>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. It was last week, we're going to have some continued conversations here. I've got a couple of guests joining me. One is an alumni. That's Jen Felch, the Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell Technologies. Jen, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thank you. And joining Jen is Deepak Patil the SVP and GM of Dell Technologies Cloud. Deepak, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much Lisa. Excited to be here. >> So the event was last week. It was huge. We know that. And, of course, challenging in the fact that we're also used to being surrounded by thousands and thousands of people in Las Vegas and thousands and thousands of partners, but it's still a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to engage its customers and its partners in the ecosystem. We heard a lot, Deepak, last week about this shift from Dell to deliver as a service. This is what Project APEX powered by Cloud Console. What can you tell us about that? >> Absolutely, Lisa, and what an exciting week it was. We did announce Project APEX at the Dell Technologies World. We are very excited about it. Project APEX marks a strategic milestone for us and our company in three specific areas. Number one is we are on a path to significantly accelerate our transformation into an as a service world. Number two, we are investing in radically simplify the way our customers engage with us. Discover, purchase, manage offers from us. And number three is we are continuing our commitment to provide more flexibility, more choice to our customers. And to make it happen, Project APEX essentially brings all the efforts across the entire Dell Technologies from product development to services, to go to market motions, marketing, finance under the Project APEX umbrella. It's a significant endeavor and we are really excited about it. Of course- >> Companies, oh go ahead, sorry. >> I'm sorry. Of course the Cloud Console that you mentioned is a key component of realizing the Project APEX Division and taking Project APEX to our customers. We are in the public preview of the Cloud Console. Using the Cloud Console with a few clicks, our customers can browse through a catalog of cloud services from us, as well as our partners using a self-serve immersive experience, they can then purchase products like the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription. IT professionals then can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid solutions like VMware Tanzu. Our customers can then manage and monitor workloads, and using real time insights and data, they can take actions like extending and expanding the system when the capacity is running low. As you know, we also announced storage as a service offering, but an offering like storage as a service using Cloud Console, our customers can see real time insights and cost breakdowns by the teams or cost centers. So, in many ways, the cloud Console really brings the power of Project APEX and the entire cloud operating model to our customer's fingertips. We're very excited about it. >> Lot of work there. So one the things I remember talking Dell Technologies World 2019 about the big digital transformation that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Deepak, you mentioned from a Project APEX perspective, this acceleration of transformation. Jen, over to you, as the Chief Digital Officer and the CIO, how has your team been able to enable this shift to the as a service model to facilitate the self-service and all of the capabilities that Deepak talked about? What's that been like? >> Well, it's been pretty exciting from a couple fronts is, you know, we've always had some aspect of as a service in our offering, whether that is software, our DFS organization, or, you know, as funny as it might sound, our actual services organization is certainly as a service. But as Deepak mentioned, and what our customers tell us, is that let's do more of that. Let's take the broad portfolio of technical solutions and services that we have today and make them simple, consistent, give IT leaders and organizations choice. And so, as the internal team, internal IT team, we play two roles. One is to, we're an internal customer. We're a very large customer of all of the Dell technology products and solutions. And so, we get to offer a lot of feedback about how we would like to work, what we've been doing to really innovate in terms of how we bring things together. And mostly we get to be those early adopters for our product groups in groups like, like Deepak's, which is wonderful to be able to give that early feedback and contribute to great solutions. The second part of it is actually doing the enablement of as a service of how, what are the underlying components that go into the engagement platform that Deepak mentioned, the Cloud Console. How does that leverage the scale of Dell, yet create those really simple consistent, transparent choices for our customers? So our teams get to sit side by side in terms of how we develop these solutions and how we're bringing Project APEX to life, both as a customer and as a development partner, so that we can really bring that together for our customers. And I'm pretty excited about using the solutions. We get to, you know, be involved with it every day. And I can't wait until it's running even more of our infrastructure internally. >> Big, big effort. Deepak, let's come back to you and talk about the market. As we know, this is a very competitive market, congested. You talked about some of the other things that we talked about on theCUBE as well for Dell technologies, world storage as a service. With this landscape that is highly competitive and has been for quite some time with this new strategy, Project APEX, what part of the market, or parts, is Dell going after? >> Absolutely. And just one comment on what Jen said. The work that Jen's team and my team are doing sitting side by side is an example, and just one of the many examples, but a shining example of how we are putting the power of unified Dell technologies behind this effort. Going back to your question, Lisa, we are in what we call it the fourth industrial revolution or whatever you want to call it. We are in a massive shift to a simple, flexible and an operating model full of choices with respect to this as a service cloud transformation, across the industry. Over the next few years, whoever essentially captures the market is going to have to deliver three core promises to our customers. Number one, is we know that we're in the middle of a multi-cloud hybrid cloud world. Any service provider, any cloud provider that eliminates the seams across different cloud environments and makes a multi-cloud experience truly consistent and simple and modern and seamless is going to have a massive advantage. Number two, customers' workforce are going to be all over the place. Good portion of their workforce are going to be in their data centers, good portions of workloads are going to be on Edge, And then are going to be good portions of workloads that are going to be in public cloud. Anybody who meets customers where they're at so that customers don't have to massively invest, invest massively in re-engineering and the VR protector and refactoring, but still enjoy the benefits of this new cloud operating model, from performance and reliability to scalability and efficiency, with the minimum possible efforts, is going to create a significant value proposition. And number three, anybody who essentially focuses on outcomes and experiences and workloads, rather than products and specific offers is going to have a significant benefit. And the work we're doing under the umbrella of Project APEX essentially delivers on all three of those promises. As I mentioned, we radically and massively simplify and eliminate the seams across different cloud environments. We focus on outcome based conversation and with the work that we're doing on with VMware on our massive 4,200 plus people partner, 4,200 plus partner ecosystem, we are working to meet customers where they're at instead of forcing them to re-engineer and re-architect and move to cloud instead of the cloud coming to meet them wherever they're at. So we do believe that the strengths that we traditionally have always had with respect to the broad technology and product and services portfolio, 30 plus thousand sales force, 4,200 plus people partner ecosystem, and a massive asset through the partner, just the best 20 plus year old partnership we have with NEOM brand, and the broad product, as well as partner portfolio at NEOM. We even like a chances in terms of helping each and every customer we work with fundamentally modernize their own portfolio, help their customers and make significant progress on their digital transformation journey. >> We definitely know that there was a big engine, a lot of momentum behind the size and the scale of Dell itself. So going back to you, Jen, if we think about some of the things that we heard again at Dell Technologies World, when we spoke with Jeff Clark, who's the COO and Vice Chairman of Dell technologies. Just in the last couple of weeks, he talked about six areas and IT innovation that Dell is focusing on. and I wanted to get your thoughts on these. Pirate Cloud, Edge, 5G, AI and ML, data management and security. In your opinion, Jen, what of this suite of six areas of IT innovation sets Dell up for success? >> That's a good question. And you know, I would say these six areas are not foreign to us. They're not necessarily brand new. They're all sit kind of right next to areas where we have very deep expertise. And so I think about the fact that, you know, we design, manufacturer, service and manage IT solutions all over the world. Large customers, small customers, consumers. We have an incredible breadth and reach of what we're doing today both from the solutions that we provide and the experiences that our customers are driving. Whether that is, you know, extending work from home or learn from home or they're, you know, going through a digital transformation as Deepak talked about, trying to really simplify their ecosystem. Oftentimes it's Dell, that's sitting right there with them. So we have an opportunity, I think unlike many others, to bring the technical expertise from the products and services that we offer, along with the experience from really working with the best and brightest of customers, as well as this ecosystem of partners 42,000, I mean, Deepak, that's a really big number, but that creates a real opportunity for innovation as things like 5G really emerge. And we have the power behind the data management analytics to support ML and AI. So, you know, when I step back and, and look at kind of what sets us up for success, it's not something that just happened yesterday. It's something that's been happening at Dell for a very long time, which is the deep technical expertise and really close engagements with our customers so that we can focus on bringing technology to solve the problems of today and set us up for the future. I know, as an IT leader, I appreciate the fact that solutions from Dell are very open. So they give us a lot of flexibility to not only provide a solution for today, but solutions that will last over time, that we have some flexibility. We don't have an incredible lock that we can never get out of it. So I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to these innovations and really, we have solutions in most, all of these areas today. I know they'll just continue to get better and better. >> Jen, last question for you before we wrap, because of course, Project APEX that Deepak talked about and kind of dug into, massive undertaking, of course, during the time of a massive change to the entire world, where suddenly, this shift to work from home was a rapid pivot. I can imagine as your teams, you talked about both of your teams really kind of not co-locating physically anymore but being able to work together. How did you manage that, and to enable the team to stay on track, to deliver this for Dell Technologies World? That's a big, it's a big task. >> It is a big task, but we have great teams. And, you know, I think as we've, we've kind of, the status quo has been disrupted, not necessarily by us, right, but by the environment that we're in. And so Deepak and I, and several other leaders, we keep our teams close and focused on where we're aiming, what we're, you know, what our mission is so that we can continue to innovate. And I will tell you, I feel like we have an incredible focus. The vision is clear as to where we want to go. And it probably just sounds simple but it's just engaged leadership. That's how we keep people focused. That's how we're keeping our eye on the ball of where we're headed. >> That's, couldn't be more important. You know, you talked about simplicity, about that engaged leadership is so key. You guys, thank you so much. There's so much more we could dig into. I wish we had more time. Thank you for sharing what's going on with Project APEX, Dell technologies, how it's helping customers transform, because we know right now, that digital transformation is only accelerating. So we'll have to have you back to talk about what's going on. Deepak, Jen, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, Jen Felch and Deepak Patil, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual experience. (digitized music)