those two together, although our development cycles have a different kind of time span against them, we're trying to solve the same problems for our customers and that's really where a lot of those innovations are going to continue to come. >> One of those interesting points you talk about from the bottom down and the top, bottom down and bottom up and top down. Sorry, >> (laughter) it's been a long day so far. >> We forgive you. We forgive you. >> These new waves of technology, you know, remember back to, you know, when flash rolled out. There were things that needed to do the infrastructure layer and there's stuff that happens on the application side. We are seeing a real renaissance in what's happening in the storage industry. Talk about NVMe, storage class memory. It's not just okay I have some new gear and I have to redo it, but, you know, it dramatically changes, you know, we're getting ready to scuzzy stack when you talk about the applications side, so, you know, I'd love to hear how this comes together and, you know, what's in the product today and how are you developing these together? >> Another interesting example that almost crosses those two is CloudIQ. So CloudIQ is something that we've developed in-house. It's an agile developed software application that is a cloud native app developed with pivotal, runs on a Dell EMC cloud. That's run out of our side of the house and it came out actually with Unity three years ago today. We now have that not just across our core storage portfolio, but we have that now with VM health insights, as well, where we've actually taken that approach where we can give that impact as well, and I think that that just shows you kind of how we do have those pieces of the culture too coming together and trying to bring these solutions together. >> I know, and I think again, you know, thinking customers first, right. We talk about this, you know, multi cloud, hybrid cloud environments where people are taking their workloads, they compute storage, networking requirement, and they're trying to migrate their workloads back and forth, but, you know, there's a more important part of the workload migration is also the data migration, right, so how do you take, you know, data migration and look at different data sources, look at your data bases, look at your, you know, different kind of data migration, and that's where, you know, storage is so critical. It's easy to take a snapshot of a workload and move it across, but then, if you have to pin it on a very seamless data migration pad, you have to have really clear storage strategies, which will support your, you know, hyper converge, your hybrid cloud, your external storage strategies that you got to map to that migration pad. >> Yeah and a service that we're going to announce tomorrow I started to kind of address that too, of like, how do you combine some of the public cloud compute and the agility of that with using these native array-based replication to get the data there, right, and combining not just that simple data movement, but having that application awareness and that application consistency, which is so critical for things like disaster recovery, which is one of the main things we certainly hear from our customers, how do I used the public cloud as my DR site? They don't want to run their own disaster recovery data centers. Customers of all shapes and sizes are really going there and something that we're announcing tomorrow is another example of that so we'll talk more about that one tomorrow, but we've got some more news on that one as well. >> So, in talking about the trends in cloud, we know that it's a multi cloud world, it's a hybrid cloud world. You were just talking about the different ways in which customers want to do their work and the different places they want to do it, public, private. What are some other trends that you're seeing and where do you think we're going to be talking about it in the years to come on this? >> Sure, like, you know, I think the traditional workloads is breaking out into two things. One is do I migrate into the cloud? And the second is I'm rewriting the application to be more cloud native. And it's not the entire application, and it's a classic example, I'm sure all of you do mobile banking, right? And guess what? I've worked with, lot of financial companies are doing this. It's a really cool, cloud native mobile application where I'm doing all my mobile banking, but then, my query goes to a main frame in a banking ledger, which is still, you know, where your banking ledgers maintain. And then pull through a three tier application through a web and database tier, pushed out to the cloud, and accessed by a cloud native environment. Where I'm coming at is even though it looks very modern, a lot of customers are maintaining this computer history museum, which all these apps are scaling through and that's not going away in our lifetime, because, you know, there's a lot of complexity in there, and it's really how we help our customers in the journey to pay off their technical debt and move over to newer technologies, be it cloud, cloud native, and get a clean start. You know, if you're a startup, you don't have all these technical debt, but unfortunately a lot of the large companies have these technical debt and how we help customers, because they're really lost. They're like I don't know what to do, there's so much coming at me, and they need the help, and I think that that's where the power of Dell Technologies comes together in giving them that journey. >> Yeah and the bank is a really good example. We have a customer who's exactly that example where everything from the main frame that runs all their transaction processing that they've always run to their mobile applications all run off of a power max, and part of this journey for them is that they absolutely need that infrastructure, but they also need to simplify their operations as much as possible and I think one platform to consolidate all that on is true in banks, and governments, and hospitals around the world and I think that that's part of where we see a lot of this pull of how do I get that cloud experience, but how do I still use that infrastructure that I have? >> Caitlin, everybody's trying to squint through the new announcement of the Dell Technologies cloud there and what does this mean to the storage people, you know, what storage is underneath that? Is that something that they see it, will they recognize it? I was wondering if you can help eliminate that some. >> Yeah and some of this will be a little clearer too tomorrow as we talk through a little bit more of the details, but if you think through the Dell Technologies cloud strategy essentially as two parts, the Dell Technologies cloud announced today and then Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure that we'll talk through tomorrow. So the Dell Technologies cloud, what we announced today, essentially has two different flavors announced today and then one that we kind of said where we're going in the future. One is the Dell Technologies cloud platform, which is essentially the VxRail infrastructure and that's that first offer, and then there's the data center as service, the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. The third one, which was only mentioned quickly today, is that validated design. So that's leveraging our best of breed three tier architecture, including storage with that. The term that Jeff used today was VCF ready. Right, it validated with VCF, that's with Unity and Power max today. Again, that's the beginning, but you can picture what we're doing with validated design, is really enabling us to offer our three tier architecture, best of breed, across all three tiers, and leveraging VCF for that life cycle management, etc. >> And again, it's giving customers those choices to say hey, do I want to keep and maintain my, modernize my infrastructure, or do I have, you know, and this is the trend shifting where hybrid, you know, people will be talking about that, it's just the trend shifted only in the last couple of years for hybrid in, shut down my data center and go to the cloud. Now it's really kind of gone two way. The streets changed from not just going from data center to the cloud, but also coming from cloud to the data center, so the interesting challenges become about not just taking the requirements of your, you know, client server architecture and migrating it to, you know, elastic cloud architecture, which also taking that elastic EC2, you know, Azure environment and landing them into your data center environments managed a service, so that comes with its own challenges, but that's where customers want it to be, because you know, they're going "I've built so much IP, natively in my cloud, "applications that I've built over the years "and now I have a need for it closer to my data center "or my users or my edge and I really need to bring it back" And that's, you know, having challenges from a storage perspective. Now, they were not designed for client server, they were designed for cloud native elasticity, so I go to build storage architecture that's supposed there. >> And I think the other pieces that, and we'll talk some about this tomorrow, but this Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure is kind of a, the other side of the coin, where we think about Dell Technologies cloud, that's really transforming into a cloud operating model and you're purchasing infrastructure to really transform that, but a lot of our customers want to use the cloud for very specific use cases. They want to replace tape and they want to archive to the cloud, right, so we have the capabilities and we'll continue and the vast capabilities of simply moving data from your infrastructure into public cloud, converting into object and putting in there, so you've met the cost profile, and you can maybe finally get rid of tape. I think I've for 14 years been trying to get rid of tape in the industry. Haven't gotten there yet. But then there's things like offering your data services, storage, data protection, data services in a cloud, so offer to find assets in the cloud or even as a service consumption of our infrastructure. So again, more on that tomorrow. And then there's the how do you manage that infrastructure and the data itself? Having that visibility on that and that's really that kind of cloud data insights piece of that. So that's really the cloud enabled infrastructure piece is really about getting to how do I leverage the cloud for disaster recovery, for archiving, for analytics? That type of thing. So, a lot of the things we'll talk about tomorrow more focus on those types of cases as well. >> Well you've given us a lot of tantalizing tidbits about what we're going to hear tomorrow, so thank you-- >> So now you have to tune in. >> We will be here. You better be here too. >> I know where to find you. >> Caitlin, Muneyb, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was great. >> Thanks. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have a lot more of our, theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE! Our continuing coverage at VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host John Troyer. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Chhandomay Mandal, the director of product marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, it's great to talk to you again! >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> We just seem to do this circuit in Las Vegas. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> So, loads of people here, we last got to speak four months ago at Dell Technologies World, thematically that event about making IT transformation real, about making digital transformation real, security transformation real. Let's talk about IT transformation. Yesterday, Pat Gelsinger talked about you know, the essentialness that customers have to transform IT, it's an enabler of digital transformation, let's talk about what Dell EMC is continuing to help customers do, to transform their IT so they can really get, get on that successful journey to digital transformation. >> Yes, the Dell transformation is key into this digital economy in order to thrive in this new world, right? And, digital transformation is fueled by IT transformation. For us, IT transformation means modernizing the underlying infrastructure, so that they can deliver on scale, performance, availability, cost-effectiveness. They can also automate a lot of the manual processes, and streamline the operations, net result being freeing up the resources, and kind of like, deliver the transformation for not only application processes, but also businesses in general. So, with our portfolio, we are helping customers into this journey and since we talked at Dell Technologies World, it is going great, we are seeing a lot of adoption in this portfolio. >> Chhandomay, I love, you know, you work on high-end storage, right? Which is. >> Yes. >> Which means that these are business-critical applications that you are supporting. >> Absolutely. >> And, that means that they're the most, in some of the ways, some of the most interesting, right? And the deepest and most important, when you're talking digital transformation. But it comes down to, you know, as you say, efficiency and how the IT department is running. In the olden days, you'd get a VMAX, and you'd have an admin, and there's a lot of knobs and adjustments and tuning, and you have to keep that machine running smoothly because they're supporting the enterprise. Now, new next generation PowerMax, some of the, you know, tell us a little about that. What I'm really impressed with is all the automation, and all the efficiency that goes into that platform. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So, PowerMax is our latest flagship high-end product. It's an end-to-end NVMe design platform, designed to deliver like highest level of performance. Not just performance, but highest level of efficiency, as well as all the trusted data services that are synonymous with VMAX. And, not to talk about the six-nines of availability, all those goodness of the previous generations carried over. But, the key thing is, with PowerMax, what we have done is, if I need to boil it down into three things, this is a very powerful platform. It's simple, and it's trusted. So now, when I talk about very powerful, obviously performance is part and parcel. It is actually the fastest storage array. 10 million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second, >> It's a maniac, it's a, it's a screamer, it's amazing. >> Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah yeah, yeah. >> But like that's kind of like a table steak and bread and butter for us. Now, what I want to highlight is, how simple the platform has become. We have a built-in machine learning engine within the platform. And now, instead of like, I need this much of capacity and this much of performance, you can actually provision storage based on the surface levels that you need to give your customers. And we, underneath, will take care of like whatever it means for any workloads you are running. And how are you doing it? So for example, today, right? Most of the applications are still like business applications, like Oracle, SAP, you name it. But, within the digital transformation, a lot of the modern, analytics heavy applications are also coming in, right? So, if I were to break it up it would be say like, 80, 20, to 80% business, 20% modern applications. Now, we are seeing the modern applications getting adopted like higher and higher and-- >> It's going to flip, right? At some point. >> Yes. Like in three to five years, the ratio will be opposite. Now, if you are buying an array like PowerMax today, how can we deliver the performance you need for business applications of today, while taking care of the analytics heavy applications of tomorrow, at the same time, meeting your applications? I mean, meeting your SLS all the way through. And that's where the machine learning engine comes in. It like, takes 40 million data sets in real-time. It makes six billion decisions per day, and, essentially, it figures out from the patterns in the data, how to optimize where to place the load, without the administrators having to like, tune anything, so it's like, extremely simple. Completely automated, thanks to the AI and ML engine. >> Taking advantage of those superpowers, AI, ML, that Pat. >> Yes. >> Talked about yesterday, so you talked about it's efficient, it's fast, trusted. Speaking of trust, Rackspace, long-time partner of Dell EMC and VMware, we actually spoke with them yesterday, Dell EMC and PowerMax particularly, have been really kind of foundational to enabling Rackspace to really accelerate their business, in terms of IT transformation. Talk to us about that in terms of them as a customer. >> So, nice that you bring up, Rackspace, they got a shout-out from Pat yesterday as the leading multi-cloud provider in the managed space, right. Now, if you look at Rackspace, they have like 100,000 plus customers all with various types of needs. Now, with a platform like PowerMax, they are able to simplify their IT environment, reduce a lot of consolidation happening on that dense platform. So they can reduce the footprint a lot of, less power culling. At the end of the day, they're minimizing their operational expenses, simplifying the management, how they manage their infrastructure, monitor their infrastructure. It becomes kind of like, invisible, or self-driving storage. Like, you really like, don't worry about it. You worry about the business, value it, and innovations that IT can bring, for your digital transformation. While the array kind of like, does it own work. A lot of work, no mistake about it. But everything is kind of like, hidden from the admin perspective. Whether you are running Oracle or Splunk, it figures out like what to do. Not only like maintaining the service levels, but as the technology evolves you bring in not just NVMe necessities, but next-generation storage class memory, they are going to automate and do the plasmid by itself. >> Yeah, that's huge, right? Because, and that's where you free up those time and resources, and brain power, frankly, for your IT and group then to be able to work on more strategic projects than tuning this particular data store and LUN or whatever for Splunk and et cetera, right? You've got so much, again, self-driving kind of self-driving storage, there. I also, Chhandomay, I also wanted to talk about the other kind of high-end array in Dell EMC's portfolio, the XtremeIO. And that, you know, all-flash, you can talk a little about that, but you know, what are the use cases there, and when should people be looking at that? And what kind of, what's new in that world? >> Sure. So, PowerMax is the flagship high-end productive spin, like evolved over 30 years, 1,000 plus patents, right? Whereas if you contrast it, XtremeIO is a purpose-built, all-flash array designed to take advantage of the flash media and designed from the ground up. Now, it delivers very high performance with consistently low latency. But, the key innovation there is the way it does in line, all the time, our data services. Especially the data reduction, the content, 800% in memory content, our metadata, helps deliver a new class of copy services so, and then, I mean, it scales modular loots, scale up and scale out. So, the use cases where XtremIO is very efficient is where you need a lot of, I mean you have a lot of common datas, for example VDI, we can offer like, very high data reduction ratios reducing your footprint for VDI type environment. The other use case is active, open data management. So, for example, like for every database, there are probably like eight to 10 copies at a minimum. Now with XtremIO, like you can actually use those copies, same as the production platform, and, cut around workloads on them. Like whether it's like your VIO upload, or like reporting test day of sandboxing. All of those things can be run at the same platform, and like the array will be able to deliver like, without any sweat. >> And as I said, you're doing copy data management sort of thing? >> Yes. >> Yeah, okay that's great. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Yeah, that's. >> So, customer examples, you know how much I love that. You talked about this really strong example with PowerMax and Rackspace. Give us a great example of a customer using XtremIO X2 that's really enabled with these superpowers to grow their businesses. >> Sure, so at VMware what best can it be saying the customer, in this case will be, guess what? >> VMware. (laughing) >> So, VMware's IT cloud infrastructure team is using XtremIO X2 for their factualized SMP HANA environment. And there are several other workloads in the pipeline. But what I want to highlight is like, what and how they are doing it. So they have their production environment, they are leveraging replication technologies for our tier, and then from that tier, they are making copies, on those copies they are applying the patches, sandboxing, all those things. An exact replica of the production environment. And then, like when they are done, they are rolling it back out to the production. And the entire workflow is kind of like automated, tested, and a great example of, like how they are doing it. But it's not just the copy that are management, there are other aspects to it. So for example, the performance. Now, they started with like a two terabyte VM and they tried to clone both in the traditional storage, and XtremIO. With the traditional storage, it took like 2 1/2 hours. With XtremIO, it was done in like 90 seconds. >> So from two hours to 90 seconds. >> Seconds. >> Is dramatic. >> And, like they ran the data reduction, they can as if. So, for VMware's entire ESX production environment, this is like 1.2 petabyte storage. Now, with XtremIO data reduction technology, they can see that it will be reduced to like, 240 terabyte worth of storage. So, essentially, from three rows of storage, it would be reduced to three racks of XtremIO. So, you can see, these settings in, all over the place. Like, I mean footprint, power cooling management, all of those things. So, that would be my best example of, like, how XtremIO X2 is being used for, I mean, in a transformative way in the IT environment. >> Well it kind of goes along with one of the things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday from VMware's perspective is, I think that the stat was, they've been able to reduce CO2 emissions by 540 million tons. Sounds like XtremIO might be, want to be, invisible. >> Yeah, of course. >> Facilitators. >> Yeah, yeah. Like we are contributing a lot in that. And I mean, at the end of the day, this is, like, what digital transformation is about right? So like, absolutely, yes. >> That's great, Chhandomay, I mean, the, I would love to have a problem. I would love to have a problem that required running, you know, hot on XtremIO because I think those are super interesting problems. And the fact that you can, you know, actually turn those huge data sets into something that's actually manageable and, I can envision three racks, I can't really envision, half a data center's worth of spinning discs, so, that's amazing. I love the fact that the engineering that goes into these high-end systems that you, on your, on the team, there. >> Yeah, so the one other thing I wanted to mention was the future-proof loyalty program. >> Yeah we've heard a little bit about that, tell us. >> Yes, so, this is essentially for our customers three things, like one is peace of mind. You know like what you are getting, there are no surprises. The second thing is investment protection. And then the third would be like (mumbles). So, there are like several components to it. And, like, it is not only like for XtremIO or PowerMax, it's pretty much like for the portfolio there is a list. Like, of what is part of it, and it's continually growing. Now for XtremIO and PowerMax purpose is the important things of asking for like if it's a three year warranty, and then like tier pricing, they know, like, exactly like what they are going to pay for support today as well as when maintenance renewal comes up. Then, (mumbles) migrations. So, back from exchange, right? Like with XtremIO to the next-generation PowerMax to PowerMax dot next, but like, they are covered with non-disruptive migration plans, storage efficiencies. And the last two things that we added they truly like we have announced that VMware is cloud-enabled. And cloud conception models, so like, I mean, as Michael says, cloud is not a place it's an operating model. So even with XtremIO and PowerMax, customers can pay for what they're using, and then, like, it's called flex on-demand. And they use, I mean when they use the buffer space, they can pay for that. And then with CloudIQ, we can monitor the storage areas from the cloud. It's the storage analytics, so it's cloud-enabled as well. So it covered pretty much like, all of the things Pat talked about yesterday. >> Fantastic, well I'm going to go out on a limb. Yesterday, I've asked a number of folks, what would you describe, I asked Scott Delandy, the superpower of certain technologies. And what I'm getting from this is trust. Like, the Trustinator, so, maybe that? Can you make a sticker by the time we get to Dell Technologies World next year? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. >> Chhandomay, awesome. Great to have you back on theCUBE, >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for sharing all the excitement what's going on. We'll talk to you next time. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, for John Troyer, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at VMware with day two from the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Annoucer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you be Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back to Las Vegas theCUBE continuing our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls here on theCUBE, along with Keith Townsend, and we're joined by Suresh Sathyamurthy, who is the Vice President of Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions Marketing at Dell EMC. Suresh, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> You bet. All right, so we're about two days in. >> Okay. >> To the show here. How's it been going for you, and what are you hearing from customers? >> It's been fantastic. I've had a few customer meetings since I got here. The amazing thing is the interest in IT transformation and digital transformation. There used to be a time when we do these conferences, the conversation would be around products, right? Like what's new with the products, what's coming up for launch? Now they're talking about transforming their IT. How do they transform their data center with solutions and the products that span server, storage, data protection, cloud? It's amazing. I'm seeing that shift of the conversation going from products to transforming your data center. >> And what's accelerating that? Because to me, that's the kind of conversation or thought process that folks in that community should have been having for some time. So, what's the acceleration now? >> So we did third party study with ESG where we surveyed about a thousand executives to find out what is it that they were interested in, and what do they think about IT transformation, and why it matters to them. Here's what we found out, and these are just a few data points. The full study is available on our website. We found out that they believe that they're going to be three x faster, in terms of completion of their IT projects, twice as likely to meet and exceed their revenue goals, and they would have 33% more budget to invest in innovation. If you think about it, that is spectacular. That is amazing. There used to be a day and age when the only conversation around IT would be, how do you reduce cost. Now we are having a conversation about how do you create new business models. So IT has transformed from this backend function to something that is enabling the businesses to build new business models, create new revenue streams, manage customer experience better, and I think that is at the heart of why the conversations have shifted. >> So let's talk about some technologies. What are some of the resulting technologies or changes in technology? Anything emerging that you'd like to talk about? >> The two things that I think is happening now, the first is cloud, the acceptance of hybrid cloud and how the cloud is being leveraged for this transformation. And the second is the use of data through the technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And if you think about those technologies, they aren't really something that has come out of nowhere. It is an extension of a data continuum that we have been having. So the way I look at it is, you have creation of data, you have analysis of data, you have machines that learn from data, and then using the data to act as the data continuum. We have always had creation of data. It came from traditional applications, now it's coming from cloud applications, as well as endpoints, and IOT. So it's increasing the volume of data that is coming in. That has changed how data has been ingested. So storage of data has shifted. It's no longer about scale-up architectures, it's about scale-out architectures and software-defined architectures. And then there are technologies like Hadoop and Splunk and SAP, for which we provide ready solutions for that's going to help you analyze the data. So a natural part of this extension is how do you get those machines to use the data to learn and improve themselves, and you train them to go do that. That's where machine learning comes in, and it's a critical part of what we want to provide infrastructure for. And the final piece of it is acting on it, which is where I see AI play, where you have application status substituting for human intelligence in making decisions and acting on that information. >> So talk to us about the real conversation. It's about making it real. We're at. >> Yes. >> Dell EMC World 2018, and the theme is making it real. Read a stat yesterday, survey, 50% of CIOs believe in the next few years they are going to have an AI project. >> Sarush: Yes. >> You know what? I asked Siri to play a song for me the other day. I asked her five times and ended up picking it up and just typing in the solution. AI is all over the place in definition. >> Sarush: Correct. >> As you're having conversations, what are the types of projects and the scope of projects that customers want to engage AI and machine learning to achieve what business outcome? >> Yes, so it actually depends by industry, but the way I think about it is now as companies look at their application infrastructure, typically large enterprises are probably about 5000 applications, right? And when the time comes to upgrade the software and upgrade those applications or write new applications for new customer experiences or new business models, they see AI as an integral part of the design point in building those applications. That has never been the case in the past, right? So you have now cloud native applications evolving, and I would bet that any cloud native applications that is either customer facing or is going to be critical to the decision making of an business or enterprise, is going to have AI built in by default. Now this would change by industry. So if I'm taking supply chain, for example, Jeff Clarke talked about this in his keynote on how Dell EMC is changing supply chain with using machine learning. The other one was customer service and support, where we have a product called Pro Assist, that uses predictive analytics. The amazing thing is we reduced our time-to-service the customer 91%. So imagine what AI can bring to those applications that have already existed that are now getting better, faster, and more intelligent in terms of servicing our customers. And the experience of our customers are going to change as well. Now it is not just what we provide to our customers in terms of platforms, we are customers of these technologies as well. So we talked about the PowerMax, which was launched this morning. It makes six billion decisions a day. It has built in machine learning, and it's helping the storage administrator's job be more easier because the decisions need not be made by humans anymore. It's optimizing by itself. It's amazing how much these softwares are going to evolve with technologies like AI. >> So I love the fact that six billion decisions are being made. >> Everyday. >> Everyday. I can't even decide what I'm having for dinner tonight. >> That's a very important decision though, just like that song you wanted to play on Siri. >> Exactly. >> 'Cause I want to ask you about it later. >> But what's really interesting, is where the control plane and processing and this activity will take place. Not just the PowerMax, but a lot of announcements today around FPGAs in servers, up to eight GPUs in a server. >> Sarush: Correct. >> Are customers prepared to now manage those environments or are they looking to have that stuff outsourced to a Google or a local Dell EMC partner to lend that expertise? Where is the expertise for all of this AI? >> We believe that the world is going to be multi-cloud. We have done third party research and surveys where we found that 81% of even our own customer base, are going to be multi-cloud. So our intent is to build technologies that is agnostic of where the data resides. You should be able to analyze your data in a public cloud environment, in a private cloud environment, or in hybrid cloud environment. And depending on what sort of security compliance requirements you need to meet, you make the choice, and we build the technologies for you. A part of what we also do, is rather that just provide a compute platform, yes, we did provide 840 and 940 XA, the PowerEdge servers with these eight GPUs that's going to help you analyze your data, but we also provide ready solutions for machine learning where compute, storage, networking and the software is packaged in. And you buy one box that you plug in to do the analysis as well. And you can also have these applications written on our cloud providers that we partner with to have those done as well. You could build your cloud native applications that use AI on top of the VMware and Pivotal and Dell EMC infrastructure, which Pat Gelsinger from Vmware talked about yesterday as well. So it should not matter which cloud the data resides in and where the analysis actually happens. We will be able to provide the infrastructure for you in private, public, or hybrid environments. >> Yeah, when you're talking about machine learning, and you think about all this rich data that's coming in and then processing it, making some analytical evaluation of it through AI, give me an example, if you would, of something that is capable in that chain of events today and just maybe 12 months ago, 18 months ago, wouldn't happen, couldn't happen. >> Oh, the example that I just used about PowerMax and the applied machine learning that we have built into the product. We did announce the PowerMax same time here, and I was here talking about one of the Vmax versions last year. It didn't have machine learning built into it. Today a storage array that can process decisions by itself, without the involvement of a storage administrator, make a decision on which media to optimize to get maximum performance off it. And we are just 12 months since last Dell EMC World. So it's a real time example that we have employed within our technologies to see how we can change those, and that's going to rapidly accelerate how much involvement humans need to have in these decisions as well. >> So that bring up an interesting point. Six billion decisions, those decisions can be made because the process is extremely close to the data. >> Sarush: Yeah. >> So super low latency between the two. You guys gave onstage today the example of, you know what you want your alternative vehicle to make the decision right there, and not send the decision up to the cloud. I have this theory that we've heard data has gravity, but now compute is starting to have that gravity. And there's this need that, this specialized eight GPUs, FPGAs, that equipment doesn't exist everywhere, but the data needs to get there. What are the conversations you're having with customers about data accessibility including the data where the compute is at? >> Yeah, it depends by industry, but the way we look at it, what we are hearing from our customers is to think about their edges as the core. It used to be edge to core to cloud. Now you have an intelligent edge and a distributed core. That is how it has changed over the last two, three years. Intelligent edge because your edges, the devices, the endpoints, the edges are making decisions themselves without having transferred data to the cloud, just like your autonomous car example. If you are waiting for data to come back from the cloud on whether you have to brake the car or not when there's an interference in front of you, that's not going to work, right? So the ability to have intelligent edges is becoming more essential. We keep hearing that from our customers, and we want to provide solutions that enable the edges to be smart. And we do. With rugged and fan-less embedded systems, as well as PowerEdge servers for the edges, as well. But that doesn't mean all the compute happens at the edge, the cloud is a critical part of where analysis happens. And if it is not real time streaming analytics where decisions have to be made at the endpoint, there is a lot of value in analyzing data that you've gathered over the years and using that data to learn from it and make decisions as well. A big chunk of that missing learning happens in the cloud. So I think it's a combination of both. It's not either or. We hear from our customers that they need intelligence in their edge, they need intelligence in their distributed core. And we will have solutions across both of those as well. >> So let's talk about some of the solutions at the edge. What's the fit and finish? I saw a huge, what is relative, in the data center. >> Sarush: Yeah. >> The new 840, not a big box. At the edge, that's a big box. Can't put that in my car. So what are some of the evolving technologies we'll see at the edge to handle this massive amount of data? >> So a big chunk of it is going to be, it has to be rugged because the edges can be, you have temperature variations from minus five degrees to 55 degrees. It has to be fan-less because it has to be optimal enough to fit into the size of any object or device that you want to do, and we offer solutions for those as well within our PowerEdge offerings. We have those as well. But what you would also see is we are, across our family of businesses with Vmware, we are also extending our software capabilities to the edge to gather that information and have compute on the edges as well. And in the core, like you said, we have these larger, more comprehensive PowerEdge servers to compute, to be able to process the data for machine learning as well. >> Man: Now how do I manage all of that? >> Ah, that's a great point. This is where our cloud strategy also comes in. The management of the components used to be on premise, application level, with applications that are for specific needs, right? You used to have storage resource management software where their specific design point was to manage your storage resources. That is changing now. So we have SAS offerings, like CloudIQ, which can manage your environment from anywhere, and it has spreadative analytics built into it as well. So your management is actually made easier because it creates a predictive health score that tells you how much involvement you need to have in go fixing the issue, and if you need to be woken up to go fix an issue, it's going to do that on your behalf. Right? So that's how it is changing as well. The management is increasingly becoming SAS based applications that have intelligence built into it and that connect across your data center. It not just manages your storage, it manages your network, it manages your compute. It knows what's happening in your infrastructure, and it's informing you on your behalf. >> Well with all this capability, can you just help Keith make a decision about dinner tonight? >> I'm thinking about waffles again. >> We're talking about one in six billion, certainly we can address that, can't we? >> We can, we can. And what I would suggest is you can pick any restaurant in Bellagio, right by the Bellagio fountains and you'll have fun. >> There you go. All right. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate the insights. Thank you very much for sharing your time with us tonight. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> We'll be back with more. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat music)