>> Voiceover: 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 coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience this year. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined by two CUBE alumni from Dell EMC. Please welcome Joe Caradonna, the VP of Cloud Storage CTO. Joe, good to see you again, even though quite socially distant. >> Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. >> And Devon Reed is also joining us, the Senior Director of Product Management. Devon, how are you? >> I'm good, how are you doing? >> Good. >> Nice to be here, thank you. >> Nice to be chatting with you guys, although very, very socially distant, following rules. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World without having you guys on theCUBE, so we appreciate you joining us. So let's dig in. So much has happened in the world since we last spoke with you. But one of the things that happened last year, around a year ago, was the Dell On Demand program was launched. And now here we are nearly a year later when Michael Dell was just talking about, "Hey, Dell's plan is to go "and deliver everything as a service." We've heard some of your competitors kind of going the same route, some kind of spurned by COVID. Talk to us, Devon, we'll start with you, about what this direction is shift to as-a-service means and what it means specifically for storage. >> Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, what we talked about last year with respect to On Demand, Dell Technologies On Demand, we've had great success with that program. But before I get into what we're doing with as-a-service, I really want to talk about why we're doing the as-a-service. And when we talk to customers and partners, and when we look at the trends in the market, what we're seeing is that customers are more and more wanting to consume technology infrastructure as a service in an OPEX manner. And analysts are revising those estimates up almost daily. And what we're seeing is one of the things that's driving that is actually why we're here in this remote session as opposed to being in Vegas, doing this. And it's really the global uncertainty around the pandemic. So it's driving the need to free up cash and consume these infrastructure more as a service. Now, as Michael said... Yeah, as Michael said, we have the broadest set of infrastructure offerings in the market and we are number one in most categories. And we're in the process of building out an offer structure that cuts across all the different infrastructure components. But to get real specific on what we're doing with a storage as a service, we are in the process of building out the first true storage or as a service offering for our infrastructure starting with storage. It'll be a private preview as of Q4, by the end of this fiscal year and generally available in the first half of next year. And what we're doing is taking the infrastructure, the Dell Technology's storage and where we're flipping the business model as opposed to buying it outright, the customers actually just consume it as a service. So they have a very simple consumption model where they just pick their outcome, they pick their restored service, they pick their performance, they pick their capacity, and we deliver that service to their on-premise site. >> Let me unpack outcomes of it, 'cause I saw that in some of the information online, outcome driven. What do you mean by that, and can you give us some examples of those outcomes that customers are looking to achieve? >> Yeah, so in today's world, the way people mostly consume infrastructure is, or at least storage, is that they say, "I need a storage product." And what the customers do is they work with our sales representatives and say, "I need a XYZ product. "Maybe it's a PowerStore and I need this much capacity. "I can pick all of the components, "I can pick the number of drives, "the type of drives there are." And that's really from a product perspective. And what we're doing with the, as-a-service, is we're trying to flip the model and really drive to what the business outcome is. So the business outcome here is really, I need block storage, I need this performance level, I need this much capacity. And then we basically ship the infrastructure, we think, that better suits those outcomes. And we're making changes across our entire infrastructure value chain to really deliver these service. So we try to deliver these much quicker for the customer. We actually manage the infrastructure. So it enables customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time actually operating the service, paying attention to their business outcomes. >> Got it, and that's what every customer wants more of is more time to actually deliver this business outcomes and make those course corrections as they need to. Joe, let's talk to you for a bit. Let's talk, what's going on with cloud? The last time we saw you, a lot of change as we talked about, but give us a picture of Dell's cloud strategy. From what you guys are doing on-prem to what you are doing with cloud partners. What is this multi-pronged cloud strategy actually mean? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, our customers want hybrid cloud solutions and we believe that to be the model going forward. And so actually what we're doing is, if you think about it, we're taking the best of public cloud and bringing it on-prem, and we're also taking the best of on-prem and bringing it to the public cloud. So, you know, Devon just talked to you about how we're bringing that public cloud operation model to the data center. But what we've also done is bring our storage arrays to the cloud as a service. And we've done that with PowerStore, we've done that with PowerMax, and we've done that with PowerScale. And in the case of PowerScale for Google cloud, I mean, you get the same performance and capacity scale out in the cloud as you do on-prem. And the systems inter-operate between on-prem and cloud so it makes it easy for fluid data mobility across these environments. And for the first time it enables our customers to get their data to the cloud in a way that they can bring their high performance file workloads to the cloud. >> So talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned PowerScale for Google cloud service, is that a Dell hardware based solution? How does that work? >> Yeah, the adoptions have been great. I mean, we launched back in May and since then we brought on customers in oil and gas and eCommerce and in health as well. And we're growing out the regions, we're going to be announcing a new region in North America soon and we're going to be building out in APJ and EMEA as well. So, customer response has been fantastic, looking forward to growing up. >> Excellent, Devon back to you, let's talk about some of the things that are going on with PowerProtect DD, some new cloud services there too. Can you unpack that for us? >> So Joe, was talking about how we were taking our storage systems and putting them in the cloud. So I just back up in, and kind of introduce real quickly or reintroduce our Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. And that's really, we have our primary storage systems from Unity XT, the PowerStore, to PowerScale, to ECS, and that's housed in a co-locations facility right next to hyperscalers. And then that enables us to provide a fully managed service offering to our customers to a multi-cloud. So what we're doing is we're extending the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services to include PowerProtect DD. So we're bringing PowerProtect DD into this managed services offering so customers can use it for cloud, longterm retention, backup, archiving, and direct backup from a multicloud environment. So extending what we've already done with the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. >> So is that almost kind of like a cloud based data protection solution for those workloads that are running in the cloud VMs, SaaS applications, physical servers, spiral data, things like that? >> Yeah, there's several use cases. So you could have a primary block storage system on your premises and you could actually be providing direct backup into the cloud. You could have backups that you have on-premise that you could be then replicating with PowerProtect data, data domain replication to cloud. And you could also have data in AWS, or Azure, or Google that you could be backing up directly to the PowerProtect domain into this service. So there's multiple use cases. >> Got it, all right. Joe, let's talk about some of the extensions of cloud you guys have both been talking about the last few minutes. One of the recent announcements was about PowerMax being cloud enabled and that's a big deal to cloudify something like that. Help us understand the nature of that, the impetus, and what that means now and what customers are able to actually use today. >> Yeah sure, I mean, we've launched the PowerMax as a cloud service about a year and a half ago with our partner, Faction. And that's for those customers that want that tier zero enterprise grade data capabilities in the cloud. And not just a cloud, it also offers multicloud capabilities for both file and block. Now, in addition, the Dell Tech World, we're launching additional cloud mobility capabilities for PowerMax, where let's say you have a PowerMax on-prem, you could actually do snapshot shipping to an object repository. And that could be in AWS, that can be in Azure, or it could be locally to our local ECS object store. In addition, in the case of Amazon we go a step further where if you do snapshot shipping into Amazon S3, you can then rehydrate those snapshots directly into EBS. And that way you can do processing on that data in the cloud as well. >> Give us an idea, Joe, the last few months or so what some of your customer conversations have been like? I know you're normally in front of customers all the time. Dell Tech World is a great example. I think last year there was about 14,000 folks there, was huge. And we're all so used to that three dimensional engagement, more challenging to do remotely, but talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you've had, and how they've helped influence some of the recent announcements. >> Yeah sure, customers... It might sound a little cliche, but cloud is a journey. It's a journey for our customers. It's a journey for us too, as we build out our capabilities to best serve them. But their questions are, "I want to take advantage "of that elastic compute in the cloud." But maybe the data storage doesn't keep up with it. In the case of when we go to PowerScale for Google, the reason why we brought that platform to the cloud is 'cause you can get hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput through that. And for our customers that are doing things like processing genomic sequencing data, they need that level of throughput, and they want to move those workloads into the cloud. The computer's there but the storage systems to keep up with it, were not. So by us bringing a solution like this to the cloud, now they can do that. So we see that with PowerScale, we see a lot of that with file in the cloud because the file services in the cloud aren't as mature as some of the other ones like with block and object. So we're helping filling some of those gaps and getting them to those higher performance tiers. And as I was mentioning, with things like PowerMax and PowerStore, it's extending their on-prem presence into the public cloud. So they can start to make decisions not based on a capability, but more based on the requirements for where they want to run their workloads. >> And let's switch gears to talking about partners now. Dell has a huge partner ecosystem. We always talk with those folks on theCUBE as well, every year. Devon, from a product management perspective, tell me about some of the things that are interesting to partners and what the advantages are for partners with this shift in what, how Dell is going to be delivering, from PCs, to storage, to HCI, for example. >> Yeah exactly, so, Joe mentioned that it's really a journey and Joe talked a lot about how customers aren't maybe not (indistinct) completely going to a hyperscale or to a complete public cloud. And what we're hearing is there's a lot of customers that are actually wanting the cloud-like experience, but wanting it on-prem. And we're hearing from our partners almost on a daily basis. I have a lot of partner customer conversations where they want to be involved in delivering this as a service. Through their customers, they want to maintain that relationship, derive that value, and in some cases even provide the services for them. And that's what we're looking do as the largest infrastructure provider with the broadest base of partnership we have an advantage there. >> Is there any specific partner certification programs that partners can get into to help start rolling this out? >> At this point, we are trying to build it, but at this point we had nothing to announce here but that's something that we're actively working on and stay tuned for that. >> I imagine there will be a lot of virtual conversations at the digital tech world this year, between the partner community when all of these things are announced. And you get those brains collectively together although obviously virtually, to start iterating on ideas and developing things that might be great to programmatize down the road. And, Joe, last question for you, second to last question actually, is this, this year as we talked about a number of times, everyone's remote, everyone's virtual. It's challenging to get that level of engagement. We're all so used to being in-person and all of the hallway conversations even that you have when you're walking around the massive show floor for example, what can participants and attendees expect from your perspective this year at Dell Technologies World? Will they be able to get the education and that engagement that Dell really wants to deliver? >> Yeah, well, clearly we had to scale things back quite, there's no way around that. But we have a lot of sessions that were designed to inform them with a new capabilities we've been building out. And not just for cloud, but across the portfolio. So I hope they get a lot out of that. We have some interactive sessions in there as well, for some interactive Q and A. And you're right, I mean, a challenge for us is connecting with the customer in this virtual reality. We're all at home, right? The customers are at home. So we've been on Zoom, like never before, reaching out to customers to better understand where they want to go, what their challenges are and how we can help them. So I would say we are connecting, it's a little different and requires a little more effort on everyone's part. We just can't all do it in the same day anymore. It is just a little more spread out. >> Well, then it kind of shows the opportunity to consume things on demand. And as consumers, we sort of have this expectation that we can get anything we want on demand. But you mentioned, Joe, in the second to last question, this is the last one. But you mentioned, everybody's at home. You have to tell us about that fantastic guitar behind you. What's the story? >> Every guitar has a story. I'll just say for today, look, this is my tribute to Eddie Van Halen. We're going to miss him for sure. >> And I'll have the audience know, I did ask Joe to play us out. He declined, but I'm going to hold them to that for next time, 'cause we're not sure when we're going to get to see you guys in person again. Joe and Devon, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. It's been great talking to you. Lots of things coming, lots of iterations, lots of influence from the customers, influence from COVID and we're excited to see what is to come. Thanks for your time. >> Both: Thank you so much. >> From my guests, Joe Caradonna and Devon Reed, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin welcoming back to the Cuba One of our distinguished alumni, Travis V. Hild s VP of product management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >>Hey, how's it going, Lisa? >>Not bad. Nice to connect a few, virtually. Of course, this year everything is so different. You've already done Virtual Cube. So welcome back our very socially distance program. 3rd 1 13 market. Alright. Eso back in May, you were on the Cube talking about the launch of power store. Really? What Dell Technologies was doing thio, um, kind of converged, Formerly overlapping technologies. My acquisitions compelling extreme io give us an update last few months of what's going on with power store customer adoption, mo mentum stuff like that. >>Yeah, you know, it's it's been, um, almost six months that we've launched the product and it's been a nun. Believable experience. Um, you know, let let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, you know, we had Thio launch power store into a very different world than we had anticipated. Um, the global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everybody, you know, and everything around the world. You know, our first priority, Adele, is the health and safety of our customers of our team members of our partners. And, you know, it was a very interesting experience in that this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad, um, you know, backdrop against which we had tow launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic mo mentum. Since launch, we've shipped worldwide over 40. We've we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. Um, but, you know, I think to really talk about mo mentum and what's going on, it's it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Um, start maybe with a health care example. Healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt power stories, a multimillion dollar deal and what they were trying to do Waas modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. Um, there was a lot of technical debt and they wanted toe modernize things, make things more autonomous and at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into, uh, you know, still, they had data centers across across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites and with power store because of the efficiency because of the D duplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual optics they had related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year. By going to PowerMax. I'm sorry by going to PowerStore, Um, so that that was a big one. Another, another good example was in a me, a high tech customer. They adopted power store because of power stores, ability to scale performance and capacity independently and in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications. And the other is, uh, kind of ah, variable. And you know and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this this nearly million dollar deal with them and then and then one other one that that's one of my favorites. Uh um entertainment company in the A P J region. Obviously, with with all of us staying home, I can speak for my my kids that air, you know, remote learning right over my shoulder. There is a lot more video games going on, and so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing power store. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from, uh, multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decrease cost a storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development and decreased cost. So those were just a couple of the examples that we have for power store. We were seeing great adoption, great traction and really, uh, customers and partners are are really excited about what we brought to market. >>He talked about, you know, some of the things that are essential that even back in May, when power Start was launched, no one would have thought here in October 2020. We'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company in a p j being essential as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption. For example, the health care organization that you talked about North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization Thio upgrade or migrate to power store so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site if it was on Prem? Because, of course, all the challenges there, right? >>Yeah, you know it, za Really good question on. We have to Do you know, this was a brand new product for us And in order to enable proof of concepts in order in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product is taken an enormous amount of coordination, an enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so you know, it's actually taken a little bit more time than, you know, had we've been ableto fly people around the world to do it. But we've gotten very proficient at organizing, with the customer being ableto host. The demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely be able to do our. You know, our customer briefing is remotely eso. It is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >>So Power Start was big. In the beginning, there was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history, the >>largest launch that we never did that we've ever done, >>launching it during a pandemic, unpredictable, and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through when you're talking to customers. What are some of the key differentiators that really make power store unique? >>Yeah, you know, I like to start at at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about power store because, um, with storage products, the architecture er is the thing that all future features and capabilities air built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of power store, it was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today in the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that the NBN me or NBN me or ECM it was micro services based so that, you know, it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And, uh, it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. You know, when we first launched this this array and this this fact is true. Today we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today. That was seven times more performance and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So that that core performance is kind of point number one point number two Data reduction data reduction is the new normal. And with power store, we have a guaranteed Fourtou one data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of of midrange storage devices. That and in their particular environment, they saw 4.6 to 1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4 to 1. So being, you know, very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, er and I talked about it in the in the high tech company that I mentioned the European high tech company, the ability to scale, performance and capacity independently in our scale. Out design is another differentiator. Um, for folks that have been around storage arrays a long time traditional storage array. You know, you you would add capacity sometimes when you need it performance or you that performance. Sometimes when you need to capacity by being ableto separate. Those two things customers can really get optimized in their environment for what they're trying toe. What their needs are. They need more performance, they can have more performance, they need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural, um, differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners and then above and beyond that we brought some industry Onley capability to market. Um, in that we are the Onley purpose built storage appliance with a built in vm ware s X i hyper visor. So what this allows customers to do is run bm where based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage. That's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables the whole new host of use cases where customers can, um, changed the way that they're optimized in the core. And also, there's a lot of good edge, uh, deployments that this that this new capability can help enable. So it z, you know, being architecturally advanced in performance efficiency and scale up and scale out and bringing industry Onley capabilities in our integration, especially with VM, where to market that have really resonated with our customers. >>How about some of those new use cases that the VM ware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate, with massively that scattered workforce that you know, some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding with device proliferation. What >>are some >>of the new use cases That that what Power Mac power store can deliver, uniquely as you said is gonna be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >>Yeah, you know, I think that there there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core. But I think the new, uh, you know, either remote, uh, site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less less. And so if you can have hardware that is ableto, you know, provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability. Those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device which leads toe, you know, easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having toe deploy multiple multiple devices. >>So you're great with the stats you show you you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with power store all the testing, what you're seeing actually, in customer, uh, environments, which is fantastic when you're talking with analysts looking at what Dell Technologies has done when it's in to develop our store. And like I said, you know, merging technologies from compelling and extreme Iot, uh, etcetera, our analysts looking at this is maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing. >>Uh, yeah. You know, there was was some press that was written when we announced that that that the release of Power Store established a new benchmark of what was expected from a million very storage array, which is, you know, it was something that that was really fulfilling, especially all after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about that that and the innovation that we have put into it over the course of a multi multi year journey. And so you know what? We're what we're seeing, you know, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have, um, taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio, that we're able to direct our R and D investments into a single platform to bring mawr and more capability to that platform over time, and that message is resonating very strongly. >>So wrapping things up here, Power Store is in its first five or six months. And during that time, you know, crazy things have happened in the world were in a state still disarray, if you will, no pun intended what is next for the second half of power stores? First year. How is Dele? Technology is going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now into thriving so that they could be the winners of tomorrow. >>Yeah. You know, I think the second half of this year, the first half of this year was was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners, trained up on it, getting those key early wins, you know, established establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of mawr customers. Getting into that that, you know, enabling our partners to, you know, amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're gonna You're gonna see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of mawr adoption mawr mo mentum and mawr success on power store. Uh, and for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture er comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture, er is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come when new media comes when new, uh, you know, interfaces or interconnect technologies come when we, uh, you know, invest in even tighter integration with VM where, like at VM World? Just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VM Ware on a new interconnect technology nbn me over TCP that core architectures so flexible that it can adopt, you know, with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, adopted and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market of alls. >>And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well, Travis. Thank you. So much for sharing with us. The moments, um, for the first half of power stores, first year and what we can look to see. And it's not just second half that going forward. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Travis, Be Hill. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 The Digital Experience.

>> 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 coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live day three of theCUBE's double set coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 I am with Stu Miniman. We've got one alumni back. We've got Gil Schneorson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vxrail. Gil welcome back. >> Thank you nice to be back. >> And it's show and tell you brought Niv Raz CTO of Harel Insurance one of your successful customers, Niv it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you and great to be here. >> So Niv let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Harel Insurance where you're located, what it is that you do and then we'll get into why think Dell EMC is so fantastic. >> Harel Insurance is a insurance company doing a life, now life insurances very wide portfolio of business products in the insurance and investments in Israel. More than 5000 employees and three million customers managing around 240 billion shekels in 2018. So it's very innovative company to work in. >> So Niv interesting. Dell has a podcast and I'm just given a little plug here 'cause at the gym this morning the latest episode by Walter Issacson talks about transformation going on in the insurance business. Some people think, oh insurance has been around a long time, I mean heck to the Roman Era when they had some of this but today Insurance is changing fast. Can you give us at a macro level, give us what are some the changes and stresses on the company and how's that impact your job. >> It's funny you mentioning that. In 2015 our CEO has declared innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program the strategic plan was to take a role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform, data transform. We Israel has the brokers. The brokers are our sales person but once the customer and the sales part, the onboarding part, you want a more innovative service after that. The post service part is very hard in insurance and we investing a lot to make the post service customer experience very advantaged. >> We talk a lot about customer insurance at every, oh sorry, customer insurance, well that's important too, customer experience is the word I was going for. It's essential right because in 2019 customers of any type of product or service have so much choice. So talk to us Niv from looking through that lens of delivering an outstanding customer experience obviously your sales folks need to have innovative technology to deliver that outstanding customer experience. But when a company says we've got to transform digitally we've got to stay ahead of the market, delight our customers Where do you start? Talk to us about maybe a phased approach that you're taking to digital transformation. >> Digital transformation is all about how customer experience feel like in your environment. So if a person entering your website and trying to do some post service and running into some old fashionable process that is very hard to him and its really frustrating to do that. And actually if I look about what our approach about it, we're thinking about the digital transformation, we're thinking about how to take the onboarding part for our brokers, the post service for our customers, to make the process, the services we are offering to our customers easy as possible to just can submit. >> All right so Gil let's bring you into the discussion here. And I think back Converge Infrastructure, Hyper-converge Infrastructure you've been riding the rocket ship that is Vxrail, digital transformation wasn't the leading use for that when we started. It was simplification driving that wave of virtualization, we've heard Vxrail everywhere in the discussion this week. It was like all of these different cloud pieces, what's underneath them, VxRail. Help us connect the dots, the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable your customers. >> Yeah thanks Stu. We talk about a digital transformation a lot. Reality is that many of the customers, not all of them are transformative like Harel Insurance right. Many of them look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility, they see the economical benefit but there's a growing majority of customers who look to this is as transformational. And so that's where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to be an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multi cloud environment. So what is so exciting about this show is because we've been very successful we're growing very fast, but by putting this building block in many of our customers' data centers they've made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy. And I think we demonstrated in the last two days that hybrid cloud is here and it's sellable, operational and with VxRail and the integration with VML cloud foundation and the ability to add and burst into a cloud move workloads It's here and its now, I thinks that's what's nice about this whole thing. >> All right so Gil it's great for you to say it even as an analyst as a media organization for us to say it but what we love is that you brought a customer here to tell us the reality as to where cloud fits into your overall discussion. And I would love your feedback as to what Gil's saying. What's the reality in your world and the impact on your work >> I would connect the previous question this one because it's like a very rolling on questions about it. So you as the customers your expectations about the company is to do every operation from everywhere very easy way and the mobility and the digital transformation itself all the mobile applications, all the things that's taking the customer experience to the next level will took the organization to a phase that I need understand how to scalable the systems. So in this journey when you're looking about digital transformation you must have a infrastructure that support the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that the customer demands. You don't think to yourself that you are enter some E-commerce customer and they will send you on application. sorry Sir, we currently offline the management reasons or maintenance reasons. That thing in 2019 you will not think about and it's not be acceptable. So to do a scalability our multi cloud strategy in Harel is to have infrastructure free environment to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part. That's the big concerns of our IT teams was how to care about support and matrix's and compatibility and maintenance and when you go into the private cloud environment, the private cloud environment, that's VxRail on the bottom and VML cloud foundation on the top allow Harel is to start the journey to a phase that said okay we're going to our infrastructure free road map. >> Tell us about the outcomes that for example go back to, what we were talking about your brokers who need to be able to deliver any service. I imagine they're out in the field sometimes with customers depending on the types of services that they need to deliver. What has been some of the feedback or maybe the outcomes for the brokers. Are they able to do their jobs faster, deliver quotes faster to customers. What are some of the exciting outcomes that you're seeing as a result of the infrastructure that Dell EMC is helping you to establish. >> Part of digital transformation we're talking about micro servicing a lot of old virtual machines I'm saying that. So service applications on the password virtual machine now your micro services, why you micro servicing it because in 8:00 a.m, perhaps there is 20 persons that's selling your policies but perhaps on the 11:00 after some TV show said something about Harel you can have thousands of customers entering to your website. So how you can support that? So again brokers need the tools to support the operation, the sales operations and the customers need the tools to support the post service for themselves, how to claim, how to do claims how to do more preventives aspects of insurances. So basically again when you're looking about what exciting is, is the reality that I'm seeing a process of a customer and is saying, wow that was easy. So taking the digital transformation to make our customer experience better. >> All right Gil help us zoom out a little bit. We talked to one customer here but the business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational and helped accelerate the HTI growth. What are some the big drivers what's changed in the business. Give us the overall update. >> Yeah look, I think that when we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value and any value transfer to finances and there's a very strong interest in so this recent innovation we've introduced with integration with cloud foundation, people don't realize how much work goes into integrating two products regardless, even between 1 company you're talking about engineers co-location, you're talking about joint sprints you're talking about test fests, design workshop, customers interaction and so, but you know what I mean, it pays off. You deliver a new outcome that didn't exist before now with VCF and VxRail you can have a full life cycle management of the entire VMX stack and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework everything life cycled together, it's a very, very impressive outcome and it's ready now and I'm really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI, people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can, because we're simplifying it. In addition to that Stu I think it's important to understand or I'd like the people to know that the other way we're taking the ATI stack and the full stack is into much more intelligence so machine learning and predictability all the way eventually to remediation and so in this show we introduced the analytical consulting engine for VxRail and we put it out there as a field trial, as an early access. The thought process is we have a very large amount of intelligent customers that could tell us where they need this to take them. What's exciting about it is that every product these days is trying to be intelligent because we have a full stack we have a lot of context, a lot of things we could correlate. So we're very excited about this and we're hoping that our customers will participate in that design, I'm sure Harel will as soon as we can give it to them, the access and, not only full stack but make it much more intelligent, I think it's going to be very exciting year til next time we speak. >> Harel you have? >> Something to say about it. We are customers, us as an organization understand the public cloud allowed us to be infrastructure free and now they said okay some workloads are good for public cloud some workloads are good for private cloud and the multi cloud approach that VMcloud Foundation gives us the infrastructure free to just focus on the services. You need to understand the manageability of traditional infrastructure is very costly. Why? You need to manage it, you need to support it, you need to upgrade the frameworks, the buyers, the drivers and all the time to be concerned about if everything is supportable, how you do that all the job and again once you taking the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMcloud foundation the software you getting a complete life cycle that assist you to just focusing about to be a service broker just add new services to the exist environment. >> Well Niv, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with Stu and me where you guys are on this digital transformation journey, the successes you've achieved so far with Dell EMC, Gil again always great to have you on the program and we can't wait to hear more next year maybe Ace is going to give us some really insightful insights that will be groundbreaking. >> I believe so. Thank you very much. >> For Stu Minneman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE, live from day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and Etico System partners. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Sin City Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have Varun Chhabra who is the Vice President Product Marketing Cloud Dell EMC, welcome back to theCUBE Varun. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Mark Lohmeyer SVG/PM of Cloud Platform VMware. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling we were talking that it should be a rap song, VMC on Dell EMC. (laughing) Tell us about the news this week. >> Yeah sure. So maybe I can kick it off. So real excited this Monday to introduce the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and you know, as I sort of think back to when we first started discussions together between the two companies, we really had this sort of this angle in mind which was how do we bring the simplicity, the agility and sort of the consumption economics of a public cloud model right, but with the control, the security, the enterprise class capabilities, you know performance that customers expect from an on-prem environment and how could VMware and Dell work together to really jointly engineer something that we think would be really special and achieve those goals, and based on feedback that we got from customers, we're really pleased at sort of the reaction to this, and we think that's really going to hit the sweet spot of kind of best of those both worlds. >> So Varun, Dell EMC's been in the private cloud market for a bit, actually it was somebody on the EMC side that, as far as I know, was credited with coming with that terminology so some of this isn't new. Give us what is new about this offering compared to what we've done in the past. >> Yeah. Great question Stu. So essentially what is really innovative about this is that this is taking the public cloud model to on-premises as Mark said. It's a fully managed service where Dell Technologies and VMware are working together behind the scenes to provide that public cloud like experience, the hands-off operations, the ability to provision resources using a cloud portal right and have it be installed for you and set up. Once it's set up, software patches, operating system updates, hardware updates, all of them are basically going to be managed for you. If there's any support issues, the VMware team will file a ticket for you. You don't even need to file a ticket, it will be managed for you. This issue will be resolved. You know we think that this will be a really transformative way for customers to consume cloud resources, and this is all about bringing that cloud model to the data center where there's so much data, that customers already have. >> All right. So Mark there were ripples in the industry, a couple of years ago when the VMware cloud on AWS was out. >> Right. You know some people may have like hey why wasn't it done on the Dell stuff first but the thing I want to ask is, what have you learned from that AWS engagement and how did that impact what you're doing now on the Dell EMC? >> Yeah it's a great question. So I think one thing, so we learn from our customers right and the feedback they give us? One of the things that they shared is look they really like the fact that we're taking all of that grunge work off the table for them right? I mean if you're an IT department and a customer you're looking at for how you can deliver more value to the business right? And patching our software, upgrading our software, being responsible for hardware issues, that's not adding value to the business right? Ensuring their delivery in the application SLA, ensuring the application is secure, helping reduce cost, those are adding tremendous value to the business right? So the fact that we're able to deliver to them a cloud service, allows them to sort of elevate the value that they can offer and so that was one key insight. We wanted to bring all of those benefits to VMware cloud on Dell EMC on-prem. The second thing I would say is just technically you know, it's a very different model to ship a customer software and hardware and say you manage it right? You're responsible for the SLA versus delivering a true cloud service right? It requires a very different way to run your engineering team, it requires this thing called service ownership right? That you're accountable for the SLA of your code running your production, you need to build out a site reliability engineering team, and it really requires a very close engineering relationship between everyone who's working together to deliver that integrated cloud solution. So we're taking all of those learnings and insights that we got from our experience in the public cloud, and now applying them with Dell to bring those same benefits to customers in the private cloud. >> One of the things that we've talked a lot on theCUBE about, in particular this week, is just how close the Dell VMware relationship seems. You have said Stu, and you really know your stuff, that this is the tightest you've ever seen it. And here you are talking about this jointly designed, engineered. Can you describe a little bit about sort of the culture of this partnership and how these two tech giants work together? >> Yeah I can take a stab at it (mumbles). Look this is not new to us. We have been working together for a long time. But I think as you saw on the Keeno stage with Jeff and Pat together, this is a new level of a relationship in terms of having our engineering teams work together, figuring out how to deliver the best customer experience right? We already see that when we made our announcement three weeks ago with VxRail and VMware cloud foundations, being able to manage the entire life cycle, right from the workload all the way down to the physical infrastructure using VMware cloud foundations. This is a natural extension of that model for us. We're taking some of the same engineering work, the tight integration, and then adding on another benefit of managing this for the customer and making things simpler for them. And you know we think this is just the start. We think there is so much more goodness we can uncover for our customers as part of this journey. >> Yeah I think it's great. The only thing I would add is you know, the analogy I like to use is sort of like weightlifting. This is a muscle that we've been building between VMware and Dell for many years now right? Delivering a full cloud service on top of Dell hardware, that's like bench-pressing 200 pounds right? (laughing) So if you just like had never worked out before and someone gave you 200 pounds to bench-press, you probably wouldn't be successful. Now the good news is we've been working together for a number of years now. We've been building that muscle together between the two companies right? VMware on VxRail, VMware cloud on VxRail, and so now we're taking this next step forward, hey maybe we're going from benching 150 to benching 200. We have the ability to get there right? And so in many ways, our ability to be successful at this is based on the fact that we have been working together so well for a number of years now and building on that. >> Okay so Varun, we look at these different solutions in the marketplace and the space and sometimes it's a little tough to differentiate them because you know, you look underneath the covers and you got a lot of hardware geeks you know? I'm one of them, I'm open the back of the cabinet and show me and I'm like oh I recognize that box and I do this but like say for example, if I go talk to Microsoft and I look at Andro Stack, they like don't really think about the Dell server underneath there and the partner they got to have, this is Azure, so when you think about the operating model, when you think about the consumption model, when you think about the applications, this is "Azure". What I've had a little bit of trouble, and I'm hoping you can help me explain is, I think it's a similar type of story but there is no Dell EMC public cloud. There's VMware in a couple of environments so is that the right model to be thinking of? I mean this is as a service, it's a consumption model but are the applications similar to what I had if I've built a stack with Dell and VMware or you know, give me the compare and contrast as to what I've done before and some of the other options out there. >> Great question and I think it's something a lot of customers ask us as well. Look I think this is a very unique offer compared to what we've seen in the market recently for a variety of reasons. But the first thing I'll start with saying is that customers today are already using VMware and LEMC for their existing workloads right? This is essentially the same platform so the tools that they use today vSphere, it's the extra migrate workloads, NSX, VSAN, they are going to be able to carry forward all the work they've done there on this platform. That's why it's no different from that perspective. So the learnings they have, the processes, the automation, the eco-system of back-up disaster recovery that they use today, they're going to be able to use later as well, with this as well so this is less disruptive for them. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'd say is you know, we think we have a unique advantage because we have a long heritage of working with customers in their data centers. Whether its VMware or Dell EMC or us combined together. Being able to manage the complexity, the thousands of variables in a data center that a customer has, where things are not just homogenous, everything is not standardized, it's very very different problem from talking about a homogenous cloud data center where everything is standardized, everything is built for automation. We think we have a unique capability to be able to do that, and not only from a day zero day one perspective, also from a support perspective. You know this is a fully managed service which means if things are you know, if something breaks, we may have to go down and actually go to the customers site and actually fix that. We have a support organization across VMware and Dell EMC already built today. Full scale. Every single country. Wherever people's data centers are. Again a different support model. We think this will be a journey for folks who don't have that built out, and finally, I think, I'm biased, but I think infrastructure matters. If you're going to take a bet on this platform for your edge locations, your retail locations, your thousands of retail locations, sure it's a fully managed service but you need to have the peace of mind that this is going to continue to work for you. Even in a fully managed scenario, it is disruptive if there's hardware failures. So VxRail is a platform that customers all around the world bet on. There's more than 4000 customers at VMware and Dell EMC have jointly driven success with so we think these are going to be unique factors that will create value for customers. >> Okay. So for the support model I understand. The question we've been talking the various solutions in the portfolio is the nirvana is that cloud operating model that I don't need to worry about what version it's running. Whether the latest security patch is in there because that's been taken care of for me. Are we close to that? Are we at that? How does that look? >> That's exactly the idea. That's exactly what we're going to deliver right? And that's powerful for the reasons you articulated. But even more than that I would say it's an amazing vehicle for us to deliver value and innovation to our customers right? You know, traditional model hey VMware developed software. It takes a year or two to develop. We deliver to the customer. They take another six months to a year to upgrade it, it's two to three years' latency between when an engineer has a good idea or a customer asks for something before they can reasonably get to take advantage of it in production. With this new cloud delivery model that we're building together, that latency shrinks down to potentially just weeks right? Because we are upgrading that service on a continuous basis. We can push those new innovations to our customers much more rapidly and they can immediately begin consuming them. Like literally those new features just show up in the service just like on your iPhone or whatever other service you might be using. Same model can now apply to the data center so its an incredibly powerful thing for our joint customers. It's also real exciting for our joint engineering teams right? You think about an engineer. They take pride in seeing the value of their work being used by customers and we can take that from two to three years, to two to three weeks. That's a tremendous thing. >> Real instant gratification. >> Yeah! >> Which makes for a happier employee, which makes for-- >> Time to innovate more right? >> All of that. >> You got it yeah. >> Great. Well Mark and Varun thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great having you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (digital music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell World Technologies here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment. We have Honore LaBourdette. She is the VP, Global Market Development, Telco Business Group. Welcome, VMware, thank you, sorry. >> Thank you, yes. >> Welcome. And we have Kevin Shatzkamer, Senior VP, Networking and Solutions, Dell EMC. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> So Kevin I want to start with you. There was a big announcement this morning, signing with Orange of France. Tell our viewers a little bit more about this. >> Yeah, sure. So, I think as overall Dell Technologies continues to focus on helping our service providers through what is a very complex transition, both in their business, in their operations, in their technology investments, in the operational skill set gaps, in the business models, the architecture's use cases kind of comes across the board of how their businesses are evolving. What we continue to do is focus on a core set of telecommunication service providers that we can partner with very deeply to help in that transformation and use the knowledge gained through that collaboration as a means to expand the Dell Technologies capabilities globally. So, I think that the belief is that when we help solve problems, it not only benefits the service provider we're working with, it benefits the industry as a whole with the lessons learned, so that we can then contribute back. >> And so far, there's been some enthusiasm about this? >> There certainly has. I think it's been a big day for us. Obviously, the first two days at Dell Technologies World, we're extremely focused on new product introductions across the Dell portfolio, and today, with the opportunity to expand the messaging and announce some of the great things we're doing with partners, we're doing with out customers, and we're doing within the ecosystem, I think we continue to drive a very positive message. >> Honore, the networking component is something that we know service providers have a need and is ever-changing. We've watched that expand greatly in the VMware portfolio over the years. I've done plenty of interviews with telcos talking about things like NFV, network functions virtualization, but the big thing everybody's been talking about, the last couple of years it feels like, is 5G. So, maybe we could start there, but talk a little bit about what you're hearing from service providers and how VMware and VMware plus Dell are helping to meet some of those requirements. >> Sure, well, needless to say, 5G is the topic of every conversation we have with our telecommunication customers, and I think that there's a number of areas around 5G that are most prevalent in those conversations. One is really how does the service provider get a return on investment for the huge amounts of monies that they're investing in this infrastructure, right? So, 5G is a new infrastructure, a new technology, that's going to require a refresh of the entire infrastructure. And so, while they're making all of those investments, and they are doing so very aggressively to have a first-mover advantage, in terms of the first to deliver on a 5G technology, they want to work with vendors who can, in fact, accelerate their time to a return on the investment for that infrastructure. So, many of our conversations are really focused around how can we help these service providers actually accomplish that, right? Not just build out, or take advantage of a software-defined infrastructure and all of the technologies that both Dell and WMware offer to them under the umbrella of the Dell Technology Companies, but also, how can we help them accelerate services that they want to to put on top of the 5G technology? I think one of the key differentiators of 5G over its predecessors is that the industry has recognized that it's going to require partnerships in order for the service providers to really get their return on investment. And that's where the partnership with VMware and with Dell and the work that Kevin and I are doing together to focus on service providing is really anchored, right? It's bringing together those partnerships, so that these telecommunication customers can take advantage of our technology and do it very quickly. >> So, there's a real acknowledgement of the need for partnerships? >> Yes. >> So then, how do you show customers that the VMware-Dell partnership is the right direction? >> Well, needless to say, it's anchored in our technology. Kevin and I have been working together for a number of years now, and our partnership really started out focusing on just making sure that the components of the stack worked as promised, right? That we could deliver a high degree of confidence to our customers that when they software-defined the infrastructure on Dell Technology hardware, and then layered on top of that, their virtual network functions, that it would perform our outperform their legacy, bare-metal, vertical-stack equipment. Over time, however, our partnership has progressed to where we're actually collaborating to bring new technology to market together. And one example of that is the City of Las Vegas. We recently announced a Smart City IoT use case, and that technology, that solution, was co-developed with NTT, Dell EMC, and VMware using VMware software, Dell hardware, as well as Dell Storage, Dell Data Analytics and Intelligence, and NTT's infrastructure and points of presence. >> Yeah, I think there's both a technical reality and an operational reality to the technologies that we speak of, right? The technical reality is that the transformation that the telcos are going through around NFV and the direction toward network edge, edge computing, cloud environments, is really just software-defined data center similar to what we've done on the IT side for a long time. So, the technologies that the telecommunications industry is adopting are the technologies that both Dell EMC and VMware have been working on for a very long time. The operational reality is that just taking what you've done in IT and applying it into a telco network is not sufficient. Understanding of the workloads, how those workloads layer on top of infrastructure, understanding that those workloads are in a transformation of their own, and that virtual network functions were not designed to natively consume and compute. They were designed for network appliances, and that there are still requirements that they drive down to the infrastructure was, I think, where Honore and I have been investing for the last several years, right? How do we complement the broad capabilities of both Dell EMC and VMware in IT virtualization software-defined data center, and bring in telco service provider networking expertise and domain knowledge that we can use to be able to really ramp up and accelerate the partnerships we have in the service provider industry? >> That's great stuff. We actually got to do an interview on the smarter cities earlier this week, and a fascinating discussion to see how there's, Kevin, I like what you laid out there. When I look at this space, scale gets talked about a lot, but you talk to telcos, they have a little bit of a different scale, and the management for these kind of environments is also quite a bit different than if you were talking to the enterprise. Are those some of the key items? Where would you say your focus? >> I also think that even further. That the challenges of scale that have been solved in the public cloud are a different set of challenges than the telco industry is really trying to wrestle with, right? In the public cloud, we're taking about a very small number of facilities, and we can build a homogenous architecture within there. We define a standard server. We replicate that server across a rack, replicate that rack across rows, replicate those rows across a data center. The reality is, as we get further and further towards the edge of the telco network, it looks more heterogeneous, right? I need GPUs for particular instances. I have cloud-native applications. I have virtualized applications that sit inside of VMs. I have native Linux environments. I need to handle dense networking topologies. I have east-west traffic, north-south traffic that I need to take into account. And I think that what we've figured out and what we've learned in automating and orchestrating the public cloud is how to handle hundreds of thousands of things at single-digit number of locations. And what we're talking about here is hundreds of thousands of locations with single-digit number of things. >> And that's another key area of the collaboration between the two groups, in terms of how we deliver value to our telco customers. So, rather than us working in silos and delivering yet another disparate technology for managing the edge, cloud, or all these different locations, we're working together so we can bring a cohesive technology to market for them. >> That's right, I think the infrastructure demands and openness and a willingness to be a productive member of a complex and consistently changing ecosystem, and I think that, obviously, Dell EMC does that in our way. VMware does it in their way, but there's clear recognition that the better capabilities are when we work together to really drive the platform and bring the true capabilities of the broader Dell technologies together. >> So, telcoms is a hugely competitive industry, and as you've talked about, there's a lot of challenges, and it's a real transformative moment for this sector. Can you lay out some of sort of what you're thinking about for after 5G, which as you've said, is a hugely expensive investment for these companies? But sort of post-5G, what are we looking at? What's on their minds of your customers? >> So, I don't know that there's going to be distinct, post-5G event, right? I think that 5G, in and of itself, is going to take some time to roll out and proliferate, to the extent that its predecessors is now deployed across all locations all over the world. I do think that 5G, in addition to the infrastructure technology, or the refresh of that technology, a lot of what is going to happen around 5G is, in fact, the applications and use cases that's going to take advantage of 5G. If we about what 5G is capable of enabling, it doesn't just address consumer applications. 5G also will address enterprise applications. And that opens up a whole world of innovation, and again, applications, partnerships, and vendors coming together, who can really help the service providers put those pieces together and deliver on those applications. There's already talk about 6G, although it's very limited. So, it's easy for me to say what's coming next after 5G will be 6G, but I think that there's still a lot of activity and a lot of innovation that will happen around 5G for some time to come. >> Yeah, we know that standards and the consortiums always have to be working. I was looking at terabit ethernet on the networking side. So, I wanted to help kind of bring this conversation together. If you have maybe a customer example, love if you could share who it is, but if not, give us a little bit of anonymity around what it is to help highlight this partnership. >> Sure, I think Honore shared the City of Las Vegas as a great example of where we're enabling the Smart Cities use case. We can speak to MetTel, in terms of the capabilities of Dell Technologies to be able to transform their NFV offerings and really help them bring NFV to market at scale. We can speak to at least one tier-one service provider in AMIA that is delivering a full-stack offering, in which we extended the capabilities of our Ericsson partnership that both Dell EMC, as well as VMware have, to build a complete stack offering of Ericsson, VMware, as well as Dell EMC. >> Yeah, and to Ericsson, there's some of the edge computing in there. I've talked to them quite a bit about what they're doing on their edge offering. >> Yeah, so I think we have a number of examples that we also can't share as publicly. But we continue to collaborate. I think we're driving fantastic innovation. The industry is responding extremely favorably across the board, and I think that the strategy that we have jointly to not just develop technology, but really change the way we engage with telecommunications organizations and service providers to work with them well before they're ready to deploy technology, and also, help them scale their own operations and understand this transformation is really key to the success here. Because just having the best technology at this inflection point in the industry is not enough. We really have to partner to help them understand how to operationalize and monetize that infrastructure. >> And we do have a number of innovation projects, with regards to the edge and far edge with some of the top-tier service providers, in particular, in the Americas, where we're working together for edge solutions. I've got to hear what this far-edge is in a future conversation, because I thought I was getting my arms around it, but -- >> I know, it was edge, and now it's edge and far-edge. >> That's for Dell Technologies World 2020. >> That's right. >> Honore, Kevin, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a great time. >> You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World. There's more to come after this. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier coming to you live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is our third day of coverage from two CUBE sets. What do you call that John? >> CUBE Cannon. >> CUBE Cannon of content. And guess who's back? One of our alumni Shannon Champion. >> Hello. >> Director of Product Marketing Dell EMC, Shannon thank you so much for joining us. >> A pleasure as always. >> Day three you still have a big smile on your face. >> I do do, it has been exhilarating, I'm completely exhausted but I'm thrilled to be here talking with you. >> You don't look exhausted but we're thrilled to have you. >> Thank you. >> So everything started, talking about cannons, Michael came out on Monday morning with all the gang, lots of news, lots of information that we've heard throughout the last three days, people are very excited about this. Excited about the deeper collaboration within the Dell Technologies companies. But something that you guys announced that we want to kind of really break through is Dell Technologies Cloud, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, can you help me as a non-technologist understand those two differences, consumption model. >> Absolutely yeah, so it's all in a name really, Dell Technologies Cloud is the unification of the strategies between Dell EMC Cloud and VMware Cloud, one unified cloud strategy called Dell Technologies Cloud. Under that there are offers. So there's two categories of offers, one is the Data Center-as-a-Service, the fully managed, on-prem infrastructure where VxRail is the foundation. People know this as Project Dimension announced last year, it now has a formal, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. So it's an offer underneath the category of Dell Technologies Cloud. >> And the VxRail components, explain VxRail for a minute, I think that's super important, it seems to be everywhere a key part of the architecture. >> It is yeah, so if you are here at the show, you've seen that VxRail is everywhere, it's on stage in lots of demos and it is the core foundation of our Dell Technologies Cloud offers. The collaboration between Dell EMC and VMware to bring VxRail to market kind of showcases the power of what this partnership can do. So it makes sense that this tightly integrated enterprise grade hyper-converged platform is the foundation of these Dell Tech Cloud offers. >> What's some of the use cases that was really driving the project, obviously multiple clouds was a key message here, but what was some of specific use cases you guys were really attacking? >> Sure, so when you look at the Data Center-as-a-Service offer, it's the fully managed capabilities. So customers are going to public cloud for the simplicity, agility, that cloud-like operations. But we started to see customers slowing down the adoption of that to some extent because they needed the security and the control of having infrastructure on premises and that's what we do with Data Center-as-a-Service, basically deliver the benefits of both, in a monthly subscription type model where they have all the infrastructure on premise but they get the benefit of a public cloud-like experience. >> And that's in beta, the announcement in the news was that Project Dimension, now Data Center-as-a-Service, which I love that name by the way, I think it's going to be great. But it's in beta, what does that mean beta? Select customers, preview, what's specific? >> Yeah, it's in beta phase, we have a couple customers that are running it today, so we're looking for customers to help shape the future, help us prioritize, you know, what are the key use cases that they're seeing a need for this technology. So we're looking for a few good companies still, so if anyone's out there interested, hit up our reps. Yeah, it'll be available in the market in the second half of this year, but currently in beta. >> It seems to be great for the edge, shipping a data center is almost like, okay with all this new technology, the bundling's literally nice, you guys did a good job on that. Shipping a data center, it almost was a dream years ago, We'll just ship a data center to the edge. That seems to be the the big use case that people are talking about, the edge of the network's going to have more capabilities, moving data around is not the answer, 'cause of latencies and as Pat Gelsinger would say laws of physics. This is identified as a big sweet spot. Michael Dell commented the edge in the next 10 years is going to be explosive, is that pretty much the core kind of direction? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you know it's called Data Center-as-a-Service and edge is a key use case for Data Center-as-a-Service, but also the core data centers when we are polling our customers they're actually telling us, they have a need for this in both locations, so both are key use cases, the edge obviously for the reasons you pointed out too. >> So talk to us about the customers involvement in the manifestation of Project Dimension. We've been hearing a lot the last three days, you really even felt it on stage from day one. Collaboration, not just within the Dell Technologies companies, we saw Microsoft. But where are the customers in terms of influencing Project Dimension now becoming a reality? >> Sure yeah, I mean this has been a collaboration with customers, but also between Dell EMC and VMware jointly with our joint customers going out to talk to them about the possibility and the promise and the capabilities that are being delivered. So certainly a joint effort from both companies along with our customers to give us feedback in terms of you know, where they see this as a key use case for them. >> Customers just looking for tighter integration, tighter collaboration, what are some of the business imperatives, where your customers are saying, hey guys, this is really the way to go here and here's why. >> Yeah I mean I touched on it a little bit in terms of like, the transparency, the security, the control, the data latency, improvements of having infrastructure on premises whilst still wanting sort of that agility and simplicity of a public cloud-like operating model, and that's essentially what's driving this new category of infrastructure consumption, Data Center-as-a-Service. And we have a whole nother side of Dell Tech Cloud, which is the Dell Technologies Cloud platform and we deliver that through VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, so I mentioned VxRail's kind of everywhere, that offer is available today for customers on premises. And with VxRail it's really the only VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure offering that has full stack integration, we're calling it full stack integration because there is a set of software capabilities for VxRail that tie together what VMware does with the SDDC Manager automation together with the infrastructure management VxRail through RESTful APIs, through software that integrates the two. So for customers, they have a complete seamless all in one management experience with cloud foundation on VxRail. So, we're really excited about that and it's only been shipping for two weeks and already customers are willing to be reference customers for us, talking about the potential, the promise, wanting to work with us on what this could mean for their organizations. >> Was going to ask you about their reactions. >> Give us some feedback on the customer, I'd love to hear what they're saying, obviously demand, what's the main euphoria around it? >> Yeah so, hybrid cloud is part of every customer's strategy and really understanding how they can best get there, what's the simplest and the fastest way for them, has been what they're considering. And if you look at what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, we have a fast and simple way and they back by the promise of both Dell EMC and VMware working together to bring these two technologies in a unified way that's a seamless experience. So, you know the power of hyper-converged is to let businesses get out of the, maintaining the infrastructure so they can focus on business outcomes. The same is true for other use cases like hybrid cloud. So that's what customers are excited about there. >> Yeah Pat Gelsinger says "don't look down, look up." Meaning if you can take advantage of the modernizations of hyper-converged which you guys have been doing for a while, the packaging's more consumable and you bolt on the VMware piece. So then you got consistent cloud operations, but then can focus in on the software. This is the dream of software defined data center, this is what people had hoped for, I think two years ago, but it's kind of, come in now this is reality. >> This is reality, for sure. >> So it sounds like, you've got nearly what 5,000 VxRail customers, it's over a billion dollar run rate, are customers looking at VxRail as a foundational component of really accelerating their modernization of their IT and their data center. >> Yeah, that's been the core of what VxRail's delivered since the start, so it's three years old, as you mentioned nearly 5,000 customers to date. It's the fastest growing HCI system, thanks to that strong customer adoption. But really it's been a catalyst for data center modernization to date. And what we're talking about this week is how it's really going beyond an HCI appliance. So it's the foundation for hybrid cloud for the Dell Tech Cloud offers. And we're also offering up additional deployment options, so people think of VxRail as an appliance, but now they can get it as fully integrated rack with or without networking and if they choose Dell EMC Networking, they get the power of SmartFabric Services integration, for hyper-converged networking can be a pain point now it's fully automated, deployment, life cycle management as part of the full stack, so lots of options. >> Talk about the software innovation, 'cause we've been hearing and this has been happening, they've done a software transition, there's more software engineers than hardware engineers these days, you guys have the system software and some analytical software, how does that play in on the HCI side and where's that sit on the VxRail side, is it on the stacks, so where is your software piece? >> Yeah, thanks so there's really great software innovation from the PowerEdge side from the VMWare vSAN side, but we also have additional software innovation, specifically for VxRail that kind of ties those things together and that now includes VMware Cloud Foundations. So there's things like the RESTful APIs that I talked about that enable VMware Cloud Foundation full stack integration, that also have downstream connectors that allow networking automation. But now we're introducing another piece of software innovation that we're calling VxRail ACE. Analytical Consulting Engine, so you know, it's a marketing term, but what does this do, it's intelligent analytics to further simplify operations. We like to call it infrastructure machine learning for VxRail. So we're excited, we have a data lake, it has an analytics engine and historical data of how customers have been using VxRail to date. Now we're able to have enough data to apply machine learning to that and offer up customers insights into how to best optimize their configurations, forecast consumptions, I was just talking with some customers in a session before about how a few years back they would try and project their resource consumption over a five year period and now they can't even look six months ahead. So a tool like this can help them forecast it. At what point in time am I going to need to add more drives or add more nodes based on my current usage rates and that's pretty powerful technology. >> And with the consumption model changing too to the subscription, this gives them more agility on both sides, proactive planning and also understanding kind of what's going on. Not look back six months to a year like, well we should have bought or over-provisioning, the old days right? >> Yeah exactly yeah, that's good a point. >> So what's the future hold, tell us about where this is going to go next. Obviously selling like hot cakes, congratulations. >> Thanks. >> What's next, where's the next innovation coming, what's going on? >> Yeah I mean, like I said, we're seeing VxRail as more than just a catalyst for data center modernization, a lot of customers are going to keep choosing it for that turnkey simplicity. But we're now enabling fast and simple hybrid cloud and as edge use cases start to emerge, VxRail as a hyper-converged infrastructure has a lot of promise there too, so we really see it as a opportunity and a foundation for a wide range of use cases with our customers. >> So a lot of customers as we mentioned. Any favorite stories that really showcase how VxRail as a foundation for hybrid cloud, customer's cloud strategies, how it's really enabling them to unlock the data capital as it's been talking about here as obviously data has so much potential, but if you can't find it and you can't harness the insights. Any customer stories that really in your opinion speak to, this is really unlocking customer's data so that they can make better decisions, identify new revenue streams and ultimately deliver an awesome customer experience. >> Yeah definitely, I mean we have over 25 VxRail customers here at the show telling their stories throughout. It's hard for me to pick a single one. You know what's interesting is when we just had a session, we had two customers there and we asked them what are the business drivers that VxRail is enabling for you? They both, completely different industries, one is an insurance industry and one was a financial services industry, and they both came back to the same premise of I need to deliver IT services faster to my customer base and I can't spend time being in the business of maintaining the infrastructure, I just need automation that enables me to let my teams accelerate the pace of innovation and stay competitive. So, that's the role that it's playing. >> And in any industry, because as we know, every company these days, if they're not technology companies already, they need to be. >> Yeah that's true, yeah we were just talking about IT as a business, how IT leaders really need to work hand in hand with the CEOs, understand the business strategy and then create their own IT strategy. And really drive a culture around a business plan specifically for IT and technology. Which is a really interesting way to think about it. >> I was going to ask you about cultural change, as we all know that's very challenging to do. These two customers that you mentioned did they talk about that at all, like how it's actually enabling cultural change that drives the business forward. >> Yeah they did actually and you know, the core there is that people is harder to change than technology and tools and processes. Some of the tips that they had were really insightful, one of which is, a lot of people fear change. But if you can inspire them to fear obsolescence more than fearing change, then you can motivate them around that, but also creating a vision for them around what their role will be when they're not maintaining infrastructure will also help kind of inspire them to do things differently. So that was pretty cool to hear directly from customers around how their innovating, inspiring their people. >> Competition real quick, obviously HCI's been very competitive, new other vendors are out there, we know who they are, how do you guys fit in versus the competition, obviously the differentiators, the multiple piece parts of Dell Technologies. But where's the real innovation and competitive advantage that you guys are putting out there? >> Yeah, from a VxRail perspective it's easy. There's no deeper integration with VMware. All customers pretty much are VMware customers, a majority of them right? And being jointly engineered with VMware gives us inherent advantages and an experience that customers come to us and tell us, is superior to others that they're able to find, so we always go back to that and we get validation from our customers on that too. >> Okay Shannon as we wrap up here in the last few seconds. What are some the things you're personally going to be taking away as you hop on that red-eye tonight? >> Personally, I think Dell Technologies World is like the culmination of so much hard work of a ton of people, so I'm going to send a ton of thank you notes to all the people that made this happen, but really reflect on how exciting a time it is in technology, in what we're doing in hyper-converged that plays a role in everything that we've heard this week. And just be proud of what we're doing. >> Awesome, you should be proud, well Shannon thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE again this afternoon we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Go get some rest. >> I will. (laughs) >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering Dell Technologies world 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Good afternoon and welcome back to theCube day three of our live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante. Hey, Dave. >> Hey, Lisa, how's it going? >> Good. Day three. >> It's cold here. >> It's cold in here. I agree. But we're going to lighten it up with some really good conversation. We've got Rob Emsley back on thCube, Director of Product Marketing for data protection, Dell EMC, Rob, great to have you back. >> Great to be back. >> We got show and tell you brought Adam Schmitt network architect from customer GEI consultants. Welcome, Adam. >> Thank you-- >> Time to heat it up. >> What a great topic he's out with data protection. >> It's a hot topic. You're right. All right. So before we turn the way up on the seat, Adam, give us an overview of GEI Consultants who you guys are, what you do. >> Sure, GEI consultants is an environmental water resources, structural an engineering firm, we focus on anything and everything under the sun from structural geotechnical, bio chemical, you know, pretty much anything and everything engineering. >> So important stuff. Talk to us about before you were using working with Dell EMC, talk to us about your, your infrastructure, on prem, hybrid, what were you doing in terms of ensuring that that data was protected was accessible, so insights can be extracted from it? >> Absolutely. So GEI has 43 offices East to West Coast, and each of those offices has their own actual infrastructure that we have to protect at each site, ranging anywhere between three to 15 terabytes of size. So we're talking a lot of data and a lot of different geographical locations that I as a network architect had to worry about protecting, and one of the challenges of our older infrastructure, we were running 40 servers, just doing file level backups and restores, and we didn't have the ability to do any offline site backups in any locations. Now, we did have those in our primary data centers, and we were able to cross backup from each location to another when necessary, but it was, again, only a file level backup, it wasn't an actual full image, and we didn't have a full cloud picture yet that we could expand on going forward. >> So not a really robust data disaster recovery strategy in the event that you had to get something like that. >> It took several times and there are examples that I could give you office lost hardware in their actual infrastructure and we had to do a restore by restoring the files out an off site location, putting it on a USB hard drive and shipping it to that location, and then having to rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up and copy the data over not a timely manner of free storage. >> Or inexpensive. >> Robin, in the old days, you'd have an admin in the remote office, they load in a tape and it did recycle the tape every day, you know, you'd have it for a week, and then you'd reuse the same tape over and over again. That was the architecture, state of the art back then. >> Yeah, you probably remember something for those ads, there was a picture of a slightly undesirable individual and says, would you like this person to be your backup admin, which I thought was a little bit strange. But now I think things have moved on a little bit. >> What's the architecture look like today? >> Well, you know, one of the things in architecture is a very key word, because we have a belief in a saying that architecture matters, and when you have a distributed network, where you have lots of edge locations, and you have the requirement to protect them, and bring them back to the edge, the architecture that you deploy, really does make a difference. You know, there's a famous Star Trek line, I've heard it a few times this week that you cannot change the laws of Physics, and the amount of data that you move from the edge to the core, you want to make it as small as possible because if you don't, the amount of time that it takes to get data protected from the edge, especially you have lots of edges becomes a real constraint. So that was something which you know, GEI was able to take advantage of. >> So can you do that at speed? Doesn't that change the laws of Physics anyway? We don't go there, okay, so I wonder if you could share with us kind of how you came to this spot? What was life like before? Did you look at any other vendors, you know, paint the picture for us. >> So working with the Dell EMC technical team, as well as the DPS sales team, we were able to come up with a different strategy going forward. But it wasn't after a lot of trial and error when doing proof of concepts with other companies that, you know, made promises that they could do the backups that we needed off site at different locations geographically, but when it came down to it, we were going to have to fork up a lot of money for infrastructure being installed at every single location, whereas Dell EMC, I don't have to deploy any or any hardware, all I had to deploy was a virtual appliance at each location and we were successful in backing up remotely, we tried various technologies that claim that they could do it, and they didn't work successfully. So after a lot of trial and error, roughly, in total about a year's worth of trying, we finally got Dell EMCs technical team and the DPS came on board and we sat down in front of a whiteboard in Boston, Massachusetts, and said, this is what we're trying to paint as a picture, help me paint this as a full blown architecture and make this happen in this design fashion, and luckily, the Dell EMC team was so experienced and has so many different strategies that they can focus on, they were able to take every little thing that we needed, mark every checkbox and deliver a package with DPS for our solution in our own architecture that answered all of my questions instantly. >> You said virtual appliance it's got to run on something. So what is that actually? It's like serverless, right? >> So we have a physical infrastructure at every location, I deployed a virtual CentOS box, that's proxy that talks back to my data domain and communicates the CVT data changes back for backup. So it's not doing a full consecutive backup. That leaves a lot of headroom left over on your actual production server, so that it's not pegged while staff are using it. So I can kick off backups during the day, it takes a snapshot, and then the data gets backed up without anybody knowing. >> So this is really important as you said, Rob, you can't change the law of Physics. I imagine you got a straw and you got to put all this data through. It's like, it's like when you backup your iPhone for the first time it takes forever now. So you're talking about, you know, changed, just checking the changed data, and putting it through that straw, even though it's maybe a little bigger than a straw, so each day, it's just a smaller amount of data, okay, but what happens on a restore? >> On a restore same instance. So we'll restore that file, if we're doing the file level restore to the data domain, and then copy it wherever we need to on the network. Or if we're doing a full image based backup, we can restore that either to the cloud disaster recovery into AWS or Azure, or we can restore it to the actual data domain and Vmotion it wherever we need to after that point. >> So let's talk about business impact Sounds like there was a lot of trial and error, as you explained, really needing to work with a strategic partner who said all right, I get what you're trying to do, obviously, not easy, but you've been able to implement that. So how is GEI's business positively benefiting from this data protection strategy that you've implemented? >> Well, not just on a financial perspective, because we've eliminated the need for a completely separate off site data center, we have everything running in a cloud environment for CDR, so that we can restore instantly anytime that we need to, so we no longer needed to spend the footprint on another network architect on another infrastructure on all the different things that rely on another infrastructure at a separate location, so on top of financial savings for the company, I mean, we saved a huge amount of money, they're on infrastructure, that's only for disaster recovery, it's not doing anything, whereas we can just spend money on object storage in AWS, and use that as our cloud disaster recovery strategy. When you need it, you pay for it for your instances but otherwise, you're just paying for object storage, it's a lot cheaper than ever having to run a full separate data center. >> Specifically what is Dell's role in that equation in terms of the value chain? >> The data domain, we also got CDR, which allows us to use an appliance on premise to talk to an instance server in AWS or Azure, and it after its normal backup period, the backup completes and then shoots all the data that changed up to AWS in an S3 Bucket, and your data stored there and in a VMDK chunk data, that after need for restore can be turned into an AMI for AWS available, and then online whenever you need it. >> So this is very key, you know, on Tuesday, cloud was a big topic, hybrid cloud reality for the majority of customers and Adam and GEI the leverage of AWS is a great example of what many of our clients are looking to do from their investment in the public cloud. Certainly no GEI today is using AWS as a alternative to having to purchase a secondary disaster recovery site, or having to sign up with a managed service provider that's providing like a co-location service for disaster recovery, so using the public cloud and using the software capabilities around cloud disaster recovery, gives them a tremendous opportunity to save themselves a lot of money and do it very efficiently. >> It's like though friends don't let friends build data centers just for DR. Yeah, if you're going to build it for something that gives you a competitive advantage, okay. >> But it's interesting with some of the plans that Adam's got for the future, you know, you want to share some of those as far as what you're thinking about for the next few years. >> So future plans for GEI is definitely more cloud growth and minimizing the footprint that we have on premise, making it so that we don't have to have infrastructure at every location, consolidation of all of our data, obviously, going forward, GEI is going to continue growing with data, with videos that were modeling for different damn inspections, levy inspections, we're collecting a lot of data. But the problem is having that data geographically everywhere makes it challenging for future admins, including myself to continue to restore and backup and keep everybody happy. It's a really challenging task to continue supporting. So going forward with consolidating all that data into a central location, i.e. multi cloud environments, or Dell EMC cloud that was announced this week, we have the option for leveraging multi cloud instances, and being able to keep all of our instances alive in the cloud, rather than on premise. >> So you said put it on one location you talking physically or is it some kind of logical mapping that you're doing? >> There'll be logical mapping with some type of caching technology at the off site so that it's ready and available-- >> So a mapping that allows you to recover really fast if you need to, what about as part of that future in the roadmap, analytics on that of backup data? >> So the analytics on in terms of how much backups are going on on a nightly basis-- >> So specifically, are you using that corporate for any other reason? Well, let's see, might be looking at anomalous behavior, doing stuff with with air gaps, and you know, investigating that other DevOps activities. >> It's interesting that you say that because we were talking about a Data Domain having an air gap last night, at an event and the air gap method, making sure that your data domain is protected, it puts it in a right only mode, so that nobody can get into your data domain and actually do any damage to your data. Because you're right, you're backing out. There are anomalies that happen. If those anomalies happen to get into your infrastructure into your data backups, you could technically get ransomware or you know, locked out of your own data. Whereas Data Domain does support air gap technology, allowing you to lock down the system and require two admins before any changes are made to it. So definitely going-- >> Read only, read only. >> I think I heard that. But it's it's a good question with respect to data reuse is that, you know, the use case that Adam is currently using is to use AWS as a disaster recovery location, but the ability to spin up his data within AWS, yes, for the purpose of insurance, being able to access those production copies within AWS. But why not be able to use those for other purposes, such as interrogation of the data that was in them? That's all things that really start to evolve the conversation from what do you do for data protection to what do you do for data management? >> Yeah, so let's use some of the tool chains in live in AWS, say for example, apply some machine intelligence and machine learning and see what we find there, maybe anticipate anomalies or find some things that we didn't know. >> Absolutely, especially when users are dumping large amounts of data, we had an instance where before we started to actually seeing large data dumps when our data started to grow in the first place, we were inspecting levees and models in Colorado, and we had three engineers fill up an entire server of 4k videos, and our nightly backup all of a sudden said, Hey, you just got a huge amount of data change in an instant. Were you expecting this kind of change? If not, you should probably start knocking on someone's door, so we were able to use that analysis really quickly. >> So looking at day three of Dell Technologies World lots of announcements, Robbie, you kind of talked about some of those, you know, cloud enabled data protection becoming a big focus for you guys, I'm curious, Adam, to get your thoughts on some of the announcements. You mentioned the VMware on Dell, a cloud on Dell EMC, what are some things that really kind of piqued your interest as, hey, we're going to have more and more data coming, we've got lots of edge devices, they talked yesterday about the edges coming what did you hear that you thought, awesome, this is really going to be integral part of our strategy going forward? >> Definitely, so one thing that was mentioned was Power Protect, and that has everybody's interest right now. Because having the ability of basically an Avamar system with all flash or a Data Domain with all flash gives you obvious IO advantages in the future, that's probably going to be my next hot topic that I'm very vigorously researching everything out to see if in a couple of years or sooner that's going to fit into GEI's infrastructure and give us more benefits going forward. >> What's your biggest data protection challenge in 2019? >> Our biggest challenge up front was definitely moving from one backup strategy to a new backup strategy and that's from file level backups, only to image based backups, that was one of the biggest challenges, because anytime you lift a backup infrastructure out of production, and put a new one in, you're starting from zero, you can't really start from where you left off, you had to get all of that data, and geographically 43 offices doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're collecting data at all of those locations, that was a challenge, getting everything worked out and getting everything backed up in the first place. >> So you're knocking down that problem. If you're in a private meeting with Rob and his engineering team is there, what's the one thing that he could do to make your life easier? >> One thing he could do to make my life easier-- >> Drop prices-- >> Oh, sorry, then I have nothing else to say. (both laugh) >> Sounds like you-- >> Really, is that what you were going to say? >> So if we could enhance the performance of DD Boost, DD Boost already does a lot of performance benefits for what we do, DD Boost, in essence of what your network performance is, if there was a way of tweaking that on new servers, when you implement it, for example, we acquire companies every now and then we're implementing their strategies for their backups, and we have to start new backups, if there was a better methodology of seeding rather than having to go out physically plug in a hard drive and an NFL storage, make a clone of it and transfer it back. If there was a different method of seeding that technology or those backups, that would make things a little bit easier. >> Get on that. >> I mean, nobody can ever have enough performance and then, as Adam said, the big part of the Power Protect announcement yesterday was, you know, the introduction of, you know, the industry's first all-flash purpose built backup appliance with integrated software capabilities, and an all flash, I think, over the coming years is going to get is going to become a definite option for secondary storage workloads, not only for the straight performance of backup and restore speeds, but also for this huge opportunity around data reuse, and I think that you'll start to see more flash appearing in the data center, not just for production systems, but also for secondary workloads and where you're storing copies of production. >> At the end of the day, it sounds like you're probably quite the hero to all those folks that need making sure they have access to that data because that's what is, as we say, it's Michael Dell said it's inexhaustible, it's gold, that's what drives the business forward, that's what allows you to identify new products and new revenue streams. So we'll say congratulations on being an enabler of the business so far, we appreciate you guys sharing what GEI is doing and Rob, we appreciate your insights as well. We thank you for spending some time with us on theCube. >> Thank you very much. >> Oh, our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, Dell Technologies World 2019 day three of theCubes coverage continues in just a moment. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, the land of Dell Technologies World 2019, I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier. we're here with about 15,000 of Dell Technologies customers not including, and partners, about 5,000 partners. We're welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Jason Mundy, Senior Director, Dell Technologies consulting, from Dell EMC. Jason, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be back, thank you for having me. >> So, lots of news the last couple of days, here we are almost at the end of day two, but you know in Vegas, it's like a time warp, I feel like we just walked in this morning. So, everything talking about cloud, hybrid cloud, we have to have this hybrid cloud strategy. One of the things Jeff Clark talked about this morning and is the five imperatives, is that, not only do customers need to build powerful and modern infrastructures so they can harness the power of AI machine workloads for this tremendous and new amount of data that's being generated, but they've got to have hybrid cloud strategy for multi-cloud. But to customers, we talk to all the time, these terms multi-cloud is challenging to do. It's a fact of a by product of many things, right? M and A for example, different acquisitions. What are some of the consulting services and recommendations that you guys in consulting are offering to customers with, how do we manage successfully in this multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, certainly, so, the Dell Technologies cloud and the VMware cloud on Dell EMC was incredibly exciting news for us, you know, all the Dell Technologies, but also, hopefully our customers, I would think so, that's probably the biggest news that came out of here. And you know, the old adage, I hate to sound so cliche, but we talk about IT being about people, process, and technology, the technology is the easy part. It really is true, especially when it comes to services, and with Dell Technologies cloud, we just made that technology component so much easier for our customers to be able to consume that infrastructure and get up and running. But, the reality is, is to get to a true cloud operating model, there is a number of considerations, right? So first of all, we actually do need to have a strategy and a roadmap to be able to get there. And many customers already have that, many customers are you know, somewhat along the way, but many customers need our help, right? They need somebody to help guide them to that, and so we work with many customers to help them develop the actual strategy, we can build out a roadmap. And one of the most important things too, is building out a business case, right? Looking at what are the benefits to the business and the cost associated with it, because it is a significant investment and they're going to their executive teams, or the board of directors to look for that funding. So we help many customers do that, if they require it. Couple other factors too are, the applications and the workloads, 'cause of course, it really is all about your workloads and your applications. And then the actual operating model itself, where the people and the process are the hardest part, especially the people alright, because that involves change and we don't like change. And so, we do a lot of work to really help our customers, we'll meet them anywhere along the way in terms of where they are, along their strategy or where they might need help. >> What's the biggest percentage of customers mix of orientation or posture? Early adopters, you know, bleeding edge to, in the middle of their journey to just starting, how do you guys see the patterns shaping out, you know, one's that are, you know, doing R and D they're cloud native, they're transforming kind of bleeding edge and then you know, ones that are maybe run out of gas or maybe needs to change the tires a little bit or you know, someone leaves they need some help along the way, and then the early, people just starting to look at it, what percentage mix to you see? >> I think probably the majority of customers are smack dab in the middle. We deal mostly with you know, legacy types of customers. Not the digital natives, right? Who are starting from fresh and building cloud native applications. But legacy types of customers that are really trying to get there, and many of them have you know, certain parts of their IT operating in the cloud, they have multiple public clouds, they might have a private cloud, but very, actually, very few are probably in a true multi-cloud environment, because that involves you know, the inter connectivity, right, of all those different clouds, and then, as I said, the hard part is really building out that cloud operating model. And that requires a fundamental shift in how they organize, how they skill the different processes that they build. >> Jason, what does that mean to a customer when you say, cloud operating model? Do their eyes, you know, pop out of their head? Are they excited? What are they, how do they react to that? 'Cause they have all this existing IT, and maybe they have some shadow IT, they got some Amazon doing some stuff with analytics, who knows, but they kind of are here and they've got to get to there. When you say operating model, what does that mean? Common operating model? Coding? App development? What is that, how do you define the cloud operating model? >> Yeah so, it really involves everything. So customers will have their traditional IT organizations. Built around technology silos, they're really more focused on the technology and project basis, right? Executing IT projects behind the scenes to try to meet the needs of the business. A lot of our customers, most of them obviously are using VMware, so they're starting to get a flavor for what a cloud operating model is, but what is really means is, is to really shift the thinking of IT to be more of a product focused and service oriented organization, that is acting like a product management team where you are providing your product to the business which is IT as a service, and so you have to have different kinds of roles, right? It's less about the technology. That is still obviously important, but you need to have roles like relationship managers to work with the business. You need to have portfolio managers, you need to have folks who are managing capacity and developing those services. Very much like in a product organization that is creating a physical product and selling it to the market. >> So these roles, people, you talked about it, that why we talk about this all the time, people don't like change, change is hard, but it's essential, right? Cultural transformation is a driver of all the other transformations. So when your talking with customers, give us like these enterprise organizations that have been around for awhile like you mentioned and you've got all these different silos of data and people with different perspectives. Something like the news yesterday, Dell Technologies cloud, what has been the perception from some of those customers, in terms of, how is this really going to make things easy for us? I know there were some beta customers, what can you share with us about how maybe, Dell Technologies cloud or even the M word cloud on Dell EMC is going to help those fragmented organizations, even bring the cultures together to leverage that technology to drive that digital transformation? >> Yeah, certainly, so we've been working with customers for awhile, whether it's building out private clouds or building out hybrid clouds, you know, the technology part keeps getting easier, so I think they view this new development, this new platform as a way to really simplify the deployment implementation provisioning of the technology piece so they can focus on that harder part, and that's where they come to us and they'll look for help for, how do I need to design my organization? What types of new processes do I need to setup? And therefore, what kinds of roles and skills do I need to support that while I'm maintaining my legacy environment, my current environment, and I need to move my existing IT people over into that new model. So I think we can sort of eliminate some of the complexities with the technology significantly with this, and really focus on those harder elements. >> I've got to ask you a question, I was talking to Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on the other set, and one of the other things that Pat Gelsinger said that I thought was interesting was, when asked about his success at VMware, where those, these transition years was, he said, he turned headwinds into tailwinds. You know, flipped down the relationship with the cloud goes, to Amazon now they're in Azhur, Michael kind of talks about the same kind of thing, where you know, there's new thing coming to bare here at Dell Technology World this year. That's kind of simplifying whether it's partner execution or helping customers have that, I won't say single painted glass, but single cloud of glass if you will, with Dell cloud. This end to end operating model really is a strategic comparative and advantage for Dell. So, I got to ask you, what are you guys looking at, that when you look at the this show and say, okay, some things have been announced, how does that directly impact the consulting team, because I've can imagine that you're job is going to be accelerated with some of these new things. What are some of the highlights here at the show that you see as really going to pop for you and the consulting group? Because, you know, when you got data centers of service, that's in beta, but still, that's interesting, right? That's turnkey and you've got to VX rail and everything, I mean, seems to be like almost the bundling setup for you guys, what's your take on all this? >> Exactly, so I think, it makes things not only easier for our customers, it makes things easier for us in the sense that we can focus less on the technology integration piece and get to that harder part, the operating model. Helping the customers, you know, figure out what applications and workloads they need to move over and help them with that migration, and it's accelerating the need of customers to move to the cloud. A lot of the research that we saw presented this week demonstrated you know, the sense of urgency where customers, they want to move now, it's no longer, yeah we want to get there, we got to plan, we'll get there eventually. It's like, we need to do it now, how can you help us? So, we can then move to that harder part, so we will see increased demand, we will see increased need for our services and capabilities. >> You know, in the tech world, within Silicon Valley, you hear this term, the glue layer, which is tech terms for you've got to build software to kind of glue things together. This component goes with that components. Proxy servers, all kinds of weird stuff. And the integration message we are hearing here at Dell Technologies, is actually eliminating all this custom glue layer software, where you guys are now integrating it more fine tuned if you will, within the products. But yet they are still separate, you've got secure works, you can get RSA, you can get some things over here. You've got multiple puzzle pieces together there, with integration, how is that going to impact you guys? And of that integration strategy, which one do you think is going to be the most popular with customers? >> Well, there is certainly the need to integrate additional technologies in the customer's environment. They're going to have you know, CMDB's, you know, there's other technologies, you know, beyond Dell that we will help them integrate with if they need that. And then certainly, we'll work with our strategically aligned businesses with RSA's, secure works, parting with VMware to integrate those other technologies. So I think the again, it's about you know, it's sort of, it's like, it's the hierarchy of the level of value of work, the value we can provide back to the customer, so we sort of eliminate some of that you know, base line work, and we're focusing on that more value add. >> The VMware piece is nice to, you've got to like that VMware action there. >> Absolutely, so that's certainly a huge opportunity for us. >> So helping customers make these strategic decisions about their cloud, multi-cloud strategy, we think about the data that is, we hear lots of analogies, data is the new oil. Data is gold, Michael, I think yesterday said, data is inexhaustible, I always kind of think of it as a catalyst in a reaction that you can use multiple times at the same time, I mean it's one of those, it's capital for organizations. So when you're talking with customers that say, alright Jason, help us to understand, based on our types of data, where we should put it so we can get fast access to it, to glean those insights to be able to stay competitive. To identify a new revenue streams, new product streams. What are some of the consulting practices that you guys deliver to help them really look at the data as assets that really can drive business outcomes. >> Yeah, so we actually have some strong capabilities in the data analytics space. So, many of our customers, they understand this. They understand data capital. They understand that the value that they have, from their customer data to all of their product data, and they want to be able to unlock that. They want to be able to monetize it. So, we can help them understand, what data do you have? How do you make sense of it? How do you organize it? Let's build an analytics platform where you can start to look at use cases and build out a strategy to take advantage of those use cases and then start to capitalize on it, right? So we can help them with some of the data engineering. We can help them with some of the data science. We can help them build and implement the actual analytics platforms to take advantage of it. Of course, all built on our hybrid multi-cloud platforms. >> So you are a marketing guy, you must have some really killer customer examples that articulate that value beautifully. Share some of those with us. >> Well specific names, I'll put aside, but we've helped some customers with incredible fraud detection, right? We had one customer that was actually a power company and they had a number of people stealing power off the grid, but they couldn't really pinpoint it. It was a incredibly manual process, we actually helped them build the analytics platform, where they could look at and pinpoint where power was being stolen off the grid. And then they were able to predict where that was going to start happening, and they were able to crack down on it. And significantly reduce the incidents of that happening, and stop it. The savings were tremendous back to the business. >> What's your impression of the show this year? Thoughts on reaction to the news, the announcements. What's the most important story being told here? >> I think, you know, the evolution of the product lines you know, which we start today, some of the new product announcements is exciting, but I think we've really done a great job of connecting that back to the integration of all the technology across Dell Technologies, right? With the unified workspace announcement yesterday, and the Dell Technologies cloud, I think that is really, finally demonstrating, not finally, but really demonstrating in a concrete way, bringing to bare all the power of Dell Technologies, and when we start to put it together, you know, the incredible solutions that we were providing our customers. So we've gotten a lot of, we've seen a lot of buzz, with our customers in the services booth. We've had customers come over and ask us, you know, how do we take advantage of the cloud? Or can I understand, you know, even more about unified workspace and how it can help us? >> It could be a boom for you business? Some more build outs? >> Absolutely. >> More and more work to do. >> Absolutely, it's really going to, it's accelerating customer's demand for those solutions and of course, they're always going to need some level of services to go with that. >> We've heard that spirit of collaboration and integration throughout the last couple of days. Jason we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE again. Talking about what you guys are doing in consulting and helping customers to really make the right strategic decisions to move their business forward, thank you so much for joining John and me. >> Thank you so much for having me, really enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure, for John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live, wrapping up close our second day of two sets of CUBE coverage. As John says, it's a CUBE cannon of content, coming at you. From Las Vegas, we thank you for watching. (outro music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello. Welcome back to the Cube. At least a market with Dave Alonso. We are at Del Technologies World. This is our third day of coverage. As John has been saying, This is a cannon double cannon of Q content. We are pleased to welcome back a couple of alumni to keep. We've got Beth failing Presidents data Protection division from Italians. It's great to have you back. And Sherrod Rastogi also welcome back S VP of data protection product management Guys, Lots of news. The last three days, fifteen thousand or so people. Lot of partners. We've been hearing nothing but tremendous amount of positivity and also appreciation from your customers and partners for all of this collaboration within the Della Technologies company with partners. Some of the news, though, that you were on the keynote stage give us some anecdotes that you've heard from customers and partners the last few days about where Del Technologies is going. >> Yeah, I'm happy too. And you know, a big announcements this week. We're a power protect software and the power protect extra hundred appliance. And what we're hearing from customers is this is exactly what we needed to do because the demands on data protection are changing with more more. Brooke look being distributed with data being more more important and with the risks being more more prevalent that they were looking for us to take a bold step and introduce this next generation software to find platform. And so the feedback you're getting is you've done what you needed to do, and they're looking forward to learning more. >> So I wonder if we could sort of explore a little bit this concept of data management. So data management lead needs different things to different people. Sure, if your database person maybe maybe different from a person who's doing data protection, what does it mean in a data protection context? I think >> first of all, you know, having visibility off your data all across your infrastructure that resides in the edge. The court a cloud across multiple applications in physical virtual environments, right? So having full facility that I think is one component second is not the ability to move the data across seamlessly across any socially target but it is on track in the cloud. Robert Cloud. I think that sort of a second element, the third and probably the most important is how do you actually get value from the data, right? Already, Actually, not only unable to protect it, but make it available at the right time, right place for the right application and be able to use it because, as you know, data is the fuel of the modern visual economy. On making it available is really, really critical. And that to me. So you're combining all of that is what I would consider it at management to be. >> So double click on that. I mean, could you be more specific about the attributes of, you know, a modern data management system? So I >> would say, you know, any modern technology may be modular FBI driven, you know, it really sort of the automate scale performance coverage. All those attributes, I think are very important for any more than data protection product and be able to meet the needs of our customers. You know, high scale hi coverage and rapidly, >> and that gives you a cloud like experience presumably allows you to scale out many a performance. I've seen some of the conversations that start associating with that or scale in place Bath. You talked about that? Yeah, Well, yeah. I want to explore a little bit about your business because you know who knew? Who would have predicted a few years ago? The data protection would always because all of a sudden become this hot space veces diving in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. And of course, you're the biggest player. So everybody wants a piece of your hide. And so and you got a portfolio. It goes back up llegado days. They have amar stuff data, domaine et cetera, et cetera. She had a sort of make sure that that was logical for your customers. Protect those customers that have made investment of you, but also shoma roadmap. Jeff Clark comes in, says, Okay, we're going to simplify, you know, marching orders. Your business in a very rapid time has transformed. Can you talk about that? What's what's taking place in your business? >> Absolutely, David, it's so interesting even comparing last year to this year, right? We're at this pivot point where we're building on the legacy of Trust and I T and knowledge and experience that we have. But we're now setting the foundation to be number one and data protection and data management for the next ten years. Introducing this new set of products were able to bring a customer's forward. We call it the path to power. So in addition to that, bring new customers into the family. We're looking for all those aspects of modern day to management, with simplicity, with multi cloud, with automation and with the new use cases where it's more than just back up. It's CCD are its analytics. It's testing toe. It's validation. So this is whole spectrum of things that we can expand into now that we have this new platform. It's really exciting. >> It is exciting. And yesterday the under Armour video was very cool, and one of the things that they set in there is that there they're leveraging data for brand reputation. I mean, they've got under Armour has incredible brand ambassadors Tom Brady, Steph Curry. But looking at it as not just a business ever. But this is actually tied to our brand reputation, did. It is so incredibly pivotal to the lifeblood of a business. It has to be protected. >> Yeah, and that's a big theme. And you probably something too. But, you know, in this day and time data is no longer something that maybe people in I'd worry about write It is now the lifeblood of most of our customers, corporations and at the same time list, like the threat of malware are very prevalent. And so things like what we've done with cyber recovery always were working with our customers to protect their data. In a survey we just did. With twenty two hundred I t professionals, twenty eight percent of them had had some data loss in the last twelve months. So the risk of data loss is real. And we take our responsibility very seriously to help our customers protect from that risk. >> So I like this message to any source. Any target, any s l a. I would I would had any workload and because on so talk about you're differentiation in the marketplace, that would be great, because it's hard sometimes, you know, squint through all the marketing. And so what makes you guys different specifically thinking >> about Delhi emcee Indiana production historically has its strength in dealing with complex work clothes at high scale, with high performance on having a wide coverage of work has been a strength and actually had very low cost, very efficient, right? So that string we sort of carry on into the future. And what we're adding on is I would say that the next degree off simplification and ease off ease off, install, upgrade use. Making those work was very, very simple, right? So I think that's another dimension. We are God. We're adding our dimension, what we call multi dimensional scale, which is both scale up and scale out the same time when you actually add more notes and more cubes, you are not only capacity, but he also improved performance, right? That's it, architecturally, a fundamentally different way in Harvey approach it. So I think that's an element of innovation, and I think on performance we're introducing our first all flash off Lions industry first, So we're super excited about that. And so I think it just helped our customers in terms of restore interactions store Do those work was a lot faster. Those are some other elements in which we continue innovating. >> That's great. Yeah, so you talk about the power protect X four hundred, which is your flesh. John Rose said something on stage. Beth, I want to ask you, Teo, sort of add some color. Hey, said this is not just secondary storage. It's protected. Managed infrastructure, >> huh? That's great face. >> What? What did he mean by that? And what should we take away? >> I mean, it shows how we're broadening the use cases that these products can help satisfy. And so much of what we're talking about Del Technologies is a simplified infrastructure across the board, not thinking about just point products, but giving the customer that experience of a seamless extendable infrastructure. So protected managed infrastructure means that your infrastructure, something you have, can confidence it's protected and that you also are not just dealing with all of these pieces and parts. But I can think of it has a managed whole. I think that that helps out and talk to John about that. But that's what I take away from what he's saying. >> If I can just add to that, I would say Like, you know, data management is sort of the perfect glue across the whole del technology infrastructure, but a server storage bm We're, you know, eighty, you know, infrastructure pivotal, right? Data management data productions are off, cuts across everything, and we can bring everything together. So >> I would like to add something to that if I make it. You know Beth on sure Art as well. Data protection Backup was always OK. We gotta back it up. Who's gonna? Okay, Bump bolted on. And what's happening is the lines are blurring. Primary storage, secondary storage. You're seeing back up in the e r. Use cases. You talked about analytics and, you know, so many new emerging. That's why it is so exciting. And so because those lines are blurring, you get more value out of the system. It goes beyond just insurance. And that means this could be a lot of money being made here >> if there is. And it is also a really important need, write one thing that we haven't touched on. But I also think it's really important is with our protect we're helping combine self service with centralized governance. So what I mean by that is, if you're a V a madman or Oracle Adnan or a sequel admin, you know, you could have control over protecting your data, but we pair that with a single, you know, governance model. So if I'm the person is responsible for my company's entire, you know, data set, I can still make sure that everything's happening is it should be. And there are no anomalies, so we're really making it as easy as possible, for the business is within our customers to protect and manage their data but not making it the Wild West. Because somebody in the end is accountable for saying I know where all the data is, and I know it's protected, so it's having both of those users. >> So as data protection has really elevated, the stay was saying to become its way beyond an insurance policy. This is absolutely table stakes because data has so much value and so much value that organisations haven't even been able to extract it right, how the conversation within the customer base changed. It's not just to the admin girl or guy anymore. Rightness is Are you saying this really leveled up Tio? Maybe a senior level C level challenge as our business imperative that the state of must be protected and readily accessible at any time. Who are you talking to? >> So answer quickly that I lied to you when we're talking to the eye to decision makers. So seo no, that level data protection strategy has become something that they have in their priority list, right? It's not really in any way what it was maybe five or ten years ago. Now it's something that there's cord of what they hold as their responsibilities, executives and and that's great. It's great to have those kind of conversations because it's strategic. >> Another conversation. Just an example from yesterday, while speaking with one of the chief architects at a major company, they're really talking about cyber security on How do you use Extend? You know what we offer into a full solution across their technology. Do address, you know, doesn't use case right. So I think it's expanding beyond just back up and protection to true protection off the data. Very most mission critical data is available and not just protected. They also want to talk about how can you recover that real quickly in very quick time, so that your operation, when you do have that cyber, if and when you have that attack So I think it's just expanding toe touch. A lot more customers, I would say Our people buying, buying decision makers across >> so that when I talk to people in division I sense a renewed energy. A renewed focus. I mean, GMC before Del. Tell'Em Steve always been really good. Taking engineering resource is to getting products out to the market. But But I I see again more focused effort here and one of the exam to keep pushing on. Is this notion of cloud model so beyond? Just okay, there's a target. How do we now get to that? You know, data protection is a service small. I know that you're working toward that. I know it's, you know, a lot of it's It's early days there, but you've got to be a leader in that, I presume. So. I want to keep watching that pushing that I won if you guys could comment on what coming >> on, both things that you said. First of all, there's absolutely a level of excitement and focus and confidence in what we're doing in the product groups. I'm really changing the way we're developing software so that we have a new customer value coming out every quarter. And they were having clarity between the top level strategies. White downs, what individual engineers are working on. So that's fun and excited because we're truly transforming the way we're developing Product says point one. And the second one, absolutely here, that theme throughout all of what we're talking about. You heard a nun day one, No, giving people that cloud that experience infrastructure has a service which certainly includes data management and data protection so they can consume it in a way that fit step business that scales with business That's automated, that doesn't require, you know, massive manual steps and is more what people expect today was a cloud like experience, even for them on from data centers. Clearly, that's where we're moving. And this one more point is you know, people really want automation they don't wanna have to think about. Did I remember to protect everything? They want the system to do that for them. So you'LL see more of that from us as well. You know how we helping them with machine learning? An A I an automation so they can have confidence that all of the assets are protected even if they haven't remember to do it all. >> I mean, I just add to it. I've bean at Delhi emcee for about a year. >> It >> has been a fantastic journey waiting. It's exciting. It's been awesome. Awesome experience. I totally see the >> focus. And I think that renewed focus the cloud like a model and the innovation. They all go hand in hand because the old waterfall model of okay, we're gonna develop properties shipment every year, eighteen months. Whatever it is that doesn't fly anymore. People want innovations, and now they want to push code every day. Right? So our baby, every quarter at least. >> Yeah. Yeah. Facing new energy to the engineers as well. >> So I mean, I understand that many of your team, if not your entire engineering team, has been trained in agile. Is that my getting it right? Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, >> not just not just like internal train. You guys brought in outside people and really took him through some formal training. Right >> way have in multiple different kinds of training. And we have lots of communications inside to get people coaching. And it's not just a process book that we're following its really a different way of thinking about how you bring customer value in small increments, staying in a good known stay and making sure that we're maximizing our engineering capacity. >> That's big. And I wish we had more time cause that's cultural train. Yeah, yeah, that you guys are really driving. And we also didn't have time to touch on partners, but it can imagine there's a lot of excitement and your huge partner community about what you guys are doing This. Congratulations on all the announcement is gonna have to have you back because there's just so much more to dig into. But back Sherrod, Thank you for joining David me this afternoon on the you go. >> Thank you so much >> for our pleasure. For Dave Volonte and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day three of Del Technologies, World twenty nineteen on the Cube. Thanks for watching

>> 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 to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman, we are joined by Lewie Newcomb he is the Vice President, Server Storage and HCI Engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> For the first time ever. >> For the first time, I'm excited. Very excited about it. >> Yes well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show, I now you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. >> Okay, well the big news for the show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance, so basically, think half-rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 PowerEdge server. So all of our products are on PowerEdge servers. And the 840 with 4-socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA. >> So Lewie let's take it back a sec, because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this was a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. >> Yeah, so I'll just start with the new brands. VxFlex is the brand, VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product, VxFlex Integrated Rack. VxFlex OS and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. >> Simplicity. >> Okay. (laughs) >> The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think a big improvement over our previous brands. And then, I'll go into some of the details. So, I talked about the Appliance, think about new consumption model, little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS, so the VxFlex OS we added compression in this release, it's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision, it's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity and snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the database. We also have SAS Analytics has a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performant product. If you think about, it's a pure software SAN And we can also do HCI, we can also combine the software SAN with the HCI we call that two-layers, the way we refer to the software SAN. >> Alright, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail, so maybe use that a touch point for people to understand. VxRail, joint integration between VMware and Dell. VMware Hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast as to some of those pieces. >> Great question, the VxRail as you said, it's our, integrated in an entire VMware stack. And some great announcements, I love ACE, if you seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. >> Or even if they use VMware they're not 100% VMware. >> Not 100%, and many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick the Rail and so customers as we talk to 'em, they different needs and we have different products for those, so we give them that choice. >> Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? >> And you've been doing software defined for a long time so I always see it this way, you start out with a customer that's transforming their business, they want to get into software defined, they want to prepare themselves for the future. Well that's where we start, we're software defined. And the next thing we look at is, do they need performance? Do need they need some one millisecond latency across you know, 50 nodes, 1000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance, so that's why I mentioned the databases. And the other things is, we just talked about is that choice they may not want to use just vSphere, they might want to use other hypervisors, so we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two-layer, because as you know with HCI we combine the application and the stored services all on one node. So in our product we can actually separate those, so you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. >> Okay, simplicity is really one of the key words that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting having had discussion from CI all the way through HCI, some of the software that allows me to manage it, really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go in blocks together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at this spectrum of offerings. >> Sure, so we have the VxFlex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning, so that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that, in this current release 3.2 release. So it, more granularity round the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that, every customer I talked to this week, number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use, so as they're going into software defined, they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VxFlex Manager. >> Alright, great so talk a little bit about the application, you talk about high performance environment, one of the things we've been looking in this space especially is, what are some of the new areas, things like containerization, Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. >> Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plugin, the CSI plugin, so we have some customers already testing that beta and because we have bare metal, we can also support that in that native environment, So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment. But they're preparing for the future, they're looking at different options, so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. >> So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer... Customer list of what they want, they want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. >> They want performance. >> They want performance, so what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for the next year's? >> Yeah well next year, we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services, like we just added compression, so our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path, and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. >> Right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations, good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers, what are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? >> A lot of the customers the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment, 'cause remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations, they want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way I'll mention the two-layer, another great advantage of two-layer, a lot of times, these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool, so it's a big advantage so that's 90% of the conversations we're having. >> Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns, you talk about, I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh I had to manage it to in the VCE days, it was the compatibility matrix and then the RCM documentation, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, you know I take care of it, securities patches come I don't have to worry about scrambling I've got that taken care of. >> That's nirvana, that's our north star. We're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling it out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade right? That one button, our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates, and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part as you know, you mentioned, some older products, it's the most complex part of the solution, is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. >> So how do you manage that? I mean as you said it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet also all your clients are facing too. >> Well luckily we have a lot smart people. (laughs) and we have great customers. The nice thing you know, Dell's direct, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean they're designing with us, they're telling us what they need. And we're not a large large scale business in relative to a server business and using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers. And we go and show them our roadmaps, we go get feedback from them, they help us define what they need and we follow our customers. >> Well it's really interesting, because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. >> I feel I work in a startup, we're agile, we're listening to our customers, we're doing the right things. We're not focused all just on our business, we're focused on our customer outcomes. We made a big ship this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications and we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. >> Yeah, what about the consumption model, some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage their services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How's that fit into the VxFlex? >> Yeah, we're not there yet, of course we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio, We have some great products in that portfolio. But we'll get there over time. Today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell EMC and the cloud platforms. We'll continue to build infrastructure, we'll continue to stay in our lane, where we do really really well and the customers love us. But We'll eventually get to different consumption models. >> So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. >> And I hope and you're seeing this, this feel like we're one big company now right? We've been three years in the making. And coming to Dell Tech this year, I feel like we're one. And Michael's key note was, the first customer I talked to, you know, everything Michael said, resonated so well with me and so it really feels that way. And just the vibe back there and in the solution expo, it's just, you know at level 10. >> Well right, so we're passed the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know those seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit into place. >> Pivotal Cloud Foundry right? Almost all of us are parting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer, you know Secureworks RSA, we all need security right? We're all working there too. And even now, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, storage product, so we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement right? That's a platform, that's a analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge. We can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics in that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun, I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side, and I'm starting to see it really really come together this year, here at this show. >> Alright, so want to give you the final word, VxFlex I know people, if they went through the expo hall they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? >> So we're pure software defined, we're very high performance, we're ideal for your databases, we're ideal for scale, we can scale up to 1000 nodes or higher. And we have many many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one millisecond latency. So... >> A good note to end on, (laughs) powerful. >> Bang yeah. (laughs) >> Lewie thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it's been fun. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have so much more of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Ferrier. You're watching the Cube live at Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. This is our second full day of Double Cube set coverage. We've got a couple of we're gonna really cool conversation coming up for you. We've got Robbie Pender County, one of our alumni on the cue back as VP product management server solutions. Robbie, Welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Much appreciated. >> And you brought some Hollywood? Yes. Glenn Glenn ER, president of Sony Innovation Studios. Glenn and welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> So you are love this intersection of Hollywood and technology. But you're a filmmaker. >> Yeah. I have been filming movies for many years. Uh, I started off making motion pictures for many years. Executive produced him and over so production for them at one of our movie labels called Screen Gems, which is part of Sony Pictures. >> Wait a tremendous amount of evolution of the creative process being really fueled by technology and vice versa. Sony Innovation Studios is not quite one year old. This is a really exciting venture. Tell us about that and and what the the impetus was to start this company. >> You know that the genesis for it was based out of necessity because I looked at a nice Well, you know, I love making movies were doing it for a long time. And the challenge of making good pictures is resource is and you never get enough money believing not you never get enough money and never get enough time. That's everybody's issue, particularly time management. And I thought, Well, you know, we got a pretty good technology company behind us. What if we looked inward towards technology to help us find solutions? And so innovation studios is born out of that idea on what was exciting about it was to know that we had, uh, invited partners to the game right here with Del so that we could make movies and television shows and commercials and even enterprise solutions leaning into state of the art and cutting edge technology. >> And what some of the work prize and you guys envision coming out this mission you mentioned commercials. TV is it going to be like an artist's studio actor? Ackerson Ball is Take us through what this is going to look like. How does it get billed out? >> I lean into my career as a producer. To answer that one and say is going to enable that's one of the greatest things about being a producer is enabling stories, uh, inspiring ideas to be Greenland. That may not have been able to be done so before. And there's a key reason why we can't do that, because one of our key technologies is what we call the volumetric image acquisition. That's a lot of words. You probably say. What the heck is that? But a volumetric image acquisition is our ability to capture a real world, this analog world and digitize it, bring it into our servers using the power of Del and then live in that new environment, which is now a virtual sets. And that virtual set is made out of billions and trillions in quadrillions of points, much like the matter around us. And it's a difference because many people use pixels, which is interpretation of like worry, using points which is representative of the world around us, so it's a whole revolutionary way of looking at it. But what it allows us to do is actually film in it in a thirty K moving volume. >> It's like a monster green screen for the world. Been away >> in a way, your your your your action around it because you have peril X so these cameras could be photographing us. And for all you know, we may not be here. Could be at stage seven at Innovation Studios and not physically here, but you couldn't tell it. If >> this is like cloud computing, we talking check world, you don't the provisional these resource is you just get what you want. This is Hollywood looking at the artistry, enabling faster, more agile storytelling. You don't need to go set up a town and go get the permit. All the all the heavy lifting you're shooting in this new digital realm. >> That's right. Exactly. Now I love going on location on. There's a lot to celebrate about going on location, but we can always get to that location. Think of all the locations that we want to be in that air >> base off limits. Both space, the one I >> haven't been, uh, but but on said I've been I've walked on virtual moons and I've walked on set moons. But what if we did a volumetric image acquisition of someone set off the moon? Now we have that, and then we can walk around it. Or what if there's a great club, a nightclub? This says guys want you shoot here, but we have performances Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night there. You know they have a job. What if we grab that image, acquired it, and then you could be there anytime you want. >> Robbie, we could go for an hour here. This is just a great comic. I >> completely agree with you. >> The Cube. You could. You could sponsor a cube in this new world. We could run the Q twenty four seven. That's absolutely >> right. And we don't even have >> to talk about the relationship with Dale because on Del Technologies, because you're enabling new capabilities. New kind of artistry was just totally cool. Want to get back to the second? But you guys were involved. What's your role? How do you get involved? Tell the story about your >> John. I mean, first and foremost one of things that didn't Glendon mention is he's actually got about fifty movies to his credit. So the guy actually knows this stuff, so which is absolutely fantastic. So we said, How do you go take average to the next level? So what else is better than trying to work something out, wherein we together between what Glenn and Esteem does at the Sony Innovation Labs for Studio Sorry. And as in Dead Technologies could do is to try and actually stretch the boundaries of our technology to a next tent that when he talks about kazillion bytes of data right one followed the harmony of our zeros way have to be able to process the data quickly. We have to be able to go out and do their rendering. We probably have to go out and do whatever is needed to make a high quality movie, and that, I think, in a way, is actually giving us an opportunity to go back and test the boundaries of their technology. They're building, which we believe this is the first of its kind in the media industry. If we can go learn together from this experience, we can actually go ahead and do other things in other industries. To maybe, and we were just talking about how we could also take this. He's got his labs here in Los Angeles, were thinking maybe one of the next things we do based on the learnings we get, we probably could take it to other parts of the world. And if we are successful, we might even take it to other industries. What if we could go do something to help in this field of medicine? >> It's just thinking that, right? Yes. >> Think about it. Lisa, John. I mean, it's phenomenal. I mean, this is something Michael always talks about is how do we as del technologies help in progress in the human kind? And if this is something that we can learn from, I think it's going to be phenomenal. >> I think I think that's so interesting. Not only is that a good angle for Del Technologies, the thing that strikes me is the access toe artist trees, voices, new voices that may be missed in the prop the vetting process the old way. But, you know, you got to know where we're going. No, in the Venture Capital way seen this with democratization of seed labs and incubators, where, if you can create access to the story, tells on the artists we're gonna have one more exposure to people might have missed. But also as things change, like whether it's Ray Ray beaming and streaming, we saw in the gaming side to pull a metric or volumetric things. You're gonna have a better canvas, more paint brushes on the creative side and more. Artist. Is that the mission to get AC, get those artists in there? Is it? Is that part of the core mission submission? Because you're going to be essentially incubating new opportunities really fast. >> It's, uh, it's very important to me. Personally. I know it speaks of the values of both Sony and L. I like to call it the democratization of storytelling. You know, I've been very blessed again, a Hollywood producer, and we maybe curate a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of experience. But there's so many voices around the world that need to be hurt, and there are so many stories that otherwise can't be enabled. Imagine a story that perhaps is a unique >> special voice but requires distance. It requires five disparate locations Perhaps it's in London, Piccadilly Circus and in Times Square. And perhaps it's overto Abu Dhabi on DH Libya somewhere because that's part of the story. We can now collapse geography and bring those locations to a central place and allow a story to be told that may not otherwise have been able to be created. And that's vital to the fabric of storytelling worldwide's >> going change the creative process to you don't have to have that waterfall kind of mentality like we don't talk about intact. You're totally distributed content, decentralized, potentially the creative process going change with all the tools and also the visual tools. >> That's right. It's >> almost becoming unlimited. >> You wanted to be unlimited. You want the human spirit to be unlimited. You want to be able to elevate people on. That's the great thing about what we're trying to achieve and will achieve. >> It is your right. I mean, it is interesting, you know, we were just talking about this, too. Uh, we're in, you know, as an example. Shock tank. Yes, right. I mean, they obviously did it. The filming and stuff, and then they don't have the access. Let's say to the right studio. But the fact is, they had all this done. Andi, you know, they had all the rendering they had captured. Already done. You could now go out and do your chute without having all the space you needed. >> That's right. In the case of Shark Tank, which shoots a Sony Pictures studios, they knew they had a real estate issue. The fact of the matter is, there's a limited amount of sound stages around the world. They needed to sound stages and only had access to one. So we went in and we did a volumetric image acquisition of their exit interview stage. They're set. And then when it came time to shoot the second half a season ten, one hundred contestants went into a virtual set and were filmed in that set. And the funny thing is, one of the guys in the truck you know how you have the camera trucks and, you know, off offstage, he leaned into the mike. Is that you guys, could you move that plant a couple inches to the left and somebody said, Uh, I don't think we can do it right now, he said, We're on a movie lot. You could move a plant. They said No, it's physically not there. We're on innovation studios goes Oh, that's right. It's virtual mind. >> So he was fooled. >> He was pulled. In a way, we're >> being hashing it out within a team. When we heard about some of the things you know Glenn and Team are doing is think about this. If you have to teach people when we are running short of doctors, right? Yeah, if you could. With this technology and the learnings that come from here, if you could go have an expert surgeon do surgery once you're captured, it would be nice. Just imagine, to take that learning, go to the new surgeons of the future and trained them and so they can get into the act without actually doing it. So my point and all this is this is where I think we can take technology, that next level where we can not only learn from one specific industry, but we could potentially put it to human good in terms of what we could to and not only preparing the next of doctors, but also take it to the next level. >> This was a great theme to Michael Dell put out there about these new kinds of use case is that the time is now to do before. Maybe you could get there technology, but maybe aspirational. Hey, let's do it. I could see that, Glenn, I want to ask you specifically. The time is now. This is all kind of coming together. Timing's pretty good. It's only gonna get better. It's gonna be good Tech, Tech mojo Coming for the creative side. Where were we before? Because I can almost imagine this is not a new vision for you. Probably seen it now that this house here now what was it like before for, um and compare contrast where you were a few years ago, maybe decades. Now what's different? Why? Why is this so important >> for me? There's a fundamental change in how we can create content and how we can tell stories. It used to be the two most expensive words in the movie TV industry were what if today that the most important words to me or what if Because what if we could collapse geography? What if we could empower a new story? Technology is at a place where, if we can dream it. Chances are we can make it a reality. We're changing the dynamics of how we may content. He used to be lights, action camera. I think it's now lights, action, compute power action, you know, is that kind of difference. >> That is an amazing vision. I think society now has opportunities to kind of take that from distance learning to distance connections, the distance sharing experiences, whether it's immersion, virtual analog face, the face could really be powerful. Yeah, >> and this is not even a year old. >> That's right. >> So if you look at your your launch, you said, I think let june fourth twenty eighteen. What? Where do you go from here? I mean, like we said, this is like, unlimited possibilities. But besides putting Robbie in the movie, naturally, Yes, of course I have >> a star here >> who? E. >> So I got to say he's got star power. >> What's what's next year? Exactly? >> Very exciting. I will say we have shark tank Thie Advanced Imaging Society gives an award for being the first volume met you set ever put out on the airwaves. Uh, for that television show is a great honor. We have already captured uh, men in black. We captured a fifty thousand square foot stage that had the men in black headquarters has been used for commercials to market the film that comes out this June. We have captured sets where television shows >> and in hopes, that they got a second season and one television show called up and said, Guys, we got the second season so they don't have to go back to what was a very expensive set and a beautiful set >> way captured that set. It reminds me of a story of productions and a friend of mine said, which is every year. The greatest gift I have is building a beautiful set and and to me, the biggest challenges. When I say, remember that sent you built four years ago? I need that again. Now you can go >> toe. It's hard to replicate the exact set. You capture it digitally. It lives. >> That's exactly it. >> And this is amazing. I mean, I'd love to do a cube set into do ah, like a simulcast. Virtually. >> So. This is the next thing John and Lisa. You guys could be sitting anywhere going forward >> way. You don't have to be really sitting here >> you could be doing. What do you have to do? And, you know, you got everything rendered >> captured. We don't have to come to Vegas twenty times a year. >> We billed upset once. You >> know you want to see you here believing that So I'LL take that >> visual is a really beautiful thing. So if we can with hologram just seeing people doing conscious with Hollywood. Frank Zappa just did a concert hologram concert, but bringing real people and from communities around the world where the localization diversity right into a content mixture is just so powerful. >> Actually, you said something very interesting, John, which is one of the other teams to which is, if you have a globally connected society and he wanted try and personalize it to that particular nation ethnicity group. You can do that easily now because you can probably pop in actors from the local area with the same. Yeah, think about it. >> It's surely right. >> There's a cascade of transformations that that this is going Teo to generate. I mean just thinking of how different even acting schools and drama schools will be well, teaching people how to behave in these virtual environments, right? >> How to immerse themselves in these environments. And we have tricks up our sleeves that Khun put the actor in that moment through projection mapping and the other techniques that allow filmmakers and actors to actually understand the world. They're about to stepped in rather than a green screen and saying, OK, there's going to be a creature over here is gonna be blue Water falls over there will actually be able to see that environment because that environment will exist before they step on the stage. >> Well, great job the Del Partnership. On my final question, Glenn, free since you're awesome and got a great vision so smart, experienced, I've been really thinking a lot about how visualization and artistry are coming together and how disciplines silo disciplines like music. They do great music, but they're not translating to the graphics. It was just some about Ray tracing and the impact with GP use for an immersive experiences, which we're seeing on the client side of the house. It del So you got the back and stuff you metrics. And so, as artist trees, the next generation come up. This is now a link between the visual that audio the storytelling. It's not a siloed. >> It is not >> your I want to get your vision on. How do you see this playing out and your advice for young artists? That might be, you know, looked as country. What do you know? That's not how we do it. >> Well, the beautiful thing is that there are new ways to tell stories. You know, Hollywood has evolved over the last century. If you look at the studios and still exist, they have all evolved, and that's why they do exist. Great storytellers evolved. We tell stories differently, so long as we can emotionally relate to the story that's being told. I say, Do it in your own voice. The cinematic power is among us. We're blessed that when we look back, we have that shared experience, whether it's animate from Japan or traditional animation from Walt Disney everybody, she shares a similar history. Now it's opportunity to author our new stories, and we can do that and physical assets and volumetric assets and weaken blend the real and the unreal. With the compute power. The world is our oyster. >> Wow, >> What a nice >> trap right there. >> Exactly. That isn't my job. The transformation of of Hollywood. What it's really like the tip of the iceberg. Unlimited story potential. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you. This has been a fascinating cannot wait to hear, See and feel and touch What's next for Sony Animation studios With your technology power, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Thank you both. Which of >> our pleasure for John Carrier? I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube lie from Del Technologies World twenty nineteen We've just wrapped up Day two we'LL see you tomorrow.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Ferrier. You're watching the Cube live at Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. This is our second full day of Double Cube set coverage. We've got a couple of we got a really cool conversation coming up for you. We've got Robbie Pender County, one of our alumni on the cue back as VP product management server solutions. Robbie, Welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Much appreciated. >> And you brought some Hollywood? Yes, Glenn Glenn er, president of Sony Innovation Studios. Glenn and welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> So you are love this intersection of Hollywood and technology. But you're a filmmaker. >> Yeah, I have been filming movies for many years. I started off making motion pictures for many years. Executive produced him and oversaw production for them at one of our movie labels called Screen Gems, which is part of Sony Pictures. >> Wait a tremendous amount of evolution of the creative process being really fueled by technology and vice versa. Sony Innovation Studios is not quite one year old. This is a really exciting venture. Tell us about that and and what the The impetus was to start this company. >> You know that the genesis for it was based out of necessity because I looked at a nice Well, you know, I love making movies were doing it for a long time. And the challenge of making good pictures is resource is and you never get enough money. Believe or not, you never get enough money and never get enough time. That's everybody's issue, particularly time management. And I thought, Well, you know, we got a pretty good technology company behind us. What if we looked inward towards technology to help us find solutions? And so innovation studios is born out of that idea on what was exciting about it was to know that we had, uh, invited partners to the game right here with Del so that we could make movies and television shows and commercials and even enterprise solutions leaning into state of the art and cutting edge technology. >> And what some of the work private you guys envision coming out this mission you mentioned commercials TV. Is it going to be like an artist's studio actor actress in ball is take us through what this is going to look like. How does it get billed out? >> I lean into my career as a producer. To answer that one and say is going to enable that's one of the greatest things about being a producer is enabling stories, uh, inspiring ideas to be green lit that may not have been able to be done so before. And there's a key reason why we can't do that, because one of our key technologies is what we call the volumetric image acquisition. That's a lot of words. You probably say. What the heck is that? But a volumetric image acquisition is our ability to capture a real world, this analog world and digitize it, bring it into our servers using the power of Del and then live in that new environment, which is now a virtual sets. And that virtual set is made out of billions and trillions in quadrillions of points, much like the matter around us. And that's a difference because many people use pixels, which is interpretation of like we're using points which is representative of the world around us, so it's a whole revolutionary way of looking at it. But what it allows us to do is actually film in it in a thirty K moving volume. >> It's like a monster green screen for the world. Been away >> in a way, you're you're you're interaction around it because you have peril X, so these cameras could be photographing us. And for all you know, we may not be here. Could be at stage seven at Innovation Studios and not physically here, but you couldn't tell the >> difference. This is like cloud computing. We talking check world, you don't the provisional these resource is you just get what you want. This is Hollywood looking at the artistry, enabling faster, more agile storytelling. You don't need to go set up a town and go get the permit. All the all the heavy lifting you're shooting in this new digital realm. >> That's right. Exactly. Now I love going on location on There's a lot to celebrate about going on location, but we can always get to that location. Think of all the locations that we want to be in that air >> base off limits. Both space, the one I >> haven't been, uh, but but on said I've been I've walked on virtual moons and I've walked on set moons. But what if we did a volumetric image acquisition of someone set off the moon? Now we have that, and then we can walk around it. Or what if there's a great club, a nightclub? This says guys and wanted to shoot here. But we have performances Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night there. You know they have a job. What? We grabbed that image acquired it. And then you could be there anytime you want. >> Robbie, we could go for an hour here. This is just a great comic. I >> completely agree with >> you. The Cube. You could You could sponsor a cube in this new world. We could run the Q twenty four seven is absolutely >> right. And we don't even have >> to talk about the relationship with Dale because on Del Technologies, because you're enabling new capabilities. New kind of artistry, just totally cool. Want to get back to the second? But you guys were involved. What's your role? How do you get involved? Tell the story about your >> John. I mean, first and foremost one of the things didn't Glendon mention is he's actually got about fifty movies to his credit. So the guy actually knows this stuff. So which is absolutely fantastic. So we said, How do you go take coverage to the next level? So what else is better than trying to work something out, wherein we together between what Glenn and Esteem does at the Sony Innovation Labs for Studio Sorry. And as in Dead Technologies could do is to try and actually stretch the boundaries of our technology to a next tent that when he talks about kazillion bytes of data right one followed by harmony, our zeros. We have to be able to process the data quickly. We have to be able to go out and do their rendering. We probably have to go out and do whatever is needed to make a high quality movie, and that, I think, in a way, is actually giving us an opportunity to go back and test the boundaries of their technology. They're building, which we believe this is the first of its kind in the media industry. If we can go learn together from this experience, we can actually go ahead and do other things in other industries do. Maybe. And we were just talking about how we could also take this. He's got his labs here in Los Angeles, were thinking maybe one of the next things we do based on the learning to get. We probably could take it to other parts of the world. And if we are successful, we might even take it to other industries. What if we could go do something to help in this field of medicine? >> It's just thinking that, right? Yes. Think >> about it. Lisa, John. I mean, it's phenomenal. I mean, this is something Michael always talks about is how do we as del technologies help in progress in the human kind? And if this is something that we can learn from, I think it's going to be phenomenal. >> I think I think that's so interesting. Not only is that a good angle for Del Technologies, the thing that strikes me is the access to artist trees, voices, new voices that may be missed in the prop the vetting process the old way. But, you know, you got to know where we're going. No, in the venture, cobble way seen this with democratization of seed labs and incubators where, if you can create access to the story, tells on the artists we're gonna have one more exposure to people might have missed. But also as things change, like whether it's Ray Ray beaming and streaming we saw in the gaming side to volumetric or volumetric things, you're gonna have a better canvas, more paint brushes on the creative side and more action. Is that the mission to get AC Get those artists in there? Is it? Is that part of the core mission submission? Because you're going to be essentially incubating new opportunities really fast. >> It's, uh, it's very important to me. Personally. I know it speaks of the values of both Sony and L. I like to call it the democratization of storytelling. You know, I've been very blessed again, a Hollywood producer, and we maybe curate a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of experience. But there's so many voices around the world that need to be hurt, and there are so many stories that otherwise can't be enabled. Imagine a story that perhaps is >> a unique special voice but requires distance. It requires five disparate locations. Perhaps it's in London Piccadilly Circus and in Times Square. And perhaps it's overto Abu Dhabi on DH Libya somewhere because that's part of the story. We can now collapse geography and bring those locations to a central place and allow a story to be told that may not otherwise have been able to be created. And that's vital to the fabric of storytelling. Worldwide >> is going to change the creative process to You don't have to have that waterfall kind of mentality like we don't talk about intact. You're totally distributed content, decentralized, potentially the creative process going change with all the tools and also the visual tools. >> That's right. It's >> almost becoming unlimited. >> You want it to be unlimited. You want the human spirit to be unlimited. You want to be able to elevate people on. That's the great thing about what we're trying to achieve and will achieve. >> It is your right. I mean, it is interesting, you know, we were just talking about this too. We're in, you know, as an example, shock tank. Yes, right. I mean, they obviously did it the filming and stuff, and then they don't have the access, let's say to the right studio, but The fact is, there had all this done on DH. No, they had all the rendering. They had the captured already done. You could now go out and do your chute without having all the space you needed. >> That's right. In the case of Shark Tank, which shoots a Sony Pictures studios, they knew they had a real estate issue. The fact of the matter is, there's a limited amount of sound stages around the world. They needed to sound stages and only had access to one. So we went in and we did a volumetric image acquisition of their exit interview stage. They're set. And then when it came time to shoot the second half a season ten, one hundred contestants went into a virtual set and were filmed in that set. And the funny thing is, one of the guys in the truck you know how you have the camera trucks and, you know, off offstage, he leaned into the mike. Is that you guys, could you move that plant a couple inches to the left and somebody said, Uh, I don't think we can do it right now, he said. We're on a movie lot. You could move a plant. They said, No, it's physically not there. We're on innovation studios goes Oh, that's right. It's virtual mind. >> So he was fooled. >> He was pulled. In a way, we're >> being hashing it out within a team. When we heard about some of the things you know Glenn and Team are doing is think about this. If you have to teach people when we are running short of doctors, right? Yeah, if you could. With this technology and the learnings that come from here, if you could go have an expert surgeon do surgery once you're captured, it would be nice. Just imagine, to take that learning, go to the new surgeons of the future and trained them and so they can get into the act without actually doing it. So my point in all this is this is where I think we can take technology, that next level where we can not only learn from one specific industry, but we could potentially put it to human good in terms of what we could to and not only preparing the next of doctors, but also take it to the next level. >> This was a great theme to Michael Dell put out there about these new kinds of use case is that the time is now to do before. Maybe you couldn't get there with technology, but maybe aspirational, eh? Let's do it. I could see that. Glenn, I want to ask you specifically. The time is now. This is all kind of coming together. Timing's pretty good. It's only gonna get better. It's gonna be good. Tech, Tech mojo Coming for the creative side. Where were we before? Because I could almost imagine this is not a new vision for you. Probably seen it now that this house here now what was it like before for, um and compare contrast where you were a few years ago, maybe decades. Now what's different? Why? Why is this so important? >> You know, for me, there's a fundamental change in how we can create content and how we can tell stories. It used to be the two most expensive words in the movie TV industry were what if today that the most important words to me or what if Because what if we could collapse geography? What if we could empower a new story? Technology is at a place where if we can dream it. Chances are we can make it a reality. We're changing the dynamics of how we may content. He used to be lights, action, camera. I think it's now lights, action, compute power action, you know, is that kind of difference. >> That is an amazing vision. I think society now has opportunities to kind of take that from distance learning to distance connections, the distance sharing experiences, whether it's immersion, virtual analog face the face. I could really be powerful. Yeah, >> and this is not even a year old. >> That's right. >> So if you look at your your launch, you said, I think let june fourth twenty eighteen. What? Where do you go from here? I mean, like we said, this is like, unlimited possibilities. But besides putting Robbie in the movie, naturally, Yes, of course I have >> a star here >> who video. >> So I got to say he's got star power. >> What's what. The next year? Exactly. >> Very exciting. I will say we have shark tank Thie Advanced Imaging Society gives an award for being the first volume metric set ever put out on the airwaves. Uh, for that television show was a great honor. Uh, we have already captured, uh, men in black. We captured a fifty thousand square foot stage that had the men in black headquarters has been used for commercials to market the film that comes out this June. We have captured sets where television >> shows and in the in hopes that they got a second season and one television show called up and said, Guys, we got the second season so they don't have to go back to what was a very expensive set and a beautiful set >> Way captured that set. It reminds me of a story of productions and a friend of mine said, which is every year. The greatest gift I have is building a beautiful set and and to me, the biggest challenges. When I say, remember that sent you built four years ago. I need that again. Now you can go >> toe hard, replicate the exact set, you capture it digitally. It lives. >> That's exactly it. >> And this is amazing. I mean, I'd love to do a cube set into do ah, like a simulcasts. Virtually. >> So. This is the next thing John and Lisa. You guys could be sitting anywhere going forward. We don't have to be really sitting here you could be doing. What do you have to do? And, you know, you got everything rendered >> captured. We don't have to come to Vegas twenty times a year. >> We billed upset once >> You want to see you here believing that So I'LL take that >> visual is a really beautiful thing. So if we can with hologram just seeing people doing conscious. But Hollywood Frank Zappa just did a concert hologram concert, but bringing real people and from communities around the world where the localization diversity right into a content mixture is just so powerful. >> Actually, you said something very interesting, John, which is one of the other teams to which is, if you have a globally connected society and he wanted try and personalize it to that particular nation ethnicity group. You can do that easily now because you can probably pop in actors from the local area with the same city. Yeah, think about it. >> It's surely right. >> There's a cascade of transformations that that this is going Teo to generate. I mean just thinking of how different even acting schools and drama schools will be well, teaching people how to behave in these virtual environments, right? >> How to immerse themselves in these environments. And we have tricks up our sleeves that Khun put the actor in that moment through projection mapping and the other techniques that allow filmmakers and actors to actually understand the world. They're about to stepped in rather than a green screen and saying, OK, there's going to be a creature over here is gonna be blue Water Falls over there will actually be able to see that environment because that environment will exist before they step on the stage. >> Well, great job the Dale Partnership On my final question, Glenn free since you're awesome and got a great vision so smart, experienced, I've been really thinking a lot about how visualization and artistry are coming together and how disciplines silo disciplines like music. They do great music, but they're not translating to the graphics. It was just some about Ray tracing and the impact with GP use for immersive experiences, which was seeing on the client side of the house. It del So you got the back and stuff, but you metrics. And so, as artist trees, the next generation come up. This is now a link between the visual that audio, the storytelling. It's not a siloed. >> It is not >> your I want to get your vision on. How do you see this playing out and your advice for young artists? That might be, you know, looked as country. What do you know? That's not how we do it. >> Well, the beautiful thing is that there are new ways to tell stories. You know, Hollywood has evolved over the last century. If you look at the studios and still exist, they have all evolved, and that's why they do exist. Great storytellers evolved. We tell stories differently, so long as we can emotionally relate to the story that's being told. I say Do it in your own voice. The cinematic power is among us. We're blessed that when we look back, we have that shared experience, whether it's animate from Japan or traditional animation from Walt Disney, everybody shares a similar history. Now it's opportunity to author our new stories and we can do that and physical assets and volumetric assets and weakened blend the real and the unreal. With the compute power. The world is our oyster. >> Wow, >> What a nice >> trap right there. >> Exactly that is, um I dropped the transformation of Hollywood. What? And it's really think the tip of the iceberg. Unlimited story potential. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you. This has been a fascinating cannot wait to hear, See and feel and touch What's next for Sony Animation studios With your technology power We appreciate your time. >> Yeah, Thank you. Thank you both of >> our pleasure for John Farrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube lie from Del Technologies World twenty nineteen We've just wrapped up Day two we'LL see you tomorrow.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Del Technologies, World twenty nineteen here in Las Vegas. I'm Stew Minutemen with my co host, Dave Volonte, talking multi cloud talking about Del Technologies and all the pieces of the environment. And we're gonna drill in some to some of the storage environment. Happy to welcome back to the program. Ah, Sudhir Vossen, Who's the senior vice president and CEO of the storage division of Delhi? Emcee, Sit here. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks. Thanks for having me, Stew. >> All right, So, as I said, day one lot of the vision Digital transformation multi cloud with such an Adele up on stage. Got a little bit about today. Got back into the products, everything, you know, such a broad portfolio, everything from the latter tattooed, you know, business devices through Of course, many updates on the storage world Been digging in with the number your team gives little flavor as Teo, You know what you've been working on? You know, I know. As a CEO, you can't have a favorite family but in the family. But some of the things you and the team were really proud of to unveil >> Absolutely thanks. It's been a big day as well, and I would say a big year for us. So we, uh, we've shown incredible growth in our business in the last four quarters, taking share every four for every one of those four quarters. Just a phenomenal year. A lot of that has to do with just the strength of the portfolio. Have been investing a lot in innovation in the portfolio. So, uh, I think the biggest one today that I'm really proud of is the unity launch. Think it's, uh, it's a long time coming. We've been working on it for quite a while. The the amount of performance that is going to deliver while also delivering incredible storage efficiency data reduction. That's a huge, a huge boost. But what way haven't spent a whole lot of time talking about from a technology point of view as a Ziggy. What's cool about unity? X TV that you may not have heard a lot about is that it actually is using machine >> learning inside. So last year we lost the power Max that had machine learning inside for making all these real time decisions were taking that across the family and unity >> x t uses. Was she learning in order to actually do deliver that data reduction that we just talked about? The five to one data reduction. And what's why that school is Because, you know, we've had products that do data reduction with brute force where they use a lot of memory. You can't do that in a mid range part because that kicks you out of the cost profile. So we use machine learning, tio take advantage of a little amount of memory, but they still not compromise on the data reduction. >> Yeah, actually, I had to cover they should day talking about power, Max. We made a big deal about what was happening internally as well as what does that mean for the customers and the decisions that they don't have to make you know, in our industry, we've talked about intelligence and, you know, automation in storage for decades. So yeah, and then the mid range. What does that mean? What? What will be different from customers for as they roll out thie X t product line. So >> I think it's simplicity. It's just he's a fuse. We talk about zero touch in this case, this this fewer knobs and dials. You actually don't have to do a lot of tuning at all out of the box. It'LL will serve the majority of the use cases and the requirements. You still have the option if you want to go in. If you're sort of the black, no type and you want to do, uh, customize it to your own needs. You could do that. But that sort of this journey we're on is way. Call this the autonomous or self driving story, so a lot of people are talking about it. We're actually doing it across the portfolio, and it's actually coupled with two parts are coupled with another part. There's intelligence in Unity, Eckstine and Power Max. But there's also intelligence and cloud I. Q, which is our global Blake brain in the Cloud way, saw that on stage today as well, where it's doing long term analytics deeper, learning across longer time rises to help you manage the system without really much effort. >> So couple follow ups, if I may, on the on the data reduction front. Sounds like that's a new innovation. You guys develop come from scratch. Yeah. Um, you bringing it across the portfolio, or is it sort of obviously unity extra? Today it is. The technology apply to other potentially >> absolutely does. And in fact, that's Ah, that's something we're doing across the board from last year to this year. You you've seen with become one storage team, and there's a lot of technology views going on now inside the inside the portfolio. Things that we're doing in unstructured, for example, are we're looking at applying it into other parts of the portfolio. Data reduction is obviously one of the key ones. It's it's the first example that people think off, so we're definitely looking at that. But I'LL also say is from a technology point of view, we're changing the way software is built. We're not building it as monolithic within micro code anymore. It's containerized assets that we can embed in different products >> and then, in terms of the autonomous storage piece, you know, go roll back five, ten years ago, cheering, you know you had and you had a lot of knobs to turn and and that was always featured as an advantage because people wanted to play with it. What you're talking about today is a Zen environment that's much more complex and talk about Maur. What autonomous storages is it? Hands off on great >> questions. So we have this, this internal Carter almost of most. Joke, we call it. You know, we're talking my self driving cars. Surely we can build a self driving storage >> system. Why now, Right? It's it's It's kind of a shame that we're not doing that, but I would say it's four steps just like you have four levels of autonomy and self driving cars. If you follow that level five, I think, is the is the ultimate polio zero fully autonomous way. We'LL never get there, but similarly in storage, I break it up into four parts. One is it's got to be application aware you're not dealing with lungs and file systems and raid groups anymore you're dealing with. This is my application. That's how the human or the user interacts with it. That's easy. Relatively easy. Second element >> really took fifty years. Okay, good >> second, second element is is sort of self awareness are actually actually before. That is policy based. So if you're driving a car, you're not telling the car which which route you want to take. You want to say, I want to take the fastest route or I want to take the scenic route. That's it. And the car needs to figure out what that is. So that's policy based. I want to optimize for Leighton. See performance level. Third element is self awareness, which is story. System needs to know where it's operating in its comfort zone is that close to the edge is going to drive off the cliff. Is it gonna exit the lane to use the car analogies, right? He's You know how far away it is from the car ahead. That's also that's the stuff that we're now releasing with Bara Max and what we're doing. Immunity. That's where we using learning to figure out how close to the operating edge system itself. It's once you have that, then you can start optimizing self healing. >> That's a level four, and that self awareness. So you've got you've got decades of data. Were you able to leverage that data? Or is that is that not a cz much you. So you have >> absolutely the case. Okay, that's that's the key differentiator. Actually, thanks for bringing it up because there's a lot of washing going on. Right is everybody says that about you, but the eyes, one thing you can't just deliver develop over way have used all of the decades of dial home data we've been working on with she learning technologies for the last five years. I would say, at least so were those models are being trained with the dial home data and cloud, like you is doing that on a daily basis. Now, >> why now in two thousand nineteen? Severe is that we at the point where this has become reality is a compute power. Is that the amount of data? Just better algorithms. It's Do you >> think you nailed it? Those two things, it's It's first and foremost compute power. But also I think, uh, algorithms they they're they're much more sophisticated now. And they were well understood what algorithms to use for what types of problems. I think there was initial thirty years ago. There was like, uber intelligence. That was a very ambitious goal, I would say, even today, that's not reality. while we're succeeding is we're applying it to very focused problems, just like in the rest of the industry. Were playing through focus problems that we can't solve and then broadening our effort >> had to be clear. This is this is meta data. It's not customer data utilizing obviously across the portfolio. >> No way. We're looking at things like how much CPU it's using. How much memories? Using what? How's the Leighton Sea varying over time, how far it is away, this from its service level. Things like >> you're still just another advantage of being old. Yeah, so you talked >> about that's metadata. But what one of things we talk about is when you talk about digital transformation, it's customers become data driven, right? So wave covered this year, this the tenth year we've been at this show. In the early days it was storage and oh, my gosh, my growth of data and I can't take care of it. Big data was the bit flip of turned that from a challenge to I should be able to turn that into an opportunity city. And the next wave of a I is I should be able to monetize that run my business and the data is one of the most valuable things we have bring us inside. You know how that shift in thinking in data is impacting storage architectures and how you work with customers. >> That's awesome. Great questions. O Data Capital is the big thing around. You've heard that today as well. Wear definitely sort of growing. Going beyond thinking of ourselves as a storage division to a data division. And I'm locking the data capital. I'd say there's several elements wonders building the best storage fore fore data applications, especially I and M L. So I think our unstructured products clearly are leading the charge of this. We've got the machine learning solution with Isil on. It's a perfect fit for that kind of application that's here and now already using a GPU Technologies in conjunction with our scale, our architectures critical. But going beyond we're looking at doesn't make sense for some of these data crunching applications to be closer to the storage layer, you know, thinking meet similar to what hyper converse is done for general computer. Is that a thing that would that would really unlock the data capital? We think that's a lot of potentials. So >> and I'm glad you brought that up because you know, when the storage geeks, you know, talk about envy me, envy me over fabric and storage class memory. Explain how that fits into what you were talking about, and not just the next, you know, major wave of, you know, a tool inside the infrastructure >> train. So I think so. Storage. Envy me. Envy me over fabric was part one off a two part story, as is your You know that that allowed us to get that super Lolita C high speed connection from application to storage with the data. But the data devices themselves were still very flash is great prepared TV, but they're talking single microsecond type of sub microsecond applications that need that kind of leniency. And that's where storage last memory comes in. Right? So we're finally getting to that point where the storage devices are in operating in that ten microsecond range, which will start to really get us to back if we can get those things go located close by unlocks a lot of things. And the beauty of envy me over fabric is that it can give you the sense of being closed by without actually physically being close by. So you could still be disaggregated, and that opens up a whole lot of architectural options >> can fall. Question on storage class memory The skeptics would say. It's just way too expensive and you're not going to get the volume of flash that you get with these. Uh, what do you What do you think? >> That's what they said about Flash dude in there, >> last one in tow. Consumer devices, not you're on this scale. Bring the price down. >> Maybe maybe before iPhones. They said that, but iPhone was the catalyst. Eyes. They're a consumer analog for storage, club consumer >> and long. I think that's fair, but I think there will be volume to drive it down. However, I will say it's a fair point. I think that with actual magic lies and combining superfast, perhaps expensive storage last memory with cheaper flash storage, and so you almost have a hybrid solution again. So the old hybrid becomes you hybrids back in such >> fashion, even with solid state, >> the storage pyramid lives Exactly way. >> Think that's going to be the killer combination? >> All right, so sit here. Can't let you go without. Give us a little bit of a look, for we talked about where we are. Talk about some of the journeys that were there. So it's our tenth year here at the show. Come back for your eleven, you know, How do you foresee the industry maturing and moving forward? >> I think for your eleven, the big things we're going to see is Cloud Two things I would say one is CL Cloud and the other is software to find. I think those are the two that are going to be big news next year. >> We're seeing some sneak previews of that this year with the cloud announcements we made you'LL see a lot more of that next year from from the storage side, both in be part of the Delta Clock Technologies Cloud Platform but also cloud enabling our storage arrays across all the all public clouds. And then the second part is software defined. I think that's really the next way. So, as I said, we are a long journey internally. We've already been on it where were transforming our internal storage assets to be more software centric, and you'LL start to see some of that All right, well, >> sit here. Really appreciate you helping us geek out on, dig into, You know, a lot of the pieces here at Del Technology World twenty nineteen. Thank you. Alright. For David Dante, I'm stew minimum, and this is the end of two days of water wall coverage. We're coming back for one more. And as always, check out the cute dot net for all the videos. Silicon angle dot com For all the articles. Wiki bond dot com For all of the in depth analysis Hit up, Dave myself, John furry in the whole team were available on social media channels and, as always, thank you for watching the cue.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering DELL Technologies World 2019. Brought you by DELL Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. We have been talking with lots of great folks the last couple of days, and we are pleased to welcome to theCUBE Erin Banks, Director of Product Marketing for DELL EMC. Erin it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, thank you so much. >> So this is the second branded DELL Technologies World. The first one since DELL became a publicly traded company once again. But you have a storied past of all this experience with a lot of these brands. Give us a little bit of your background as you've made your way through all these companies, and left your mark. >> Yeah, I feel like I've hit just about every corporate conference that we have under DELL Technologies, 'cause I came in originally through RSA around 2006, and then that acquisition happened, and then I transitioned over to EMC. So then we started the whole EMC World before, RSA Conference, EMC World. Always continuing to support security. Always continuing to do that. Went to VMware, they're doing the support security. We had a Vspecials program, so we wanted to sell EMC products for VMware products. So we continue to do that. So I think there's VMware and then I came back, I left for a little bit and then I came back. So I always joke that I have four companies I think left, and I would've had like, I think I get an award for having worked at every seven of the companies. (Lisa laughs) >> At least a mug, right? >> Yeah, I should get something I think. >> You should. >> Yeah, I think so. A jacket. >> Alright, so what's your current role now? So you're working in what group? Where are you now? >> Yeah, so right now I'm focused on structure, storage, divisions. So that's going to be Isilon, ECS, ClarityNow and the project Nautilus, and we're focused from a marketing perspective. I'm the Director of Product Marketing for that group. >> Yeah, storage didn't get a lot of keynote coverage. Normally they do get a lot with the EMC, 'cause obviously there's a lot of things going on around Dell Technology World, but Michael Dell said, storage isn't stopping, 'cause you have more data coming in. So unstructured is a big part of it. >> It's huge. >> Whether it's social data, gestured, any kind of Data Exaust, IoT, data is data, right? And the unstructured is the large growing percentage of the overall data population. >> Yeah, I think somebody gave me a statistic that 80% of the data that's generated is unstructured data, right? And people need to keep it and they need to, in some situations like Thomas Driving Systems, they need to keep it for a very very long time. So, there's always that debate of all these years that I've been at these conferences, about how long you keep the data, and obviously archiving them and where are you moving them, giving the customers the options. We're still obviously talking about that, which is great, but now we just have more and more data. Now it's really, from an Isilon perspective, we're focused on the management, and also the real estate, right? Because there isn't just every amount of space that every data center can have. Customers are running out of data center space, and they're running out of people, right? And they're like, listen, I can't hire anymore people, I want to focus on the business, and that's what we support from an Isilon perspective, is focusing on the business. I mean we obviously focus from all of UDS, but our announcements today were a focus on Isilon. >> So large growth, okay, but with the habit of, okay, just store it, we'll get to it later, it's been a nice luxury with unstructured, because some of the technology allows you to store it. Some call it a data lake or data swamp, depending on how you look at it. Now that the focus is getting more out of the data, while still storing it, right? Just throw it into the pile or into the corpus or into the data lake or whatever storage it is. Getting the mechanism to get the data out, and making it relevant and valuable is a focus. What's going on there? What are some key trends that are happening that you guys are riding? >> Yeah, well we're talking a lot, we have a campaign around data capital, right? And obviously as we all know, data has a lot of value within organizations. I'd like to tell customers that data has more value than we do as the employees. Companies will get bought and they'll fire the people, because they just want the data. And we can't ignore that fact, right? What does it say about the businesses customers? What does it say about their likes or dislikes? What does it say about where the company needs to go? The only way you know, to be successful, I think, in the next three to five years is to understand your customers and what they need, right? We had a bank the other day that was like, well all of our customers are 50 years old, so we're not going to do applications, and we don't really care about our data, and you're like, but you have people that are coming up behind that are using applications, right? That want more of a service. It's no longer, I say to banks, you don't need to buy another bank, right? You need to provide a service to me. How do you get that value out of that data to understand who I am as a customer or what I like, where I travel, what do I do in my day to day life, and give me that service, so I continue to be a customer for you. That's essential. >> It is essential. We talk about customer experience a lot. It's absolutely essential, because whether we're consumers of banking services or retail or whatever it is, we have so much choice. >> Correct. >> And especially with social media, I talk about unstructured data, we have a voice and the opportunity to get that out there, and go in turn. So really evaluating that data and understanding, and making decisions on that data to deliver a personalized experience is table stakes. >> Yes, I mean, we talk about this all the time, about the markets that are not doing it. Like retail, right? They always talk about, everyone wants to go to Amazon and buy their clothes or now there's boxes that are coming to your door with all the clothes in it. So how does the real estate business stay essential to me as a buyer, we all need clothes, but what gets me back into the store, right? And we talk about the sensors, right? We talk about the data that is generated of just me walking around the stores. How long do I spend in front of an item, right? Can I have a coupon that's popped up on my phone, right? How do I get more from an experience. And I think these are the struggles that organizations are having. We were talking to a customer that's managing a sports arena and the biggest thing is, how do you get them back into the arena? How do you change their experience, because they're a Canadian company, they don't want to be standing outside in the cold, 'cause it's hockey season, everyone loves it. How do you get them in earlier, because now there's more security, right? We have this, I always call it the physics effect, right? You have one change, it ripples into everything else. So it's cold, the security lines are long, I'd rather be at home watching this. How do I get that experience? And these are the partnerships that are being created with companies like athletic companies, and sports arenas and sports teams and things like that to really change an experience that we have, and the only way you could do that is with data, right? The enormous amount of data that we have. We couldn't do that if we didn't have the data. >> So what do they just come up with a better solution, not standing outside and getting in quickly? >> Yes, so, yeah we talked about this, right? We did a great podcast about this, because they're now doing these programs where they'll bring you in earlier, right? So maybe they'll have dinner and of couple beers, right? And you can come in and kind of enjoy the arena when no game is going on, but you get in earlier out of the cold. They talked about buying retail from your seats, right? And they test it out. That wasn't successful. So it's a really good kind of option along those lines. People like to walk around and look, and they touch and feel the items, and look at all of their options. So these are great things that they were able to test. The digital signage has been a huge impact from an analytics perspective. Really being able to change it. The amount of growth that organizations have achieved from just digital signage has been enormous. So, they're really transforming their businesses in different aspects, and it's all really driven from the data. >> So what's going on with the products that you guys are doing? What's the value proposition for Isilon? Where's the focus for you now? >> Yeah, so, we're always continuing to just answer the questions that our customers are having. Which always comes down to the amount of data that we have, how to continue to manage that, and then how to manage it in this data center. So we had a release today, which were focused both from a software aspect as well as a hardware aspect and now our software of OneFS, so it's still the single file system, is not being able to scale out to 252 nodes. It was 144 before. Now it's 58 petabytes. And what I love most about that is, how you manage 58 petabytes is exactly how you manage a terabyte. I mean that's important to a customer, where they're saying, I could easily add storage within a minute, I don't have to worry about it, and I have the same amount of people managing the system. I just have to focus on the workloads, and I just have to focus on the applications. And then our customers are saying, again, we're running out of the real estate, how can you give us a more dense box, right? We need the performance of a hybrid, but we need the capacity of an archive systems, again, we need to be able to do more with less almost. So we introduced the H5600 this week or today. And really just being able to give our customers what they need to really continue to drive their business forward. I always say, it's always about the workloads, and the applications. I'm inspired by what our customers are doing. They're just doing these innovative tools, and work and everything, because no longer they're being constrained from an IT perspective, right? The technology is now doing the heavy lifting, and now we're able to really utilize the data for what it's worth and getting the most out of it. Which I just love that, right? I think that's important to businesses. >> Put today's announcements in the perspective of the Workforce. We've talked a lot about Workforce the last couple of days, about really enabling businesses to do so much with this distributed Workforces, but in terms of Workforce optimization, the density that you just talked about, what are some of the immediate impacts that customers are going to realize that's going to, besides productivity improvements? >> Yeah, again, I've had direct conversations with customers, it was like an autonomous driving system, and they were saying, listen, again, I don't have a head count, nobody wants to give me more head count. I can't keep doing this. What the business wants to do is, they want to get to market fast. Because if we can get to the market fast, then we can drive that business faster, and that's what we need. How can you help me? And that's what I love about, not only the unstructured data conversation, but the Isilon conversations that we're having is like, how can you help my business? Well okay, we understand that there's struggles. Again, no data center, don't have the head count, they'll give us developers, right? They want to drive in these other markets, right? And then were saying, great, we'll continue to drive this one file system capability, but give you this enormous growth, and really continue to drive that, right? >> If they get revenue, they can get head count. So this I back to >> Correct. >> the cloud model of, let's get some value out there quickly, time to value. >> Yeah, and then the question is, where is the optimal head count that you need? Is it to do with somebody just continuing to rack and stack. Or is it someone that's really going to get the value out of that data, continue to push that, to test the systems. Again, they want to get to the market first. How can we enable that? How can we really help them to do that? That's our goal. >> So talk about customers and their receptiveness for AI. We hear a lot about it all the time, but really looking at, we talked about the volume of data, we could talk about that for days and days, but really enabling customers to harness the power of AI machine learning to extract the insights. Where are those conversations going with customers as it relates to Isilon and some of the things today, but just in general, where's there appetite with respect to being ready to harness the power of AI? >> We ask this question a lot about where are we in the AI landscape, right? And some customers are really focused on that, but they have a completely different model than some of the companies that have been our traditional companies that we've been kind of like focused on. So it's kind of a between the both, right? I think a lot of it, in my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the culture, right? It's a completely different way of thinking about a business, and it's a completely different way of focusing on, not only your data, but like the data management. You know with the joke about a data swamp, cleaning the data, having a business focus that's driven specifically from data is a culture change. And not a lot of people are willing to have that culture change. New companies can do that, 'cause that's how they developed the company, right? But when you see some of the companies that we've all been a part of for all of these years, that's not that easy. So, in the little baby steps, which is why I love telling those customer stories, so I'll be like, listen, this is possible, this is not just fake, we're not just fairies floating around us, right? This is truth capablities-- >> It's real transformation, that's the theme. The developers are a key part of this. This is something that we've seen. Developers using data as part of their application. Making that addressable, making it fast access is one, that's awesome. The other interesting dynamic that I want to get your thoughts on, because you have a security background is securing data and also governance or also driving use cases in applications that might not have been foreseen. We're one year into GDPR, and I don't think really anything's changed, but, I don't want to go on that rant, but now you have other regulatory things that's saying, hey, you know what, we might have to deal with the data differently. So how is Isilon enabling that? Is it just another use case? >> Yeah, I mean it is absolutely just in another use case that we're just going to have to focus on from the aspect of what's the implication. What are their customers looking at? When we talk specifically about GDPR, that's fairly new, right? We're just trying to figure this out, and trying to look at those different kind of aspects. A lot of that was also the right to know, and right to remove, and saying, what do you know about me and how do you kind of manage that? So a lot of that is really focused on a data management aspect and it's not just from Isilon, but it's, how do you manage it, right? So the ClarityNow capabilities that we have, right? This product that we were able to acquire, that really will give you that great insight into your data, so you can make those decisions, it says, alright, well this is all of our information on Erin Banks, this is her likes, dislikes, whatever that information has, right? We're able to really manage that a lot better, and the data management is the really next important step of the data collection, the data processing. It's understanding what you have, because it all comes in, but it doesn't add value until you really know what you have and what you don't have. Because even from an analytics perspective, you might have to supplement that data from some other resource. Maybe you need to change the application, and get additional data. This is all really driven across that same kind of aspect. This is the same conversation, and we'll just continue to fuel that and have that, and enable them to do that. That's why I say, we want to inspire our customers to be like, wow, I didn't realize that I could do that with tech, right? And then start enabling them to be innovative, and that's what we're still continuing to do. >> What's one of your favorite stories of, we had talked about your tenure within the Dell Technologies family when we first started, but looking at today in 2019, every company is a tech company or has to be. If you look back over the last 10, 12 years, what's some of your favorite stories of how this company Dell Technologies has enabled, and it's companies, a surprising customer to become a tech company? >> Yeah, and I think the number one thing that I personally love, right? That keeps me here. That brought me back, right? Not only was it just 2006 and staying, but said, I want to go back to that, is because what I really feel is, our experience that we have across every market, right? The geographies, the struggles that customers are having, and what we're able to learn from them, and really help our customers excel. It's not just us selling products, right? It's not just selling services, it's not just selling software, right? It's us trying to get out there and saying, this is how other customers are using it, this is how they've been successful, this is where they've downfall, lets help you, right? As we're trying to bring companies further along on their business journey, and we're saying, we've worked with customers to do this, we'll continue to work with you to do that, and we can do it across all seven of these companies end-to-end. It's a very impactful capabilities across applications, security, which is incredibly important, right? IT and Workforce and all these individual transformations, and that's what I think is a passion, and the best part of what we do. >> Well Erin, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon, and walking us through some of these key things, helping customers of any industry really excel, and unlock the capital in their data. We appreciate your time. >> I appreciate yours, thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)