>>the service experience has dramatically changed over the course of history within enterprise it once a purely break fixed business that put out fires technology services has become a linchpin of customer I. T. Execution strategies where companies carefully select technology partners to anticipate and remediate potential problems before they occur. Moreover, organizations have come to expect a cloud like experience for their entire I. T. Estate spanning on prem cloud cross clouds. And increasingly the edge and technology services are looked upon by customers to provide a layer that helps abstract that underlying complexity of I. T. So they can focus on what they do best welcome to the cubes ongoing virtual coverage of Dell technologies world with me today to talk about the modern services experience are Doug Schmidt, who is the president of Dell Technologies and Services and Alex Barreto. Senior vice president. Dell Technology Services gentlemen welcome to the cube. Great to see you >>Well thank you. Dave big traven us >>really. My pleasure. Doug and I wonder if you could start by just giving us a quick overview of the organization that you lied. What's new with with Dell technology services? >>Well, yeah, so you know, first of all I get the privilege along with my team of leading over 60,000 service professionals and partners and we support customers in over 170 countries and 54 languages. And we can cover the entire technology spectrum from the edge to the core to the cloud. And our expertise in this area is broad and deep as you can imagine. And we help our customers with their transformation with the indian services and this includes consulting, uh deployment, support, managed services, education services as well as asset recovery. So just to name a few, so we use all of this technology and this capability to help our customers with their digital transformation. >>Greatest Alex, what's your wheelhouse? What's your role in in the services, strategy and technology? >>Yeah, I have the great opportunity to drive strategy, operations and technology. We're doing exciting things across all three day. But in particularly the technology space when I think about the intersection of technology and customer experience, a lot of exciting things there, I'm sure we'll talk about today. >>Yeah. Doug I mean if you look at the past 12 months, I mean you certainly saw you know, a real shift to work from home technologies and you guys, you know all about, you know the story well. But one of the things that we've been talking about is the uptick that we're expecting and we're already seeing it in professional services because there is a talent gap, there's a skills shortage and people have to they have to get hybrid right, they have to fund their digital transformation, they need help. So there's been a lot of changes in the market during the past year. What are you hearing from customers? What are their priorities? How are they changing? >>Well yeah you've stated Dave look there's a lot of changes in the market during the last year clearly and what our customers are telling us and where they're changing priorities are are really centered around two things. The first uh is that all of us are helping our customers deliver a better experience to their customers right to end customers that matters. You know in a brand new study we commissioned from Forrester consulting. Actually 56% of I. T. Leaders said that improving customer experience is the top driver for their digital transformation efforts. The second thing that we're hearing and that I'm hearing is that they're asking us to assist in this digital transformation. In that same research that I talked to you about From Forrester, 81 of the Iraqi leaders said that they need to leverage external technology specific expertise to help their internal I. T. Teams be successful. And I think just to deep dive these two items, you know first it's on the first one for the customer experience. It's just crucial for customers to transform their C. X. To be competitive. That's for all of us and you know there's not an industry or a team around that's not going through this whether it's schools uh doing digital learning healthcare and all of the things you know recently I just talked to a doctor via the you know zoom. I mean these are all new experiences, right? Uh government and corporations. It's just it's very remote. It's very seamless. It's very timely and uh look the employee experience is also closely tied to this right to the customer experience. Obviously if your employees aren't able to perform in this environment you can't really deliver the customer experience and they need the right technology and tools to really deliver that. And that's where we at Dell Technologies and Dell Technology Services are really helping our customers. Uh The second area I mentioned was really about getting our customers ready for the future and you know, digital transformation is not a one and done. This is a ongoing journey uh that gets our customers to assist their customers and their team members. And look they're looking for trusted advisor who can you know, specialized in the experience they need uh to guide them through this. And you know, I. T. Is not just back office anymore, as you know, it's really about getting in front of this, breaking down the silos, helping all of the departments not just I. T. Everything with their business needs and really delivering these outcomes that are going to help them with the customer experience and the digital transformation. >>Yeah thank you for that. And and doug I mean the Consumer Ization of I. T. Has been going on for the better part of a decade or or or more the cloud obviously has affected how we think about the experience and pricing and the like and and we're hearing a lot about Apex from Dell tech right now. What's the role of services in apex? >>Well look services has always been a primary interface with our customers and will continue to play a major part of that. And this is really about services and our products and our great solutions and software all coming together to really deliver the best experience for our customers. But specifically speaking about services, look this will be about services helping our customers seamlessly integrate apex offers and leverage the best of our infrastructure management capabilities into end. And I talked a little bit about those at the beginning, but this will be helping the customers deploy apex monitor it operated, optimized support, Decommissioning all those things from the end in life cycle. And look, we'll leverage our advantages in the supply slain as well. And scale Apex globally working with Kevin Brown and the operations team. So it's about bringing all the strength of Dell along with services to deliver apex, you know, services also is going to help accelerate the value of the customers with for example, apex data storage as a service, which I'm sure you're hearing about will manage the infrastructure across the lifecycle and help our customers get the most out of all of this great technology, we're bringing >>so Alex and then dug maybe you can you can chime in but you guys, you talked talked talked about how important customer experiences can you tell us more about what services is doing to specifically enhance that customer experience? Yeah, >>sure. Thank David. And look, you talked about which I thought was great about the notion of services much more than just break fixed. So that customer experience now spans the entire services lifecycle. So when we talk, yes, it's really that entire Cf. So we're doing a couple of things to to really drive customer experience to the next level. In fact three distinct focus areas. The first one is really around artificial intelligence, machine learning and embedding that notion of A I into everything that we do, whether that support deployment services, managed services, consulting services, education services. The entire spectrum of our services offering now carries a I into the services offering. We started with support but now we expanded to the entire entire spectrum that drives efficiency and customers see that and feel that in terms of lower costs, greater speed, it drives value for our customers as well because they're able to generate new and appreciated insights. And second, if you think about the total customer experience, there are times when they do have to interact with us and that interaction now is food and it's a seamless, unified in simple experience that the customers have with us across the entire product set of Dell. So there's pc servers, network storage we provide, we provide a single unified view in a simple view for our customers. And then third, if you think about our services offers, we're modernizing them, talked a little bit about this as well. We're embedding technology into the services offering, make them better and faster. Good example, that is modern provisioning. We launched at the beginning this year. Great market feedback has new features, new capability, leverages our cloud infrastructure to deliver the services. >>You know, Alex, I want to stay on that for a minute because when I when I think about apex to me it's it's it's a cultural transformation that's going on. I mean look, Del is a tech technology company, have been product company and you know, services there to support that, but it's always you've always had to align with product. But now that I almost see the, you know, the product is aligning with the customer service experience and they're coming together like this. So so we talked about the changes and obviously the focus on C. X. Can you tell us more about the specific technologies that services is leveraging to affect that? >>Yeah it's a good question. Often we actually talked about products and services now and services is the product, as you said, they're really coming together and there are a number of things we're doing to drive that technology change both within apex and also outside apex of our regular Capex model. So a couple examples of things were around the data management side as an example using graph technologies to really contextualized data generate insights from that data regardless of how the data is structured, regardless of where the data is stored, represent those values. Were using that inside L. For services, we actually then monetizing that in providing that to our customers. We are consulting services and manage services. You talked about Apex Cloud is and hybrid Cloud is a big big area for us. Big focus here. In fact all the apex offers are actually they'll manage customer operators. So that managed services component is integrated and is a fundamental part of everything our other apex offers that we're putting in place. There are a couple of other areas. We're also excited about two of them to highlight specifically Five G and the Edge and five G. We see phenomenal growth and opportunities around for customers around the new digital transformation that they can do with five G. But enabling that is the carriers behind that infrastructure of five G, which we are supporting with our managed services, developing carrier grade specific managed services capabilities for carriers around the globe. And on the edge side with the growth and phenomenal exponential growth actually of data around the far edge being driven by sensors and greater compute needs and storage needs at the far edge, we're actually providing services for those specific data centers. They're very distributed some of them in urban areas, some of them in non urban ears and there's hundreds of them and they require remote services capabilities which we have that infrastructure today. So we're deploying that in this far edge space, another area that we're excited about five G the edge apex and then our core services capabilities, >>the edges like this, this really infinite technology opportunity. It's so we see the, you know, the data center and you see the cloud and okay, we were largely a remote set of cloud services. You're seeing the cloud come into the on prem, you're seeing on prem come into the cloud. So you've got the hybrid connections here, cross cloud and then even at the edge you've got layers of edge, you think about, you know, the autonomous vehicle, there's so much going on their custom silicon etcetera, it's okay you're not gonna get into the auto business, I don't think at least any time soon. But all that data that's being collected that has to get back to the cloud and much of its not gonna get persisted. A lot of it's gonna stay at the edge of a lot of it's gonna come back to the cloud. Everything is just exploding. You've gotta roll there. It's just these layers and connections that are coming through into this, this kind of ubiquitous matrix. I mean it's like the movie, it's amazing. Very exciting times. And doug. I wonder just going off here Doug. I wonder if we could give you the last word. Maybe I'm looking into the future beyond apex what's next for Dell tech services and your customers? >>Well, first of all, they did a great job on that. It is exciting. Look, and the reason we're putting so much effort into the emerging technologies uh we've talked about is to prepare uh you know assist our customers with this and you and you brought this up as well. Look, the vast amount of customer data uh that they're going to have to contend with is just staggering. 175 0 bytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025 according to D. C. And even more amazing about that is 30% of it is you know, projected to be processed real time. You're talking about that edge, right? And more than you know 50% of the enterprise generated data will be created and processed at that edge according to Gartner. So look it's gonna be exciting. And over the next 5 to 10 years we predict that all devices will be able to communicate anywhere on earth. And you know look these types of support tools to gather intelligence from billions of in point, uh, is going to be fascinating as well. And there will be new ways to consume the this knowledge seamlessly, making the relationship between us and the intelligence even more seamless and natural. You know, an example of that that we're working with right now is augmented reality a R out for our field resources. And, you know, we're seeing the capability, it's going to provide our field engineers and it's, it's pretty amazing gonna buy a better experience for our team members and a better experience for our customers. You know, and customers are going to have to contend with all of these challenges. And so we're modernizing to help them and kind of just summarizing up, you know, look, the value of services is really about shifting to intelligence as a service. And there's three ways uh, that this will really come about. One is our relationship with our customers is evolving from providing technology solutions. You mentioned this in your opening to being fully integrated as a business partner. That's the first one. Second one, we're helping to shape how our customers run their business from processes to resources to the experience they delivered to their end customer. That's number two and number three, it's really about uh measuring our success. Everything we do is about our customers achieving their business targets and their outcomes. And that's why we believe intelligence as a service is the future of services. >>And this is where technology plays such an important role in the services component of that as they set up front is the linchpin. There's an inverse relationship over the course of my career between the customer experience and the technical complexity. The simpler it gets for customers, the more complex it gets at the back end, and you've got to hide that complexity and that's a big part of where technology and services comes in. We're seeing the explosion of data as you said, and and the explosion of processing power is very exciting times, Alex and Doug. Thanks so much for coming to the Cuban, sharing the update on Dell Tech services in the future. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, and thank you for watching everybody's day volonte for the Cube and our ongoing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone, and welcome back to DTW 2021, theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I've been watching the ebb and flow and transformation of cloud strategies, from on-prem suppliers for a number of years. And it started with an aspiration to compete with their own public clouds. And over time, it became clear that customers wanted them to focus rather on their enduring foundational platforms, and evolve those, to bring cloud-like experiences, along with simplicity and agility and flexibility to the data center. And there's no more prominent example than VMware Cloud. We've shared the data with you all, as part of our Breaking Analysis, customers are leaning in, they're placing bets and the spending on these platforms is rising. And with me to talk about this, are two CUBE alums, Fidelma Russo, Senior Vice President and GM of Cloud Services unit at VMware, and Travis Vigil, who's the Senior Vice President Product Management, at Dell Technologies. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> Nice being here, Dave. >> So Fidelma, let's start with you. We've been seeing the rise of VMware Cloud and we see it in our ETR survey data, that VMware's Cloud offerings, as well as Dell's, Travis, have some of the highest momentum, within your respective company portfolios, when it comes to relative customer spend. So customers are voting with their wallets. Fidelma, what's the update? What do we need to know about VMware Cloud? >> So, as you saw Dave, we just did a big announcement at the end of March, on Yammer cloud being our multi-cloud platform. We truly believe that, this is what customers want. They want a consistent experience, not just on the public cloud, but also on-prem. And we're delivering that experience across a multitude of platforms. With that, our relationship with Dell Technologies goes very deep. We've seen a big uptake in the data center, where customers want a cloud operating model, that is just like being in the public cloud, but because of things like latency compliance, data sovereignty, you know, they're really those applications that need to remain on-prem, and that's where VMC on Dell EMC comes into play. >> Great, thank you Fidelma. Now Travis, we've had this scenario out there, where, we had to pivot of course, to remote work. And now, we're sort of forecasting, that, we're clearly, we're seeing spending coming back, but there's this sort of dual strategy, where people have to invest in hybrid, hybrid work meeting, and they also have to invest in the data center, because it's kind of been neglected over the last year. So, but the problem is that there's a staff shortage. There's a skills gap. And so people are sort of leaning more into managed services. They're definitely looking at OPEX models because it gives them more flexibility. So that's more important to organizations. What is VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and how does it address those needs? >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're spot on. And VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is a joint solution from VMware and Dell, to provide infrastructure as a service, delivered and deployed on-premises. And that on-premises could be a data center. It could be a colocation facility, it could be an edge location. And the great thing about it, as you pointed out, is that customers don't have to worry about managing the infrastructure, because it's managed for them. And, if you look at the offering overall, it has VMware Software-Defined Data Center stack, with compute, storage and networking coming from Dell, comes with flexible billing options. And, Fidelma talks a little bit about some of the workloads that are staying on-prem, whether that be for data sovereignty or compliance or performance or latency or any of the other issue, the other deciding factors that Fidelma mentioned, but the other great thing about this solution, and to your point, is that it helps customers, that are in this hybrid world, both develop and run both traditional and cloud-native applications on a single unified infrastructure. So we're seeing a, a ton of momentum, a ton of interest in this solution and solutions like it. >> I mean Fidelma, it's actually kind of scary. I mean, it's like the entire tech businesses now, just everything's growing. I mean, whether it's on-prem, laptops, new security solutions, you know, to crypto. I mean, it's just crazy right now, but the data center is on fire. You see the chip shortage, you see all kinds of investments going on, and organizations as you've pointed out, they want a hybrid solution. What are the workloads or use cases that are the best fit for on-premises and can benefit the most from this cloud service that you guys offer? Where are your customers finding success? >> So, where we found success, you know, and not surprisingly, regulated industries and industries where privacy and security are paramount. So let's talk a little bit about healthcare, and what we've seen on VMC on Dell EMC. There we've seen it deployed, on-prem, to provide online access to clinical records via VDI, and also access to analytics, from ALGA to clinicians, ALGA remote centers, where the clinicians work. So, that's one aspect. Another aspect is in energy, where we've seen deployments happen, and happen not just in the data center, but also out at the, what I would call the fat edge. And so, you know, so not unlike what you would think, as we move forward here. And, what I would say is, there is a thread that's common amongst customers, in areas where they have maybe a very mobile workforce, COVID I think has played into actually, not just accelerating to the public cloud, but also accelerating the need to have this remote operation of data center infrastructure on-prem. So, so as you said, both on fire, and we're seeing the uptake, especially within a regulated and compliant industry verticals. >> Great, thank you. So Travis, course we all saw the news couple of weeks ago and it was no surprise. Dell's spinning out VMware, and as part of that, there's a special commercial agreement associated with that spinout. But wonder if you could tell us, what is this joint offer, and how does it inform us about the future of VMware and Dell Technologies Fidelma mentioned? It's obviously a great channel, Dell that is, sells a lot of VMware technology. So, what should we, how should we think about this relationship going forward? And what's the next phase of this partnership going to look like? >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know an easier way to say it, than VMware is a key strategic partner for Dell, and this relationship enables us to deliver unmatched value to current and future customers on a continuous basis. And, if you look over the the last couple of years, the collaboration across Dell and VMware has never been stronger. We have shown our ability to partner very, very effectively on things like VxRail. And so, if you look at, what we're doing with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, it's really about radically simplifying customer's IT experiences, so that they can focus on business outcomes. And we have teams here at Dell Technologies. We have teams at VMware, they're hard at work, at taking this offer and scaling it in the market. And we're also working at a, on a longer term integration of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC within Apex, which is really going to further simplify the experience for our joint customers. So, I mean, I think the easiest way to say it, is that we're both committed to delivering the best enterprise class infrastructure services to our joint customers, including hardware and software integrated together, and, I think this is just the start of many good things to come. >> Well, it makes sense. I mean, you guys have obviously developed muscle memory over the years, you know, it's like for years EMC prior, and obviously Dell, you kind of wanted to hang on and it was kind of tethered to VMware, but the time is right for that, for a lot of reasons. But I wonder Travis, how do you see, sort of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, particularly you mentioned Apex. Is Apex, you have Apex hybrid cloud, that you've announced, the Dell Tech World and Apex private cloud. How does, how do you see that fitting in? >> Yeah, it's all part of a portfolio of solutions that we have for our customers. Dell Technologies, you've worked with, for us, for a long time Dave, and we always strive to provide the best solutions for our customers to match their needs. And so, if a customer determines that they will require a vendor managed cloud service, they want that single invoice billing, that completely managed solution for them, the best offering is obviously VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. If a customer determines that they have the IT resources to manage the infrastructure, they want the flexibility to and managed services later, Apex hybrid cloud or private cloud is the best solution. But the great news is that, all of these solutions showcase the partnership between Dell and VMware, as all of them have a major VMware component. Showcases our joint solutioning, and all of them are available today via Dell. And so, the only thing I can say is, there's more to come in the future. So stay tuned for exciting announcements in the not too distant future. >> Well, well Fidelma, the great thing about VMware and Dell, is you were in it, you got VMware. A lot of people, look back and say, wow, we could've had that for 635 million or whatever it was. (Fidelma laughing) And now it's just amazing to see how that the transformation has occurred. And I'll tell you how, how I see it. I mean, you've got this huge opportunity. You call it core to cloud to edge. I just see this abstraction layer that can be built out. And if I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, that the next 10 years of cloud aren't going to look like the last 10 years of cloud. So I'm wondering, but you have relationships with the public cloud players. You got a special relationship with AWS obviously, IBM, Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera. How do you see VMware Cloud on Dell EMC relative to the offerings that you have with other hyperscalers with the public cloud? >> So, we think it's a very important compliment. And so, you know I think, we've been around this industry long enough to know that, there's never one size fits all, and that, I think we're just coming into the next innings in cloud, as you said the next 10 years, won't be like the last 10 years. VMC on Dell EMC is the perfect compliment to other VMC offerings on top of the public cloud. And so, most customers end up with, they will have public cloud, for some applications native, they will have public cloud with VMware on it, and then they would have the need to have something either in their data center or at a colo. And for there, VMC on Dell EMC is the only heterogeneous one, that can operate with all of the VMware options on the public cloud. So, we think this is a really important play for us and our customers, and dovetails nicely into our portfolio. >> Yeah, we got a little bit of time left, I wonder if I'd get your opinion on this. I mean, I think that, obviously the public cloud is growing faster than the on-prem piece of it, but the on-prem piece is so much larger. So just a few percentage point growth in the on-prem, can mean so much more (Dave laughs) revenue and value. And I think people forget about that sometimes. I think the other thing is, I think for years, people misunderstood that, oh, it's like, it's not a zero-sum game, I guess is what I'm saying. And my point there is, if I'm you guys, I'm like, well thank you public cloud guys for spending tens of billions of dollars a year. It's like building the internet, thank you for that. Now we can build on top of it. And that's where I see the next 10 years, the real innovation that you guys can bring. The public cloud guys, yeah maybe they're going to try to dabble in that, but I, I'm not sure, I trust them to run my whole estate. If I'm a big Dell customer, I want to know, okay, what are you guys going to do for me in VMware? What are you going to do for me in terms of expanding? And that seems to be the direction that you're going, like Fidelma just said, it's early innings, that whole idea of abstracting all that underlying complexity away. It just seems to me, a huge opportunity for you and your customers. >> Yeah, we agree. I mean, even if you think about, you know, you made a very important point, it's not a zero-sum game, applications and workloads are growing. They're being driven by the development of modern applications on top of container technology. And so, with our transient technology from VMware, deployed across multiple cloud endpoints, we give you a lot of choice on where you want to develop those applications. You'll see us embedding it in many of our offerings including VMC on Dell EMC. And we're seeing a huge uptake on interest within the data centered customers and within, to start to develop modern applications on-prem. And so, as you said, it's not a zero-sum game and a few percentage points in uptake in data center will be good for everybody. Travis, you want to add? >> Yeah, I think that's right Fidelma. And I think the other thing is, Dell and VMware have been doing on-premises deployments for a long time. And, if you look at some of the core strengths that Dell has in terms of something, as critical as supply chain or services reach or the, what I call the ability to service tens of thousands of customers at moderate to large scale, that's something that, some of the alternative providers don't have. And so, the more, and Fidelma and I have talked about this a lot, the more that Dell and VMware can collaborate on these solutions, I think the stronger hand that we're going to have, going forward. >> Yeah, on-prem and complexity, frankly, that's your home court. And so, it'd be really interesting to watch. Guys, great to see you again, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE, and an awesome conversation. Really appreciate it, and best of luck to you both. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we are continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021, the virtual edition, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm Yes. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World Virtual. I'm john for a host of the cube. We've got a great two guests here talking about a new apex brand and products Allison Langdon, Senior Manager, product marketing at Dell and David Reed senior Director of Product Management. Dell all around the apex to CUBA alumni's great to see you remotely. Soon to be in person. It's right around the corner but great to see you. >>Hey, thanks for having me and us. >>So I wish >>we were in person. >>We missed the Deltek Worlds amazing event. Um we're virtual this year but all great goodness is here but great big announcement still go on. The Apex Brandon portfolio is coming together the cloud and as a service, everything is happening. You got the new apex data storage service take us through what what is the new service? Why? >>Sure. So I can start um you know, we've been seeing this this shift towards an as a service model, you know I. T. Has always struggled with complexities associated with under and over provisioning capital budget constraints, lengthy and complex to refresh cycles. So you know the events over this past year and our new normal is really accelerated these you know challenges and it made them even more manageable. You know organizations need to become really agile and um they don't want to invest make big upfront investments in infrastructure when they're having such a hard time forecasting there needs you know the new levels of unpredictability that's been accelerating this you know adoption of as of service. So this is why we're introducing apex data storage services essentially were radically simplifying how customers can acquire and manage their storage resources. So data storage services is going to be the first as a service offering in our apex portfolio. So it's going to provide an on crown portfolio of scalable and elastic storage resources that are designed for affects treatment. It's all going to be anchored in our apex console. So it's gonna be a seamless self service experience where you just have a few key inputs, your data service, your performance tier, you're looking for your commitment term, your base capacity, for example and then all the infrastructure is owned and maintained by us built on our Industry leading Technology. So really delivering a super simple self service as a service experience, >>You know, when Jeff Clark was first talking about this as a service as it should be, you know, introducing the project, Apex Devon, I was kind of okay, this is kind of what we heard when we were last in person in 2019. The end to end l cloud, hybrid, cloud operating model, this is kind of what we're talking about here. What's something that covers? What's what's what is this data services? How does that vector into that? Because you know data control planes are being talked about a lot. The use of data in A I. And A II. Operations impacts I. T. And cloud scale. So hybrids now the operating model for the enterprise. >>Yeah. Yeah definitely. And it's this is really only where we're starting and we're going to be starting on a set of apex data storage services. Um so if I step back a little bit and talk a little bit about what apex data storage services are, I'd like to draw a little bit of a contrast to how customers procure their equipment today. So a customer typically today says I need some storage I need some mid range storage. I need for example a power store 5000 and then they work with the sales representative and says I need 24 1.92 terabyte drives. They need certain connectivity and then we present a quote to them with a whole bunch of line items with a lot of different prices and then the customer needs purchased that year, purchased that upfront and then uh, the only asset and then they managed the asset. So they're taking the risk. They need to plan for that capacity. And what we're doing is we're radically flipping that model. Uh, and what we're, what we're doing here is we're just driving to an outcome. So customers, they don't want to take that risk. They just want to drive to their business outcomes and they want to manage their applications. So what they have to do in this model is just pick, hey, I want storage services, I want some block services, I want a certain performance level and I learned a certain capacity and I want a commitment level. And what we do is we basically create a rate for them And we've optimized a lot of our processes on the back end to be able to, once that order has booked, we target a very rapid time of 14 days from the time the order is dropped until the customer can actually start operating on that here. From the, the time is dropped to the time that they can produce in their first volume Is 14 days. And really all they have to do is operate the year and we manage everything everything for them that you know, from capacity management to change management to software, life cycles, patching and you and things like that. And now jOHN I want to address your question about the hybrid world. It's absolutely designed for a hybrid world. So in our first release will be offering this on customer premises. And we're also introducing announcing a relationship we have with the data center provider of Equinox, which is the largest co location provider in the world. And what will be able to do is provide the subscription service of this as a service, not only customer on customer premises but in near cloud environments, in a co location facility. And we also have software assets that will extend into this environment, all driven by a central pain of unified experience. >>That's awesome. The hybrid cloud, It's gotta have that table stakes now. So, good, good plug there. Thanks Call out Allison, I gotta ask you on the customer side, what's the drivers for the apex data storage service? What was the key things that there you're hearing, why this is important to them? Uh, and what is the value proposition? >>Right, Great question. So I touched on a little bit of that upfront, but it's, you know, essentially what we what we do with this offering is take it out of the infrastructure business so that they can focus on more value added activities, focusing on customer satisfaction. Um You know, because we're maintaining we're managing and maintaining all the infrastructure for them. You know, some of the key pain points are just, you know, the overhead associated with maintaining and managing that infrastructure. But there's also the financial aspect as well. These services are designed for affects treatment, so you're not having to make that big initial Capex expense, um you're really able to align your expenses with actual usage versus anticipated usage. So it eliminates that, you know, cycle of over and under provisioning, which either results in, you know, over provisions waste or under provisions risk. We essentially, you know, streamlined all of those processes. So the customer just has to worry about operating the, operating their storage and it takes a lot of that worry off of them and they're able to just pay for what they use, elastically scale of resources up and down. So it's essentially really simplified and more predictable. >>Page has always been one of those things where hey, I'll pay when I need it. I gotta ask you on the differentiation side. This is comes up all the time. How do you guys different from alternatives? How do you differentiate going forward? How do you guys be successful? What's the, what's the strategy? What's the, what's the focus? >>Yeah. So I'll take the, I'll take a couple of points and then I'll pass it over to you Alison if you don't >>mind. Um, >>so first and foremost, I'm asked this a lot. So what does Dell bring to the table in this whole little apex? And as a service? First and foremost, Del is the leading infrastructure provider for all of I. T. On premise. We have the enterprise infrastructure re leading across just about every major category of infrastructure. So first and foremost we have that. We also have the scale of the reach, not only in our enterprise relationships through our partner community. So that is one that is one huge advantage that we have. One thing that we're and we talked about this model. Um the level of management that we provide for our customers is second to none with this solution. So we provide um we provide all of the the difficult management tasks from end end that a customer that we repeatedly hear from our customers that they don't want to be dealing with anymore. And we're going to be able to do that at scale for our customers. And I know there's a couple more points, so I'd like to I'll pass it on to Alison and she can she can address a couple more points there. >>Yeah, sure. I mean obviously Devin makes a great point as being an industry leader and just the breadth of our portfolio in general, beyond just storage that we can essentially deliver as a service, but no, with our initial flagship storage as a service offering. Um, so with apex data storage services, you know, I talked a little bit about, you know, the pay as you go, pay as you know, pay for what you use. You know, essentially the way this works is, you know, there's an initial based commitment of capacity that the customer commits to and then they're able to elastically scale up and down above that base and only pay for what they use. One of the differentiators were bringing to the table is that, you know, in addition to that base and that, you know, the on demand space if you will, that that goes above that we're charging a single rate. So it's really a simplified and transparent billing process. So you're not getting any over ridge penalties or fees for going into that on demand. It's essentially a single rate based on your commitment and you know, as much as you scale up and down, you're gonna you're gonna stay within one single rate. So no surprise average penalties. So that's definitely something that that differentiates us. And the customers also have the ability to raise that based commitment at any point. Co terminus lee in their contract. So if they're seeing like a strong growth trajectory or anticipating a more, you know, a big burst in usage for some data intensive type workloads. You know, we can add that can raise that floor commitment resulting in a lower rate but still a single rate for both based on demand. >>Well certainly data storage and moving data around, having it in the edge to the core to whatever is critical. And I think I think that's a great service. The question I want to ask you guys next to addresses. Give us an update on the apex brand and portfolio overall. How does this fit in? How is it shaping out? Can just take a minute to explain kind of where it is right now and what's available, how it was the strategy and what's coming? >>Sure. So I can talk a little bit about what's available when we're talking about today and then maybe devon if you can touch a little bit on the on the strategy and going forward. Um But what we've announced today is you at Del Tech World is the apex brand, the apex portfolio, which as I mentioned, it's our strategy for as a service and cloud. So in addition to our data storage services offering that we've been focused on today, um which is part of our infrastructure services, we're also introducing our cloud services as well as some more customizable services. So from a cloud services perspective, we're also going to be talking about our apex private cloud and apex hybrid cloud offerings. And then of course the apex console is really what brings all of these pieces together. It's that single self service experience to manage all of your as a service resources from a single place, David, I don't know if you want to take it. >>So what I would, what I would like to add is a little bit more color on the customized services. So if you look at apex at a high level um it's really how we're transforming the way we do business with our partners and customers and the way we deliver products and offers to our our partners and customers. And within the apex umbrella there's really two segments of customers that we see. One, there is still a segment of customers that want some technology control. They want to build their they want to build their clouds, they want to build their infrastructure and that's where really the apex custom comes into it. And we have a very large business in our custom business today with Dell technologies on demand with flex on demand and data center utility and those will be represented to be apex flex on demand, apex data center utility, um you know, that's what we're announcing here. And then the second portion is really this apex turnkey offer where customers don't care to manage it, they want to just consume, they want to operate their gear. And that's where a lot of the innovation, a lot of the a lot of the strategy that we're talking about here with the hybrid cloud service, the product cloud service, apex data storage services. So we're building out a set of world class infrastructure services that will then be able to wrap our leading infrastructure utilities around data protection, security, migration, compliance etcetera. And then build a set of horizontal and vertical solutions on top of this infrastructure to provide uh paramount uh value to our >>awesome Alice. I gotta ask you because this is always the case right. There's always one or two features that jump out the product, everything as a service clearly aligns with the market macro conditions in the marketplace and the evolution of the architecture in all businesses. That's clear, there's no debate on that. You guys got that nailed. What's the, what's the key thing if you had to kind of boil out the one thing that people are gravitating towards on the data storage service because um, everyone kinda is going here, right? So what if you get people that are watching it are learning what's popping out as the key product feature here or a few things that jump out. >>Sure. So, I mean really at the core, it's all about simplicity. Um, it's in terms of the console itself, which we've talked about it, you know, you have your infrastructure resources, your storage, your cloud services and it's all, it's just so simple. It's just, it's a matter of a few simple clicks and inputs that are pretty intuitive to meet your needs. It's the fact that its outcome based, you know, we're not focused on delivering a product, it's really truly delivering an outcome and a service to meet the customer's needs. So it's a whole new way of you know approaching the market and talking to our customers and making it intuitive and simple and seamless and really, you know, taking so much of the complexity off of the table for them. Um So it's the simplicity of the console, it's the being able to transition to more op ex model um from a financial aspect is huge and then you know aligning your expenses, you know with your actual versus and you know anticipated usage, so being able to manage that unpredictability, so that's necessary talking about a specific feature but really how we're driving towards really focusing on the customer needs. >>Now the business values right there, it's all about the outcome and you know, we're about getting charged on this variable, you know, over age on some service David. How about under the hood? If I look at the engine of this, how it fits into the kind of product architecture, you look at the product management, you're building the product and the engineers are cranking away what's the, what's the gear, what gears look like? What's the machinery look like under the hood? What's the cool tech, if any, um, you would share, if you can share. >>Yeah, it's interesting that you asked that, john and it's, it's really interesting that we got probably what, 12 minutes into this interview and we didn't even talk about a product, not one single product and that is really by design here. We're really, we're really selling the service. We're selling an offer. The product is the service, the service is the product and it's really about selling those outcomes. But then at the end of the day since we're talking talking shop here um we are introducing block services and that's powered by our new award winning power store mid range product and our file services are going to be powered by our um our award winning power scale and Ice alone systems as well. So we'll be interested you know introducing block and file services and we'll be extending that to object object services and data storage services. Uh >>huh, awesome. You know Alison and Devon I was talking to a friend we're running weren't on camera with the camera was turned on but we're just riffing about all the coolness around devops to have sex cops, how I. T. S go into large scale cloud apps and we're talking about all that and we were both kind of coming to the same conclusion that the next generation on top of all this automation is the excess of service, everything is a service. Because if you go that next level, that's where it is. Because the outcomes, the outcome is the services and that's underpinned by automation ai ops all the other stuff that's kind of hardened underneath still enables it. And you guys are already there. So congratulations. That's really cool reaction to that. That concept of automation powers X as a service. >>Yeah, I'll take that one, john. So, um while I talked only about playing storage technologies that power this there is a phenomenal amount of investment in um uh work and thought going into building out the underlying infrastructure and operations behind this because we need to provide um the operations and management of this infrastructure services, not only for storage but for compute and solutions and develops environment at scale. And it's crucial that we, we build out that infrastructure, that automation, that machine learning AI offers to really support this. So yeah, you're absolutely right. That is fundamental to getting this model. Uh nailed >>Alison. You're feeling pretty good about the product and the service. Now everything is a service that's your wheelhouse. It's happening. >>Yeah, here we are. We've got, we've got apex portfolio has arrived. So yeah, feeling good. Um, definitely excited. >>He was bright. Congratulations Allison David, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing the updates on the apex new data storage services, the new portfolio, the directionally correct action of everything as a service and all the automation that goes on the, that's really kind of a game changer. Thanks so much for sharing on the CUBA. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks a lot, john, >>thank you. Okay. >>Del Tech world cube coverage continues. I'm john Kerry, the host. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Mhm.

>>Welcome back everyone to Dell Technologies World 2021 the virtual version. You're watching the cubes continuing coverage of the event and we're gonna talk about the Edge, the transformation of telco in the future of our expanding tech universe. With me is Aaron Jason, who's the vice president? Edge and Telkom marketing at Dell Technologies erin great to see you. I love this topic. >>Absolutely. It's it's pretty popular these days. I'm glad to be here with you. Thanks. >>It is popular, you know, cloud was kind of the shiny new toy last decade and it's still growing at double digits but it's kind of mainstream and now the Edge is all the rage. What's the best way to think about? What is the Edge? How do you define that? >>Yeah, you know, that's probably one of the most common questions I get is we start really doubling down on what we're doing it in the Edge world today. Um you know, I tried to basically not overcomplicated too much, you know, last year we really tried to to talk about it as being where you're the physical world, in the virtual world, connect. Um but you know, really it's more about what customers are looking to do with that technology. And so what we're really thinking about it today is the edges really where customers data is being used near point of generation to really define and build the essential value for that customer and that essential value is gonna be different in each vertical in each industry. Right? So in manufacturing, that essential value is created in the factory and retail, it's going to be, you know, at point of sale, whether that's in a store or on your device, in a virtual interaction, um in health care, it's going to be the point of care, Right? So it's gonna be the ambulance or the emergency room or the radiology lab. and of course in farming that essential values created in the field itself. So um, you know, for for many customers, it's really trying to figure out, you know, how do they take technology closer to the point of that value creation to be able to drive new new capabilities for the business, whether it's for what they're trying to accomplish or what they're trying to do in helping their customers. So really that's how we're thinking about the edge today. It's where that value generation occurs for a company. And how do we take technology to that point of generation to deliver value for them? >>Yeah, I like that. I mean to me the edge, I know what it's not, I know the edges, not a mega data center, but but everything else could be the edge. I mean, it's it's to me it's the place that's the most logical, the most logical place to process the data. So as you say, it could be a factory, it could be a hospital, it could be a retail store, it could be, could be a race track, it could be a farm, I mean virtually anything. So the edges, it's always been here, but it's changing. I mean most of the edge data has historically been analog. Everything now is getting instrumented. What are the factors that you think will make this, this industry's vision of the edge real in your opinion? >>Yeah. You know, it's it's really bringing together a handful of technologies that have really started to mature after over the last decade or so. Um the ones that have been around for a little bit, things like IOT have been emerging in the last several years. Um even Ai and machine learning many of those algorithms have been around for decades, but we've only recently been able to bring the compute power required to do that in edge environments in the last decade or so. Um it's so really the two key sort of killer technologies that have matured in the last couple of years is really the mic realization of computing. So being able to put compute almost anywhere on the planet and then the emergence of five G networking, giving us the ability to provide very high performance, low latency and high bandwidth environments to connect all those things together and get the data to those analytics environments. From that computer perspective. I mean, I still like to talk about moore's law as an example of that that ever marched that's been going on for, you know, half a century or more now is continuing to push forward um at a rate that is that that that that just really hasn't slowed down for the most part, you know, the example that I use with people, as, you know, you know, I still remember when I got my first calculator watch as a kid, you know, that Casio calculator watch that so many of us had, And my dad told me the story when he gave it to me, he's like, Hey, look, this has the same amount of compute power as the landing module on the moon, and I didn't know it at the time, but that was my first sort of entry and education around what Moore's law provided. And it's not so much speed. I mean, people think about that as it doubles in speed every 18 months, but it's really more about the density of compute that happens that moore's law drought, pushes along, so I can now squish more and more compute power into a smudge smaller location and I can now take that performance out to the edge in a way that I haven't been able to do before. I mean I think about my history, I joined E M C, that was acquired by Dell Technologies a couple years back. I joined that back in the late nineties when the biggest baddest storage array on the planet was one whole terabyte in size. And now I can fit that in the palm of my hand. In fact, when I walk around, you know, when I used to walk around with my, with my back, my laptop and go into offices, um you know, if I had my laptop and my tablet and my my my smartwatch, I had 12 to 16 cores on me and a couple of terabytes of capacity all connected with the equivalent of tens of T ones. Right? So what was once a small or or a mid sized data center just in the last decade or so? We now all walk around a small data centers and the power that that compute now brings to the edge allows us to take analytics that was really once done in data centers. I may have captured it at the edge, but I had to move it into a data lake. I had to stage it and analyze it. It was more of a historical way of looking at data. Now I can put compute right next to the point of data generation and give insight instantaneously as data is being generated. And that's opening up whole new ways that industries can drive new value for them and for their customers. And that's really what's exciting about it is this combination of these technologies that are all sort of maturing and coming together at the same time. Um, and there's just so much doing, it happened that space and devils really, really excited to be part of bringing that into these environments for our customers. >>I'm gonna give you a stat that a lot of people, I don't, I don't think realize, uh, you talked about moore's law and you're absolutely right. It's really, you know, technically moore's law is about the density, right? But the outcome of being able to do that is performance. And if you do the math, you know, moore's law doubling performance every two years, roughly, The math on that is that means 44 improvement per year in performance. Everybody talks about how moore's laws is dead. It's not, it's just changing. Here's the, here's the stat. If you take a system on a chip, take like for instance apples a 14 and go back five years from 2015 to 2021. If you add up the performance of the CPU the combinatorial factors of the CPU gpu and in the N. P. U. The neural processing unit, just those three, The growth rate has been 118 a year vs 44%. So it's actually accelerating and that doesn't include the accelerators and the DSPS and all the other alternative processors. So, and to your point and by the way that a 14 shipping cost Apple 50 bucks. So and and that fits in the palm of your hand to the point that you were just making So imagine that processing power at the edge most of of of of of ai today is modeling, let's say in the cloud, the vast majority is going to be a i influencing at the edge. So you are right on on that point. >>Yeah, there's no question about it. So, to your point, I mean, moore's law is just of course CPU itself. All right. And it comes out to roughly, on average, it's about 10 x every five years. 100 X every 10 years, 1000 X every 15 years. I mean, it's incredible how much power you can put in a small footprint today. And then if you factor in the accelerators and everything else um, it's actually if anything that innovation is going faster and faster and to your point, um you know, the while the modeling is still going to typically happen in data centers as you pull together lots of different data sets to be able to analyze and create new models. But those models are getting pushed right out to the edge on these compute devices literally feet away at times from the point of data generation to be able to give us really real time analytics and influencing. The other cool thing about this too is you know we're going from sort of more looking backwards and making business analytics based on what has already happened in the past to being able to do that in the very near past. And of course now with modern analytics and models that are being created for ai we're able to do more predictive analytics so we can actually identify errors, identify challenges before they even occur based on pattern matching that they're saying. Um So it's really opening up new doors and new areas that we've never been able to see before that's really all powered by by these capabilities. >>It's insane the amount of data that is coming. We think data is overwhelming today. You ain't seen nothing yet. Um Now erin you cover the edge and the telecom business up. I was beside it when I when I when I found that out because the telecom businesses is ripe for transformation. Um So what do you how is Dell thinking about that? Why are you sort of putting those together? What are the synergies that you see in in the commonalities in those 22 sectors? >>Yeah. I mean at the end of the day it's really all about serving the enterprise customers in the in the organizations of all kinds um that the industry is trying to bring these edge technologies too and that's no different with the telecommunications industry. Right? So you know when when the when the four G world changed about 10 years ago um you know the telecom industry was able to bring the plumbing the network piping out to all the endpoints but they really didn't capture the over the top revenue opportunities that Four G technologies opened up right. That really went to the hyper scholars. It went to you know, a lot of the companies that we all know and love like uh you know, Uber and Airbnb and netflix and others um and that really when the four Gr that was really more about opening up consumer opportunities as we move to five G. And as we move these ultra low latency and high bandwidth capabilities out to the enterprise edge, it's really the B two B opportunities that are opening up and so on the telecom side we're partnering with the telecommunication companies to modernize their network, enroll five G. L. Quickly. But one of the more important things is that we're partnering with them to be able to build services over the top of that that they can then sell into their customer base and their business customer base. So whether that's mech, whether that's private mobility, um delivering data services over the top of those networks, there's a tremendous opportunity for the telecoms to be able to go and capture um Ed revenue opportunities and we're here to help them to partner with them to be able to do that. Now if you put yourself in the shoes of the customer, the enterprise business, a manufacturer or retail, who's looking to be able to leverage these technologies, there's a variety of ways in which they're going to be able to to to consume these technologies. In some cases they'll be getting it direct from vendors direct from Dell Technologies and others. They might be using solutions integrators to be able to combine these technologies together for a particular solution. They may get some of those technologies from their telecom provider and even others, they might get it from the cloud provider. So um Dell wants to make sure that we're being able to help our customers across a variety of ways in which they want to consume those technologies and we have to businesses focused on that. We've got one business focused on edge solutions where we partner with oT vendors closely as well as cloud providers to be able to provide a technology and infrastructure based on which we can consolidate edge workloads To be able to allow customers that want to be able to run those um those services on prem and by those from a direct vendor. Um there's other customers that want to get those through the telecoms. And so we work closely with the telecommunication providers to provide them that modern cloud native disaggregated network that they're looking to build to support 5G. And then help them build those services on the top that they can sell either way whether the customer wants to get that from a vendor like Dell or from a service provider like like uh like an A T and T and Verizon or others. Um Dell looks to partner with them and be a way to provide that underlying infrastructure that connects all of that together for them. >>Well, I mean the beauty of the telco networks is their hardened. But the problem for the telco networks is they're they're hardened and so you've got the over over the top vendors bow guarding their network. The cost per bit is coming down, data is going through the roof and the telcos can't, they can't participate in that over the top and get to those subscribers. But with Five G. And the technologies that you're talking about bringing to the telecoms world, they're they're gonna transform and many are going to start competing directly and this is just a whole new world out there. I wonder Aaron if you could talk about um what you're specifically talking about at Del Tech World this year as it relates to Edge. >>Sure. So the both of the businesses hedge in telecom have a couple announcements this year. This this year, Deltek World, um starting with Edge um as you may recall back in uh in in the fall of last year when we had our last technologies world, we announced our intent to launch an edge business. Um so that that was formulated and stood up over the last couple of months and and we're really focusing on a couple of different areas. How do we look at our overall Dell technologies portfolio and be able to bring particular products and solutions that exist already and be able to apply those uh to edge use cases. We're looking at building a platform which would allow us to be able to consolidate a variety of workloads. And of course we're working on partnerships specifically in the ot space to be able to vertical eyes these offers to help particular uh particular industries. Right now we're focusing on manufacturing and retail but we'll expand that over time. So at Del Tech World this year we're launching our first set of of solutions family which is going to be the Dell Technologies manufacturing edge solutions, the first one that's gonna be launching as a reference architecture with PTC um thing works on top of what we're also proud to be announcing this week, which is our apex private cloud offering. So this is the first example of of of a partnership with an O. T. Provider on top of apex private cloud so that we can bring in as a service platform offering to the Enterprise edge uh for manufacturers. And combined with one of the industry's leading oT software vendors of thing works. So that's one of the solutions were doing um we're also looking to launch a product which is we're taking our existing um streaming data platform from our unified storage team and taking that, which was once running in the data center out to edge these cases as well. And that allows us to be able to capture click stream data in manufacturing and other environments, buffer and cash that in a in an appliance and then be able to move that off to a data like for longer term analytics. While it's in that buffered state though we open provide a P. I. S. So that you can actually do real time influencing against those click stream data as it's flowing through the appliance on its way to the data lake for longer term analytics. So those are two key areas that we're gonna be focusing on from an edge perspective on the telecom side. Um we're really this is going to be a big year from us as we move towards creating a common end end five G platform from quarter Iran and then also start focusing on partnerships and ecosystems on top of that platform. Uh last week at Red hat summit we actually announced a reference architecture for red hat. Open shift on top of Dell technologies infrastructure servers and networking. And here at Dell technologies world. This week we're announcing a reference architecture with VM ware. So running VM ware telecom cloud platform. Also on top of Dell technologies. Power edge servers and power such as um so this allows us to create that foundation that open cloud native. These are container and virtual layers on top of our hard work to give that that cloud native disaggregated uh, network claim to be able to now run and build core edge and ran solutions on top of and you'll be hearing more about what we're doing in this space in the coming months. >>Nice. That's great. The open ran stuff is really exciting now, last question. So mobile world Congress, the biggest telco show is coming up in late june Yeah, still on. According to the G S M, a lot of people have tapped out um, and but the cube is planning to be there with a hybrid presence, both virtual and physical. We'll see um I wonder if there's anything you want to talk about just in terms of what's happening in telco telco transformation, you guys got any get any events coming up, what can you tell us? >>Yeah, so we took a close look at mobile world congress and and uh this has been a challenging year for everybody. Um you know, Dell as well as many other vendors made the decision this year that we would actually not participate, but we look forward to participating uh with full gusto next year when it's back in a physical environment. Um So what we've decided to do is we are going to be having our own virtual launch event on june 9th. Um And in that event, the theme of that is going to be the modern ecosystem in the neighboring leveraging the power of open. Um So we'll be talking a little bit more about what we're doing from that open cloud, native network infrastructure and then also talk a little bit more about what Dell technologies looking to do to bring a broad ecosystem of technology vendors together and deliver that ecosystem platform for the telecom industry. So registration actually opens this week at Dell Technologies World. So if you go to Dell technologies dot com can register for the event. Um we're really excited to be talking to the telecom providers and also other hardware and software vendors that are in that space to see how we can work together to really drive this next generation of five G. >>That's awesome. I'll be looking for that and and look forward to collaborating with you on that, bringing your thought leadership and the cube community we would really love to to partner on that. Aaron, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really exciting area and best of luck to you. >>Right. Thank you. I appreciate the time. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody says Dave Volonte for the Cubes, continuous coverage of Del Tech World 2021. The virtual version will be right back right after this short break.

(bright upbeat melody) >> Welcome back to Dell Technology World 2021. Dell Tech World, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about the Edge. I'm very excited to invite Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management for the Edge portfolio at Dell. And Gil Shneorson, who's the Senior Vice President, Edge portfolio also at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, great to see you welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you guys too. Wish we were face to face but maybe in '22. Gil, let's start with you. The Edge is very exciting, it's not really defined. It's very fragmented, but it's there. It's kind of, you know it, when you see it. What do you get excited about when you think about the Edge? >> I think of there's two elements. The first one, is that we all live at the Edge. In other words, the areas we deal with are around us everyday. When we shop, when we consume, when we drive. So it's a very physical type of activity, we know it's there. What's really exciting mostly to me is that, and you started with talking about fragmentation right off the bat. It is a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to add value. Because it's so fragmented, because it's so new, because it has developed and evolved the way it is. We see an amazing opportunity for us to add much more value than we do today and solve problems that have yet to be solved in the industry. >> And Pierluca, it's an exciting, it's almost like an infinite playground for a technologist. I mean. >> Yeah, Dave, I think that's exactly what we find out. The Edge is very exciting, there is a lot of motion especially due to the pandemic and other things. Big factor that is accelerating the innovation at the Edge but this is an inorganic acceleration and what it cause for most of our customers is also confusion, right? They need to apply multiple solutions but not very organized. So you try to solve the outcome like having the right production on your line because demand is surging. But you don't have an organic things to do that and solve the problem. So you see a lot of silos coming in for each one of the solution, and that's what Gil was referring. That's a great opportunity for us as Dell with the breadth of the portfolio we have and what our team that is a new team is focusing doing is to bring that idea to be able to consolidate multiple things at the Edge and process things at the Edge. >> We did an event. CUBE had an event called the CUBE on Cloud and Q1, we had John Rose on and the title of the segment was something like gaining the technology Edge. And we were kind of geeking out on the tech at the Edge. And my takeaway there was... We were trying to like what is Edge? It's like, well, it's the place where it makes most sense to process the data. And so that brings up a lot of challenges. There are technical challenges and there are business challenges. I wonder if we could sort of dig into those a little bit. How do you guys look at that? Maybe Gil, you want to start maybe. Maybe on the business side and then we can dig into that. >> Sure. The way things evolved. If you think about it, at the Edge is very verticalized. And because of that, they're very use case driven. And so in every industry possible, you start with some business person making a decision whether they have a need or they want to grow their business. And so for example, they will buy an applying to do fraud protection in retail or detection retail. Or they will apply an application to merit robotics and the factory need would come with its own gateway, implant, compute, and a cloud portal. And then you do it again and again, and again, every time you have a business opportunity. All of the sudden you have this proliferation of IT type equipment. At the end where it's the worst place to have it really because you don't have the right IT resources and you are in the need to protect it in a much more... In a different way that you can do in a data center. And so all of that, bring us to a point that we see an opportunity to simplify. And so not only simplification. And this is, you know, simplification or simplicity is the most important driver for any IP purchase. Things that are simple or the easiest and the most economical to operate. The next demand that we see from a customer is security. Because things are at the edge, they have a much more extended attack surface. They need to be connected to networks. They need to be connected without IT staff. So if you can simplify insecure, you can really unlock amazing value by processing data close to where it's created. Without it, we're seeing this opportunity as businesses but we can't really get to it because there are those two hurdles in front of us. >> So Pierluca. We need to you thank you for that, Gill. When you hear a lot about AI inferencing at the Edge. And if you think about AI today, much of the work is modeling. It's done in the cloud. But you're not going to be doing AI inferencing in real time in the cloud. Take the autonomous vehicle example. So that brings some technical challenges. There's obviously data challenges. I'm curious as to how you think about that. I mean, we always talk about how much data is going to be persisted. I think Tesla persists like five minutes of data, right? But some of it is going to go back. That's true. But a lot of it is going to be processed real time. And that's just really different than the way we typically think about IT. >> Yeah, absolutely. So at the Edge, especially in manufacturing, we see right now, or in other use case, it's very important to get the outcome very quickly. Now, you don't use that a deep learning model for that. You need to just understand. For example, in the computer vision use case where you take image of your production line. To your point, Dave, you not keep those image, you keep the image where you have the defect. But you need to process that AIML needs to be intelligent enough to understand that you have a defect, and send that image then to the club. So the search of the data at the Edge is a very important factor. And why you need to process data at the Edge, because as your point, you can't wait to send to the cloud and then wait, right? Tesla is a clear example of that. All the autonomous car where you need to react instantaneously to a change. But in manufacturing, for example, that is our focus for now, is for example, the robots. That if you need to optimize the robot, you need to have a immediate understanding of where the pieces are and when they need to put. And the tolerance need to be act immediately. Otherwise, you come out with the thousand of pieces that they are not in the right tolerance. So, and at the end of the day, what we see is not only the search of the need of processing AIML to the Edge, but also the need to have a new type of compute at the Edge. So in the past, was just gateway and you'd get the gateway and you send the data to the cloud. Now, it's a form of a new compute that has also GPU capability and other things to process this data. So very important. And I think that Dell, especially, we are very focused on that because is really where the customer need to extract the value. >> Thank you. And Gil, I want to get Gil to the unique value proposition to Dell and what makes you distinct. If I infer from your comments, your strategy, you said it's to simplify. And so I see two vectors there. One is to simplify at the Edge. The other is where needed connect that Edge, whether it's on prem, a public cloud, cross-cloud, that kind of simplification layer that abstracts the complex the underlying complexity. Maybe you could talk about your strategy and what makes you guys different? >> Sure. We've been talking to our... Well, we always talk to our customers. And we've been doing business at the Edge for many, many years. Let's call it coincidence that we're a very large company. We have reached, we serve our customers. So when they decide to buy something for their Edge, you know, environments, they come to us as well as other vendors. When the percentage of the time based on our market share. But when we decided to take another look at how can we be even more relevant, we started talking to a lot of them great depth. And what we discovered was the problem I talked about before. The problem of complexity, the problem of security and the problem of choice. And so our focus is to do what we do best. At the end of the day, we're an IT company and our customers for the most part are IT people. And we see them dragged more and more into Edge projects because customers need to connect Edge to the network. And they need to security, and that's how it starts. And so those worlds of IT and OT are coming together and they're coming together, applying IT best practices, which is exactly what we know how to do. And so, because of that, we think that they need to think about architecture versus unique silence solutions. Architecture that can support multiple use cases that can grow with time, consolidate more and more use cases as they grow, simplify what they do by applying tried and true or tried and true IT best practices in a secure manner. So the dealer approach would be doing that, taking a more architectural approach to the adverse as a use case. And then just like you predicted, meet the customers where they are from an application standpoint. And so we know that a lot of applications are growing and be developing on a hyper scale or public clouds. We would like to connect to those. We would like to allow them to keep working as they have, except, when they run it at the Edge. Think about environments, if can consolidate multiple workloads and not solve it for each one at the same time. And so that will be our overall approach. That's what we're working on. >> Yeah. So, okay. So in that horizontal layer, if you will, to serve many, many use cases, not just... You're not going to go a mile deep into one and be the expert at some narrow use case. You want to be that horizontal platform. Here, look, I wonder, does that call for more programmability over time of the products to really allow people to kind of design in that flexibility, if you will, build my own. Is that something that we can expect? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we spoke a little bit about this before the interview. And the things that is very important is composability, starting from a very small form factor to the cluster, and then expand to the cloud is the fundamental things. And the trend that we see. The fact that you can compose the infrastructure, starting from a small gateway that is changing in this market right up to the cloud, and be able to use the same layer that allow you to run the same application is a fundamental things. And we are working on that. We are working on this vision and our strategy is really to be able to be transparent but provide the right building block to do all the use cases that they are required. Where the data. So we, again, not only meeting the customer but meeting where the data are, what the customer wants out of those data. So that's a fundamental things. And we have project Apex. So obviously we are plugging in the project Apex. From a Edge point of view, will allow the customer to have these unique experience to go in Apex and also deploy the Edge infrastructure that is needed. We're starting right now with that. So we will touch later, but that's the first building block of that journey. >> Excellent. Let's touch now. You've got some news around Apex and what are you announcing? >> So we are very excited because as I said our team it's pretty new and it's a very important investment that Dell makes. Not only in us as a team, but as a motion. So we are announcing a reference architecture with PTC. PTC is one of the biggest company for... Actually based here in Boston for manufacturing. And reference architecture will be run on base on Apex private cloud. So the customer can go to the portal, order Apex private cloud and deploy PTC on top of that. So very important things is the first step in this journey. But it's very important steps so we want to thank you also PTC to allow us to work with them. We have other stuff as well that we are announcing. I don't know if you are familiar but we have a very unique streaming data platform. Streaming data platform that can stream multiple data collected from gateway, from every place. And that it's a need. Obviously, when you need to process data in real time, whatever is streaming. What are we doing with the new streaming data platform approach is the ability to deploy single node. So it can be very appealing for the Edge and up to three nodes. >>Awesome. That's great. So a couple of comments on that. So it was funny. We did the LiveWorx show in theCUBE a couple of years ago. PTC is a big event and it was the Edge. And I remember looking around and saying "Where's all the IT vendors?". And so that's great to see you guys leaning in like that. Pierluca, the streaming platform. Tell me more about that. What's the tech behind it? >> So the streaming data platform is a project, that we start couple of year ago, is actually start from open source Pravega. It's a very interesting technology where you can stream multiple data. It's not a traditional storage. Use a technology that can really collect thousands of different streams. And that's very important when you need to mind the data. Bring the data, the structured data in efficient that you can process them at the real time. It's very important. So there are very cool use case of that. But now, that we look at the Edge, this is make more and more tangible sense because we have a lot of partners that they're working with us, especially to extend. When you have all these sensor, you bring the data to the gateways and from the gateways, then you can use data streaming platform to collect all these streams. And then you can easily process them. So it's a very fundamental technology. We are very proud of that. As I said, our enterprise version, it's getting more and more. And now we can land these on different architecture. So it can be backed up by an unison. It can be also on different storage type now. And as I said, we looking now to bring from a what was it data center kind of structure, down to the Edge because now we can put it in a single node up to three nodes. >> It makes a lot of sense. Is this like a Kafka based thing or open source or is it something you guys built or a combination? >> It's a combination. The project is an open source project but we did that. We start this many years ago. And it works with Kafka but it's not Kafka. So it has plugging that can work with Kafka and all the other things. And it's very easy to deploy. So it's a very, very important. And the other things is the scalability of this platform. >> Yeah, so I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing you had in the labs. And you said, "Okay, this is going to be important". And then boom, all of a sudden, the market comes to you. As if you pop it right in. And then of course, the Accenture relationship. Deep, deep industry expertise. So that makes a of sense. 5G's happening. A different world the next 10 years than the last 10 years. Isn't it? >> Yep. >> What is it about manufacturing? Why did you start there? >> I can take this. We looked at where the opportunity was from two perspective. One is whether what are the opportunities to sell, Dave. And the other one obviously comes with it because there's an opportunity to have. And manufacturing today at the Edge is about 30% of the opportunity in sales. According to IDC. But more so, it's been around for the longer time. And so it's maturing, it's the most demanding. And you know, it's got very long horizons of investment. And what we did was, we figured that if we can solve problems for industry, we can then extend that and solve it for everybody else. Because this would be the toughest one to solve. And we like challenge. And then, so we decided to focus and go deep. And you said it before, well, our approach is definitely horizontal approach. We cannot take an horizontal approach without verticalizing and understanding specific needs. So nobody can avoid doing both at the same time. You need to understand. But you also want to solve it in a way that doesn't proliferate the silos. So that's our role. We will understand, but we will make it more generic. So other people can never (indistinct). >> Yeah. And David, if I can add, I think the manufacturing is also very exciting for us as a technologist, right? And Dell technology, as in the name, the technology. So it's very exciting because if I look at manufacturing, we are really in the middle of a industrial transformation. I mean, it's a new era. If you think about, nobody care in the past to connect their machinery with... That they have PLC to the network. All of these is changing because the life where we live right now, with the pandemic, with the remote working, with the fact that you need to have a much more control and be able to have predictive matter. So you're not stopping your manufacturing. Is pushing the entire manufacturing institute industry to connect these machines. And with the connectivity of these machinery, you get a lot of data. You get also a lot of challenge. For example, security. So now, that's the place where connectivity brings the IT aspect in. And the OT guys, now they starting to speak (indistinct) because now it's a more complex things, right? It's not any more computerized only to one machinery. Specifically, is the entire floor. So it's a very interesting dynamics. >> Is the connection between that programmable logic controller and the Dell solution, you mentioned to secure, better security. And I presume it's also to connect back to whatever the core or the cloud, et cetera. Is it also to do something locally? Does it improve? Is there value add that you can provide locally? And what is that value add? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the value add, as I said, if you think right in the past, right? You have a machine that probably stay in the manufacturing for 20, 25 years then you have an hardware attached to that machine that they used the POC about 11 year. The guy that he knows better about that machine, is actually not the software component of it. But he's the guy that he's been working on that machine for 15 years. Now, how you translate that knowledge to a learning algorithm that actually can do that for thousand of machine. And that's really the key, right? You need to centralize information, process those information, but not in the cloud, not in a central data center, but on the manufacturing floor. And you need to have a way to represent these things in a very simple way. So the plant manager can take action, or the guy that is responsible for the entire line, can take action immediately. And that's where the change is. It's not anymore to... Is trying to extend that knowledge to multiple machine, multiple floor, and try to get these change immediately. So that's very important. >> So the PLC doesn't become a general purpose computer, or even necessarily an Uber computer. It connects to that capability because that enables data sharing across clouds. >> That's enable the entire things. You can't do a model just with one source. You need to have multiple sources. And also think about the manufacturing is changing not only for the machinery, but people that they build new manufacturing, right? They need to be smart building. They need to have a technology for being more green, solar energy consumption. So the manufacturing itself is mean five or six different things that you need to solve. It's not just the machine. So this idea of this silos environment is starting to collapse in one. And that's why it's important for us to start from a vertical, but also in the manufacturer, you already see this will expand to multiple things. Also, smart building another thing because they need it. >> Yeah. The red guilt to your point of view. Manufacturing is like the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And you've got adjacencies that you can take the learnings, and manufacturing, and apply them to those adjacent industries. Gil, give us the last word. >> No, usually when we talk at Dell technologies world, we talk to an ideal audience. And we're thinking this year that the way to talk about Edge, at least with the people who traditionally buy from us is expose them to the fact that they are more and more going to be responsible for every projects. And so our advice would be, our hope that they would partner with us to think ahead. Just like they do with data center with our cloud strategy. Thinking ahead as they think about their Edge and try to set up some architectural guidelines. So when they do get the request, they're ready for it. And think about what they know, think about the IP best practices that they applied. All of that is coming to them. They need to be prepared as well. And so we would like to partner with all of our customers to make them ready. And obviously help them simplify, secure, consolidated as they grow. >> Well, guys, thank you. I learned a lot today. We've made a lot of progress. You know, this is the hallmark of Dell, right? It's a very high, let me make sure I get this right. Very high do to say ratio, right? As you guys talked about doing this, a couple of couple of years ago. And you've made a lot of progress and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE to explain this strategy. It makes a lot of sense. And so congratulations and good luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's ongoing coverage of Dell Tech World 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, I'll be right back. (closing music)

>>Okay, welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del tech world. I'm john for your host of the cube we're here for virtual coverage were not yet face to face as we start to come out of covert, we're still doing the remote but we got the cube virtual. We're here with Dennis Hoffman, senior Vice President, General Manager for the telecom Systems business group within Dell Technologies dead. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming in CUba alumni. Thanks for coming on. >>My pleasure, john great to see you and look forward to the days when we can stop doing this virtually. >>Well, you guys have been certainly pumping out a lot of content and right now telco cloud telco disruption is big. We heard Michael Dell last event and even when we were in person in real life, we he was really laying down the five G leadership now with hybrid cloud, um, standardized, pretty much I mean, consensus is no, no debate really. It's hybrid multi cloud on the horizon. That's still just a subsystem of basically distributed computing A. K. A hybrid cloud makes the edge a huge part of the story this year. And the innovations all around telecom, Edge in five G have been around and they're changing really fast. What's how are these Edge in five G technologies impacting the market today? >>Yeah, it's uh is fascinating times, I'll tell you they are providing really the ultimate carrots, you know, the catalyst for um innovation in the market and really driving the world's network operators To uh want to take advantage of all the opportunity that the edge presents and that 5G enables. And it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's really forcing folks to think hard about if they have the right network architectures to enable that to capture that opportunity to have the right kind of capabilities. And so we're seeing an awful lot of interest in network desegregation, network modernization, various forms of adopting the technology is you and I are familiar with from years of what's going on in data center evolution are really starting to hit the telco network now at a really, really interesting time >>while we're on the landscape. Do you want to get your opinion on something? I've been hearing a lot, certainly in interviewing other folks here at Dell tech world and in the industry about how the edge and the data compute equation and the connectivity has changed how they're going to lay out essentially their factory, their plants, their operations and certainly covid pushing everyone at home has changed the game on how data is being computed on and how apps are being built. This is a huge five G opportunity certainly when you start to get into the business impact, autonomous vehicles, I've been doing stories about autonomous boats and everything we could have an autonomous cube soon. So, you know, everything is autonomous which drives to this whole edge piece, What's your take on that? >>Yeah, you know, it's, it's funny for years we've been talking about on prem and off prem, like there's two problems there turns out there's a third Prem, right? There is the other premises and that is not the private data center and not the public cloud. And when you stop and think about it, it it makes sense because at the end of the day, wherever we can get data, we can create digital advantage and it's always been cheaper and more effective and faster to move compute to data than to move data to compute. So technology is like 5G are beginning to make it possible to run very interesting applications in very different places and capture what is predicted to be some 3/4 of the data created over the next decade is going to get created somewhere other than a private data center or a public cloud. And that's the edge, you know, in telcos, look at that third premises as their opportunity to get another bite of the apple on services. Four G was kind of a story of the over the top. Players really took the profit pool and made a lot of money from the over to the netflix is to the itunes and so on and so forth. But when you come back to Five G and think of it kind of as the Enterprise G, it's a chance now for the world's network operators to really get a chunk of that profit pool that comes from the emergence of this third premises called the edge >>Enterprise G. I love that, I'm gonna steal that from you. It's a great, great uh >>somebody else >>uh Yeah, the new trend, but it's a business, it's a business opportunity again, totally cool. And consumers to um okay, so you got your out on the road a lot. I know that we've talked in the past on the cube. There's a lot of discussions in the industry, as well as customers that you're having. What are you hearing? What are the some of the pain points are, see Covid has unveiled unveiled new use cases, people had had adapted to it. There's adaptations that are out there that are new and then things that might not happen again. What are you hearing from customers? >>Yeah, I would say in summary, we're hearing a mix of optimism and uncertainty, optimism around all the stuff we just talked about and that you mentioned, you know, it's it's a blank from anywhere. World right work from anywhere, learn from anywhere. Medicine from anywhere. And you know, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's about the absolute necessity of communications technology to the world we live in today. The uncertainty comes from this question of, okay, so I know that there's this big opportunity and I know that I need to modernize my network architecture and kind of change the way I operate to capture it all. But the architecture is I run on today, make that really hard. And the architecture is that that the modern data center is built on, We know they work. But how do I get them in a way that allows me to build a resilient, high performance agile communications network. Um, you know, today we uh we face a world in which we see, we have a world in which solutions are delivered very fairly monolithically in the network uh for network operators but going forward, the power to potentially decompose all of that is wonderful provided it can be recomposed in a way they can consume. And I think that's where the uncertainty lies. There's a lot of testing and trialing of pieces of applications of underlying hardware, infrastructure, servers, accelerators, um certainly different types of virtualization and container ization technologies. But in the end these networks need to run it many many many nines um and they need to be extremely robust and pulling together a lot of different components from the open ecosystem is a daunting challenge for most of the network operators. >>You know, I hear you saying about the opportunity recognition and the re factoring how we called re composing this opportunity here and again. I like this enterprise G angle because what it means is that it's not the consumer the only it's it's everything. It's a complete consumer ization of I. T. So it's a whole another edge landscape. Prem third, the third premise is the edge. All good. I've always so set on the cube and certainly Dave and I have David and I have riffed on this is that you know, everything is now cloud operations and the data center is a big edge and then you've got other pieces that are just edges. A distributed system kind of sounds like a computer in the cloud. So this is kind of operating model. So I have to ask the question which is in telco, if it's gonna be distributed like that and it's going to be operated at scale, how is Dell responding to capture the mind share and customers using Dell in this new telco disruption? Because it's kind of you got to keep the lights on and you gotta also get them in a position to take advantage of the new opportunity. How are you responding? >>Yeah, Well, we're trying to we're literally trying to fill that gap, you know, the talking to the world's uh modern or say the world's telecom network operations leaders. We've uh we've had a lot of conversations with folks about what they need to do and what's holding them back from really in many ways taking advantage of the digital transformation that that's kind of rippling through the economy. And as they kind of laid that out to us, we decided that it was an enormous opportunity for Dell that this this uh you know, this new network will be fundamentally built on computer technology uh and it will be open industry standard computer technology. And on top of that we will use virtualization. And if this begins to sound like the way data centers are being built, because that's exactly what's happening. But more than that, I think there's a need for an at scale substantial provider that the world's biggest carriers can bet on and feel they can trust as a strategic partner to not only pull the ecosystem together, validated, certified, curated a little bit uh, and deliver it as an outcome, but then stand behind it running and importantly, do all of that in a way that doesn't constrain the continuous innovation. That's really the hallmark of some of these modern architecture. So for us, we see, you know, an opportunity that is literally perfectly built for a company like dealt and that's why we decided to invest in it. That's why you hear Michael talking about it a lot. Uh it's um, you know, it's it's really super well aligned with our strategy, we think it's actually key to winning the edge. Uh and and it's also really well aligned with our purpose, you know what this company exists to accelerate human progress through technology. And this little slice of it is all about accelerating communications and the transformation of modern networks to do exactly that right, To help close the digital divide, to bring fair and equitable medicine and learning to all, um and to allow us all to work from wherever we're working. So it's uh it's something that we're excited about on multiple levels and we think the company is really built for the distributed computing environment that a modern telco network represents. >>Yeah, what's interesting is that the value that you guys can enable at the edge, his real impact, It's not just data center and compute and have applications. Remember the old days I got my crm in my E. R. P and I got my apps on my systems and it's all good now. Business is completely software enables, it's the entire business and the business is software naval, which means that you have to have that edge. So I totally love of the positioning and strategy. I have to ask you if you don't mind, where is the residents with customers when you look at the telco enablement there that you're enabling them to do what's resonating the most, what's jumping out from the telescopes in terms of what Dell's doing for them And the customers, you mentioned tele medicine, which by the way, is an amazing impact to the world. Just one example. But where's the residence? >>Yeah. You know, first we we are what we are. Right. So it's, I think with a lot of conversations, it begins with, um, the telecommunications network needs server technology, but it needs very specific kinds of server technology built in very specific ways. Um, the, you know, the needs of compute at the base of a cell tower on a hill in Montana in the middle of winter are different than we've been building for data centers for years. So I think the first thing that resonates it, I need it, I need a very specific kind of open compute, uh, infrastructure hardware foundation that is industry standard. And, and we turn to somebody like Delta do do exactly that. But what we've learned is there's so much more than that because really we need to begin to deliver outcomes on top of that foundation. Uh, First outcome, we need to deliver his modern operations and maintenance of a distributed network. Zero touch provisioning, zero touch upgrading. How can we impact the total cost of maintenance and ownership in a meaningful way, um, for a network that is in fact constructed out of a fabric of server. On top of that there's the actual network core network services, Edge, the radio access network. And how do we successively open up each section of the network, driving computing storage all the way to the edge? Because for many organizations in the world, many enterprises, their edge will actually be on the telco premises. Right. The telco edge will be their edge. Some of the bigger companies certainly can build their own. But as you get in the world of medium and small business, the person they buy their circuits from and their communications from. If they have the ability to deliver them private slices of networks and virtual compute and storage, that's going to be how they get after it. So you know for us that next piece that resonates is the ability to pull together solutions like we've been doing for years with the ex rail hyper converged the stuff we did with the C. E. Back in the day and then last >>I'm just saying that you know you're bringing up things that kind of sound. It's super complex physical plant and equipment. You're talking about real hard and purpose built devices in the past very operational technology oriented stuff and then that has to have I. T. Agility right? And then have scalability behind it and complete you know integration this is not obvious and easy. It's hard. >>Yeah. No I mean software doesn't run on software right? Software runs on hardware and so as much as a lot of the power and the interest comes from what the application can do underlying it all is a capability to distribute, compute and storage to where the application or the software wants to run or runs best. That's what's really cool about five G is its ability to do the stuff you mentioned earlier on, you know, the, the G Wiz stuff, drones and autonomous and a AR and VR and all the things that ultra reliable, low latency communication would make possible on a grand scale that really bring the machines into the picture, not just humans on the edge. It's the stuff, right? That that's on the edge and we've been talking about it for a long time, but none of it's gonna matter if we don't put this infrastructure foundation in place. Then we got to lay an open marketplace of containerized network functions. Virtualized network functions on top of that all to enable our network operators to deliver interesting services to end users. It's >>super exciting. I got to say that it's a super exciting because you know, it's coming it's like the energies there, it's like the, you know, the storm's coming of disruption in the innovation because you think about what containers and cloud native kubernetes the cloud native technologies can do for legacy because its shelf life and more headroom, right? So you can you can win these telcos can actually not only pivot but line extension into new capabilities. So they tend to be very strong technically is an operator, operator networks, the hard tech stuff, physical stuff and software but not known for it. I mean but now there's a huge opportunity that's gonna come around the corner. I'm bullish on Iot and edge where you have the O. T. And I. T. Coming together. It's really compelling And it's going to be radically different I think in the next 5 to 10 years what's your take on that in terms of outlook? >>Couldn't agree more. Yeah I mean it's you know it's for those of us are in the industry always the knowledge of what's coming or the belief in what's coming. The hype precedes the actual development. But you know just as I don't know 15 20 years ago the idea that you can completely disrupt the taxi industry with an app and a four G smartphone service was in nobody's mind except maybe a couple of people. You >>know it >>makes you wonder what is the what is the uber equivalent of a business service that will be fundamentally enabled by the architecture we just described that we're not thinking about right now and that's why every time we move from a centralized computing model to a decentralized computing models that decentralized computing models dramatically larger than a centralized, >>way >>bigger than mainframe. Edge, way bigger than client server, which is already way bigger than cloud, Public. Cloud. And so I think it's, you know, there's a, there's a lot of promise, a lot of excitement. Still a long way to go though. A lot of the stuff we're talking about still is not actually rolled out into the network. Um and that's kind of the opportunity for somebody like them. >>Yeah. And decentralized and open winds. It's funny you mentioned high, we were talking David was just talking with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger in 2013. We're talking hybrid cloud, that's 78 years ago. Okay, so good stuff. Let's get into the news real quick. Um Deltek World, you've got some news coming. Uh Let's dig into it. Please share some of the outlook of the news. You're gonna be you're you're announcing here? >>Yeah, thanks. Sure, john, I mean, we're gonna be announcing two things relative to the telecom portfolio. Uh and they're both reference architectures with VM ware. One is the second edition of the telco cloud platform for five G. Um, so that's a Delvian where reference architecture, that is exactly what we just talked about. It's this open software defined on industry standard hardware platform, um for running 5G applications. And then the other one is the first version of the telco cloud platform for the radio access network, TCP ran as we would call it. Um and as we start to push this technology from the core out towards the edge of the telecom network. So to really interesting developments in in deep partnership with VM ware and stuff, we've been working on for a while stuff, we are in fact working on with customers and delivering today and we'll be making formal announcements about those at the D T W show. >>Awesome. Dennis, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing the update and thanks for the industry insight. Uh, I love the telco shift that's going on. It's an extension of existing, I think cloud native saves the day here with telco and allows the completely different landscape to evolve. So you guys were on top of it. Thanks for sharing S VP and general manager, the telecom systems business with Dell Dennis. Hoffman. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks john Okay >>cube coverage here. Del Tech world. I'm john for a year. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

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

>>Mhm Yes. Hi lisa Martin here with the cube we are covering Dell technologies world, the digital event experience. I have two guests here with me today that are new to the program. So I would like to welcome David Lowe, the Director of product management for Dell Technologies. David. Welcome to the >>program. Hi, how are you >>doing well? And Catherine Ward is here as well, customer experience strategist at Dell Technologies Catherine, it's great to have you join us. Thanks. Happy to be here lisa. So we're talking about embracing as a service. That was a big announcement at Dell Technologies World as we were talking before we went live just a few months ago in the end of 2020 where the new Dell Technologies cloud console was announced. David start with our audience in terms of describing the apex council, what it is when it was launched and give us some color around that. >>Absolutely. Back in october we announced the Dell Technologies cloud console as part of unveiling the apex vision and this was really uh in response to what we heard from our customers about the need to be able to take advantage of cloud and as a service, operating models, being able to take advantage of our products and services around infrastructure in a way that really uh you know, met their needs in terms of the business results that they were trying to drive the kind of flexibility that they needed about how to get those offerings in place and be able to to run them having simplicity and how they managed those offers while also having just a greater degree of control, of course, that's afforded by having infrastructure running on premises versus uh in the public cloud. So with the apex console today, again, we're just listening to what customers say about being able to double down on that vision and provide even more functionality and capabilities on top of additional services that we're making available in the apex console today, >>Captain, let's get some point of view from the customers. David mentioned them a number of times. Obviously this is why you're doing this, but how does apex designed to help simplify operations? What are some of the things that you're hearing from the customer experience about it being able to simplify ops? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we've we've talked to many customers that's part of my team's job to ensure we're delivering a great experience. We've really heard >>that customers >>appreciate that they can now subscribe to services and and that the Dell offers. Um we've heard a lot from customers and sales folks that tells us that not every project they want to do is funded in a complex way. And so one of the great benefits of Dell clouds offers and the apex console is being able to get things in an op X way so they can pay on a subscription, uh sorry, so they can play on a subscription basis uh to meet, you know, their business needs is one major positive that we've been hearing from customers. >>One of the things that I read when apex launched a few months ago was this really as a way to demonstrate cloud as an operating model rather than a destination and lets you get both of your opinions on that and since launched what you thought, David, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, Well that's it's a great it's a great concept that customers really that really resonates with customers. So I mean, you know, cloud as an operating model has been something that many companies have moved towards over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, where there are fundamental characteristics of cloud that are defined as being on demand, being self service, providing easier access with elastic scale and then also just paying for what you use. And and and these are the things that customers really care about. And so as part of the apex vision and unveiling today in the in the apex console where offering services, for example, like apex storage services, where customers will have the ability to subscribe to that service on demand through the Apex Council in a self service way, they'll be able to take advantage of it in a way they pay for what they use because on top of a a committed storage capacity, it's an on demand usage model, uh and they have the ability to come in at any time and increase as their business demands what storage is available to them. So we really are capitalizing on those cloud characteristics that customers want to be able to take advantage of but doing so, you know, on top of uh, infrastructure products from Dell that customers have trusted for decades. >>Right. So one of the things that we've talked about so many times in the last year is the acceleration that we've seen in every industry with perspective digital transformation and seeing so many businesses in every industry pivot multiple times here. And that speed up, you know, like, you know, here we are using SAS applications to communicate and to reach customers. I'd love to know Katherine, what some of the things are that you've learned since the initial launch. Kind of given the interesting times that we're in, what are some of the things that you've learned from customer feedback that are going to be utilized to help uh, uh, kind of modify the product going forward? >>Yeah, absolutely. So one thing is customers echoing David, really value self serve. They want to be able to do things on their time when they want. And one of the great things that customers can do through the console is build solutions, choose services that best meet their needs, they don't have to involve sales, they obviously can if they want to, but they don't have to. And that is a big selling point key, you know, meets a key need of that. We've heard from customers, I'd say. The second thing that we've heard from folks is that they really like how we have set up our role based access >>and identity >>management capabilities. Uh and I'll give you an example, So there are company very large companies, let's say who may have one finance department and they are the only people who are empowered to sign off on orders, let's say. So maybe a more purchaser type role, you may have an entire separate set of folks who are more technical folks who understand how to configure an offer, how to put it all together and those, but those folks can't buy. Um And so we have built in some workflows um to help support those processes that we've heard from customers that they have, and by doing that they can ensure appropriate separation of duties according to their internal policies as well as help them get a handle on unexpected spend from I. T. Services. >>Catherine is really touching on an incredibly important point there that customers over the last 10 years as they've used cloud services from other providers. We know that the democratization of cloud, that said that anybody can come in off the street with a credit card and start using services. That's a great way for people to get up and running. But that also leads to the problem of shadow I. T. It also leads to uh you know, an unbounded expenses and and you know difficulty in managing costs and unpredictable expenditure. So we've seen over time how even other cloud providers have had to come back laser and based on customer feedback, start adding governance, start adding policies, start adding, you know budget management and spend controls, uh Start ensuring that the kind of workflow that Catherine mentioned is in place around uh you know, ordering And we decided to put that in just from day 1. So when customers come to the apex console, they're going to be coming in the context of a company or an organization where there will be users that have specific roles. And as Catherine mentioned, they'll have specific permissions that might align with their particular job function and there will be governance that an administrator can implement to ensure that only certain people can perform certain tasks, which, you know, we already know from customer feedback is incredibly important to give customers that kind of control that they might not get or that they might have been asking for from other cloud providers in order to ensure that this is truly like an enterprise grade level of servants. >>Yeah. And just to play off that David, you know, I've talked also while I also, I talked to customers a lot also make sure I interact quite a bit with our sales team so to get their views as well. And there's a university customer that we have who has this exact problem of shadow it. And they were, their goal was to unify and get all their main campuses on same system, following same policies, same procedures, same infrastructure. Um And one of the key challenges that they have is people, developers get excited, they want to build stuff and they will go to the public cloud, use a credit card for example and just get up and running. And now this company realizes that a those folks kind of going off and doing some of that on their own are actually spending more than their central it spends. So again I think it's a real world problem that we think we're we're well positioned to solve. >>Yeah, those guardrails seem really outstanding for customers to be able to get that. You both mentioned shadow I. T. And that's one of the things that we know so easy to spin up services. But yet you then disconnect I thi from different business units which is always a challenge for organizations. So having the governance and the role based access controls really provides your customers with more of a chance to, as you said I think a minute ago David consume and only pay for what they're consuming but also have that line of sight that visibility across who's using these services. What are we paying? Are we are we getting what we need and are we ensuring that we're getting more control over our environment? I can't even imagine how much more important that is these days with so many people still scattered and remote. >>Yeah and and and and and and it's it's just really part of the whole customer lifecycle as they work with our services. So after customer is able to subscribe to something like apex data storage services and after it has been deployed at their data center they'll be able to come in to the apex council, they'll be able to see information about that subscription and about the infrastructure that they're running including having health monitoring and alerts and be able to see the capacity usage of that service. Uh And with that telemetry and insight then be able to take action. Uh Perhaps as you say to you know either uh you know put in place additional controls within their teams on on spending or consumption or increase the available storage that they have to ensure that it meets uh their business needs. And and as we build out this end and life cycle within the apex console customers will see more and more features coming to help with you know tagging of expenditure for show back purpose is to simplify the way in which uh you know both I. T. Teams and financial uh personnel within a company are able to ensure that they're being responsible and and have that governance over over what's being consumed and spent. >>Yeah. Absolutely critical. Catherine talked to us about for existing Dell customers, how can they access the apex console? What's the what's the process there that you advise? >>Yeah. Great great question. So the good news is if you already have a Dell account, whether you're an existing premier customer or perhaps you visit us through Dell dot com your credentials will work. All you need to do is talk to your sales team, your sales representative and ask them to be enabled and the process typically goes that they will sales will help enable an administrator and from there the administrator at your company can start giving access and assigning those roles as as as you as you need. >>Just a little bit of a pivot on that. And what are we talking about in terms of time frame when we think of cloud services being able to spend them up knowing that there's still so much remote work going on. How quickly can Adele customer follow that process that you just mentioned and activate these services? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So our goal is to be able to, once, you know, we have your interest, we understand what you want to get you equipment and get you up and running within 14 days is our is our goal and our target. Um It's a lot depends on on what the customer needs and if they can get, you know, if they can accept delivery that quickly and all that. But but that is our that's our goal is get you up and running in 14 days. >>Excellent. That time to values David. Go ahead. >>Oh yeah, the the getting access to the council can be can be can be, you know, certainly a lot faster. But as Catherine said, you know, once you get into the console and you want to be able to consume the services, especially for those infrastructure services that are going to show up and be deployed at your data center. Uh You know, we we include features like integrated site survey that customers are going to see shortly when they're able to go through the subscription process and enter information about their physical data center. Maybe uh you know, physical access characteristics or power or networking configurations that they have So that our deployment services team knows what to expect when they show up. We can get everything wrapped and stacked and ready to go put it on the truck and have it uh you know, to the customer as quickly as possible as Catherine said, with the time to value promise of 14 days. >>Excellent. And that fast access last question David, before we wrap up, talk to us about what's next? This was only announced in the last 67 months so lots of Development and progress, lots of customer feedback helping to tune the services. What can customers expect you know going out the rest of 20 calendar year 2021 >>more. Just I mean you know we'll have access for more customers in more countries to be able to consume more services and more capabilities within the console to provide that richer and to end experience today we already have access Uh for the console within 17 countries around the world with customers from the US and. UK. and France and Germany already able to subscribe to certain services. We have access for apex data storage services and other countries uh Coming very soon. Uh So we'll be adding more countries or languages will be adding more services uh in the coming months. And as we alluded to earlier more capabilities to ensure that the end and experience that customers have crosses all of the different boundaries within their organizations and supports all of the different roles who need to be able to come in and do everything from discover services. Subscribe to them, provision, resources, uh manage, operate support and and and build solutions on on top of what they have. So it really is all about ensuring that it's a single consistent and to end life cycle within the apex console. >>Well, that word more was perfect when I said, what's coming next book? And folks expect more? It's like that. But wait, there's >>more. So I'm sure >>folks will will get a lot more information as the event unfolds in the weeks after David and Catherine. Thank you for joining me talking to me about all of the progress that's happened in such a short amount of time with apex concept. We look forward to seeing what's next. >>Thanks lisa. >>Thanks for having us. >>My pleasure for David Lo and Catherine Ward. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world, The virtual event experience. Yeah, yeah.

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies world 2021. The digital experience. I'm lisa martin. I've got two guests here with me today. Adam Glick is here. Senior Director of portfolio marketing for Apex at Dell Technologies. Adam welcome to the cube >>lisa. It's great to be here with you >>likewise. And Andrew Glinka is here VP of Competitive intelligence at Dell Technologies as well. Andrew welcome to you as well. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>So the last Dell Technologies world was only about six months or so ago and sadly I was sitting in the same room doing that. We're not in Vegas at the convention center but hopefully one day we will be soon. But a lot of news there um Adam was about Apex and this big transformation about what Dell wants to do, give us a little bit of a history and what's transpired in the last six months. >>Well, a lot of things have happened in the past six months with what we were calling Project Apex before probably the first most obvious one is we've removed project from the name as we've made the offering generally available. We've also added a lot to it. There's a lot of new pieces of technology that are part of Project Apex now, we've talked about bringing in the cloud, bringing the custom solutions, hear a lot about that at Dell Technologies where all this time and really practicing that all up together in a single experience for customers, giving them something that's super simple agile and gives them all the control that they want to use their infrastructure where they want it all of that as a service. >>Big changes Andrew. Let's go over to you now. Talk to me about some of the players in the market. >>Well, he has a service market is growing incredibly fast and will continue to grow over the next number of years. And what we're seeing is a lot of players trying to enter that market because it is growing so fast. So you have some of the traditional infrastructure players that are entering like HP has their offer out in the market and pure storage and that happened many others. And you also have the public cloud providers like amazon web services, google Microsoft azure that are starting to develop um on prem tech capabilities to kind of validate this hybrid cloud as a service, all things everywhere model. So uh rapidly growing market a lot changing in a lot of players entering this space very quickly. >>So a lot of acceleration we've seen with respect to digital transformation Andrew in the last year. So talk to me about how Apex compares to those infrastructure players, you mentioned peer storage, Netapp HP. Talk to me about the comparison there. >>Yeah, so one of the things is we continue to develop, Apex is we're going to offer the broadest portfolio of as a service solutions for customers, all with different consumption models. So we'll be offering outcome based meter based as well as custom solutions, which is a little bit different than what others can provide all delivered using market leading technology and all Dell supported. So we're not using third party to deliver any of the asset service, it's all Dell supported, um some other very tactical things like single rate, so we don't charge for over usage or charge extra, which is different than some um and also it's all self service. So through the console you can place an order for a new system or upgraded system and you're avoiding the lengthy sale cycles and all the back and forth. So just a couple of questions you can get the outcome that you're looking for. >>Adam. Talk to me about how apex compares to the public cloud providers, customers obviously have that choice as well. AWS google cloud platform. What's the comparison contrast there? >>So when we think about what's going on with public cloud providers, we really look at them as partners and people that we work with. There's a Venn diagram if you think about it and the reality is that although there is some overlap between, there's also a lot of differentiated value that we look at, that we bring their and it's how do we work together on those pieces? So the most obvious of those is when you're thinking about things like a hybrid cloud and how people work together to make sure that they've got a cloud that meets their needs, both on prem in their Coehlo locations out of the edge as well as whatever they're doing with public >>cloud. >>And so we're looking at how do we bring all those pieces together? And there are certain things that work better in certain places, certain ones that work better than others. We do a lot of things around the simplicity of billing to make that easy for customers, giving them really high performance ways to to work well that really meet the needs of a lot of workloads that might need regulatory needs or might have specific performance mapping, high performance computing, things like that. But it works together. And that's really the point is that what customers tell us is that they have needs for on premises, They have needs for things in their private cloud and follows. They also have needs in the public cloud. And how do they bring that together? And so we're working to say, how do we bridge that gap to make the best possible outcome for customers? We work on partnerships with the partnership that we announced with Equinix to bring together co location facilities around the world and bring apex services customers easily when they want to say reduce the latency between what they're running and what they control within their own hardware stacks and what might be running in the public cloud. It's kind of a merger of both that really helps customers get the best of all that they need because at the end of the day that's the goal is helping our customers get the best I. T. Outcomes for their businesses as possible. >>Right? And you mentioned Hybrid cloud and we talk about that so often customers are in that hybrid world for many reasons. So basically what you're saying is there is partnerships that Dell Technologies has with Apex and the other hyper scholars so that when customers come in, if they're most likely already using some of those other platforms, they actually could come in and work with Apex too, develop a solution that works very synergistically. >>Yeah, we're helping them pull together what they need. And if you take a look, 72 of organizations say that they're taking a hybrid cloud approach, they want to be able to bring the best of both worlds to what they're doing and really choose what's right for them. Where do they need to be able to really control what's happening with their data? Where do they want to be able to maintain and control the costs that they have and also be able to access the other services that might be out there that they would need. So how do they bring those together? And those ways that we work together for the benefit of customers? And we bridge those two pieces is really what we're aiming to do here. >>Excellent. So Andrew, let's go back over you. I want to talk about workloads here because you know when we look at some of the numbers, the 8020 rule with the cloud, 80 of those workloads still on prem customers needing to determine which workloads should go to the cloud. How does apex work with customers to facilitate making those decisions? Um about the workloads that are best suited for apex versus club? >>Well, I think that's the beauties, it's very flexible. And so some of those traditional workloads that are still on prem can be run as a service without a whole lot of change. So you don't have to re platform, you don't have to reengineer them and you can move them into an as a service model, continue to run them easily. But then there's a whole lot of new development like high performance computing and Ai And machine learning, particularly at an edge where Gartner says by 2025 75 of all data will be processed at the edge. So as these new capabilities are being built out, uh customers have been asking us to start to run that infrastructure in these new workloads and and at as a service model and so high performance computing ai. Ml these edge workloads are fantastic use cases just get started with as a service and can certainly extend back into some of the more traditional workloads that they've been running >>adam. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's transpired in the last six months from the customers lens as we talked a little bit about, we talked a lot in the last year about the acceleration of digital transformation and so many businesses having to pivot multiple times in the last year. A lot of acceleration of those getting to cloud for, for to survive. Talk to me about the customer experience, what you see in the last six months. >>So what we've heard a lot from our customers is that they're really looking for the benefits of consumption as a service that especially as you see the financial impacts that happened over the past year, People looking at ways to preserve capital and what are the ways that they can go and maintain what they want to do or perhaps even grow and accelerate. Take advantage of those new opportunities in ways that don't require large capital purchases and the ability to go in and purchase as a service is something we've heard from multiple customers is something that is really attractive to them as they look at. Hey, there's no opportunities they've opened up and how do they be able to expand on those as well as how do they be able to preserve the capital? They have, be able to continue with the projects that they're looking at but be able to take a more agile approach for those things. And so the as a service offerings that we've been talking to our customers about have been really something they've been excited about and they come to us kind of, hey, what do you have? What's the roadmap? How can we have more of those kinds of things? And that's why we're so excited Dell Technologies world to be talking about how we're bringing even more apex services as a service available to our customers. >>And I'm just curious in the last year since we've seen so many industries, every industry really rocked by the very dynamic market, but some of the things like healthcare and government, I'm just curious if you've seen any industries in particular really take a leading edge here and working with you in apex. >>one of the most >>interesting things that I've seen from the customers that I've been talking to is that it really is broad ranging that I've talked to customers who are governmental customers who are interested in expanding what they're doing with it but very concerned about things like data, locality and data sovereignty. That's very interesting to them. I've talked to manufacturing organizations, they're looking at how do they expand their operations in asian manufacturing for instance. And they're going from, how do they operate within the United States to how do they expand their operations? Be able to do that in a more quick fashion? What they're doing? Talk to healthcare organizations, they're looking at, how do they be able to bring digital healthcare and as you to think about what's happening more virtually that people are doing, What does that mean in terms of health care? Both from people who are actually doing virtual visits with their doctors as well as even things like digital surgery. So there's so many things that are happening really. I could talk to you about dozens of industries. But the takeaway that I've had is that there's no real one industry, it's really something that has impacted just operations globally and different folks. Look at different things in different ways. I talked to a company that does train that actually train company. They do logistics and they're looking at edge scenarios and how do they do train inspections faster to be able to provide better turnaround times for their trains because there's a limited amount of track and so if they miss a maintenance window like that's time that they not only have to wait for the next window, they have to wait for all the other trains to pass too. So it's really breathtaking, just the scope of all that's changing in it and all the opportunities that are coming up as people think about what consuming it services as a service can mean for them. >>Yeah, amazing opportunities. And you talked about, you know, the virtual and there's so much of it that's going to persist in in a good way, silver linings, right? Um and you want to go back over to you talk to me when we, when we talked about apex at Dell technologies world 2026 months ago, this was kind of revolutionary and really looking at it as a really big change to Dell's future strategy. Talk to me about that. >>Well, it's a change for the entire company, so having to rethink how we deliver all these services and outcomes to customers. So it's it's not just about the product. The product is now the service and the service is the product, so it's very different in how we approach it. Thinking more about how we can help our customers achieve these outcomes um and help deliver these services that get them there, which is a little different than just developing the products themselves. And so that's been a big thing that we've been taking on and making sure that we deliver these outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah. And then adam last question for you talk to me about kind of same perspective of looking at this as as how Dell intends to compete in the future and what customers can expect. Also how can they engage? Is this something that is available with Channel Partners? Dell Direct? >>So this is the beginning of a huge journey and transformation as Andrew spoke about, like this is a transformation of not only what we're providing, but a transformation across all of Dell. We're looking at how do we expand the X portfolio to bring a portfolio of options to our customers? You know, we're starting with with storage and cloud and some are custom solutions, but we really have a vision of how do we bring all of Dell's business products and into services for our customers? You know, it's a huge transformation, it's something I'm incredibly excited about because it really aligns what we do with what our customers do. We've never had an opportunity to be so closely connected with our customers and create great outcomes for them. So the transformation, like we're just at the beginning of this and it's an incredible path that we're on that's providing amazing value for the people that we've already started working with. For people that want to find out more about it. You can certainly come to our website, Dell technologies dot com slash apex. People who have a relationship with Dell already contact their sales representative will be more than happy to talk to them about what their current needs are and what effects can do to help them continue their digital transformation and create better outcomes for their organization. >>Excellent, Adam Andrew, Thank you for joining me today to talk about what's going on. Project apex to apex the tremendous amount of opportunities that it's helping customers in any industry uncover. We look forward to seeing down the road some of those great customer outcomes that come from this. I thank you both for joining me today. >>Thank you very much. Thank you >>for Adam Glick and Andrew Glinka. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021 The Digital Experience.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to DTW 2021, theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante and for years we've been looking forward to the day that the on-premises experience was substantially similar to that offered in the public cloud. And one of the biggest gaps has been subscription based experiences, pricing and simplicity and transparency with agility and scalability, not buying and installing a box but rather consuming an outcome based service to support my IT infrastructure needs. And with me to talk about how Dell is delivering on this vision is Akanksha Mehrotra, Vice-President Marketing for APEX at Dell Technologies. Welcome Akanksha, great to see you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. So we're going to dig into APEX. We know that Dell has been delivering cloud-based solutions for a long time now, but it seems like there's a convergence happening in all these areas. And it's generating a lot of talk in the industry. What are your customers asking you to deliver and how is Dell responding? >> Yeah, there's a few trends that we're seeing and they've been in place for a while, but they have accelerated certainly over the past year. The first one is organizations all over the world want to become more digital in order to modernize their operation and foster innovation on behalf of their customers. And they've been thriving for years, digital transformation can do so. That in and of itself isn't necessarily new, but the relative complexity of driving digital transformation. For example, when they're bringing on a predominantly or all of the remote workforce as well as the relative piece of change, for example, if they see remarkable spike in the consumption of digital content validated over the past year. And because of that the need for agility has gone up. The other trend that we see is that there's a clear preference for a hybrid cloud approach. Customers tell us that they need on-prem cloud resources to help mitigate risk for applications that need dedicated fast performance as well as, you know, in order to contain costs. But then they also tell us that public cloud is here to stay for the increased agility that it provides a simplified operations as well as the faster access to innovation. And so what's really clear is that both private cloud and public cloud has their strengths and picking one you're inevitably trading off the benefits of the other. And so an organizations want the flexibility to be able to choose the right path that best meet their business objectives. And IT is a service delivered at the location of your choice is one way to do that. As you know, we talk a lot to analysts like yourself and they tend to agree with us. IDC predicts that by 2024 or perhaps a better data center infrastructure is going to be consumed as a service. At Dell Technologies, we're beginning to see the shift happen already. As you said, we've been providing flexible consumption and as a service solutions for well over a decade. However, what's different now is that we're radically simplifying that entire technology experience to deliver this at scale to our entire install base and that's what APEX is all about. >> Great, thank you. So I know Dell is very proud of the tie. I think I got this ratio right, do to say ratio, right? The numerator's bigger than the denominator. And you've got a good track record in this regard. You're going to announce project APEX in October and you've provided a preview of what was coming then and today you're fully unveiling APEX, no more project, just APEX. What's APEX all about and what customer benefits specifically does APEX deliver? >> Yeah, so you're right. We announced that this a vision back in October and now we're kind of taking away the project and it's generally available. So you can kind of refer to it as APEX going forward. APEX represents our portfolio of as-a-service offerings. These helps simplify digital transformation for our customers by increasing their IT's agility and their control. We believe it's a solution that helps bridge this divide between public and private cloud by delivering as a service wherever it's needed to help organizations meet the needs of their digital transformation agenda. Talking to our customers in terms of customer benefits, we've centered around three areas and they are simplicity, agility, and control as the key benefits that APEX is going to provide to our customers. So let me unpack these one by one and kind of demonstrate how we're going to deliver on these promises. Let's start with simplicity. APEX represents a fundamental shift in the way that we deliver our technology portfolio. And obviously we do this to simplify IT for our customers. Our goal is to remove complexity from every stage of the customer journey. So for example, with APEX and APEX offers that I'll just get into in a bit, we take away that complexity, the pain and frankly the undifferentiated work of managing infrastructure so that organizations can focus on what they do best, right? Adding value to their organizations. Another way in which we simplify is streamline the procurement process. So we allow customers to just simplify a simple set of outcomes that they're looking for and subscribe to a service using an easy web based console and then we'll take it from there. We will pick the technology and its services that best meets the needs, you know, best delivers on those set of outcomes and then we'll deliver it for them. So as a result, organizations can kind of take advantage of the technology that best meets their needs but without all the complexity of life cycle management whether it's at the beginning or at the end, you know, the decommissioning part of the life cycle. Next, let's talk about agility. This is an area that's been top of mind for our customers as I said, certainly over the past year and frankly, it's been one of the main driving factors over the other service revolution. Again, with APEX we aim to deliver agility to every stage of the customer journey. So for example, with APEX, our goal is to get customers started on projects faster than they ever have before within their data center. We target a 14 day time to value from order to activation or from subscription to activation within the location of their choice. Another driver for agility is having access to technology when you need it without costly over provisioning. So with APEX, you can dynamically scale your resources up and down based on changing business requirements. And then the third barrier of agility and this is a serious one, it's just forecasting costs and containing them. And with APEX, our promise is that you're paying for technology only as it's used using a clear, consistent and a transparent rate. So you're never guessing what you're going to pay. There's no overage charges and you're not paying to access your own data. And then finally from a control standpoint, often business and IT leaders are forced to make difficult trade offs between the simplicity and the flexibility they want and the control, the performance and the data locality that perhaps they need. APEX will help bridge this divide and so we're not going to make them make this kind of false trade off between them. It'll enable organizations to take control of their operations from where resources are located to how they are run to who can access them. So for example, by dictating where they want to run their resources in a cool or at the Edge or within their data center, you know, IT teams can take charge of their compliance obligations and simplify them by using role-based permissions stick to limit access, IT organizations can choose who can access certain functionality for configuring APEX services and thereby kind of reduce risk and simplify those security obligations. So, those are some examples of, you know, how we deliver simplicity, agility and control to our customers with APEX. >> You know, I'll give you a little aside here if I may, you know, you said the trade-offs and I've been working on this scenario of how we're going to come back from the pandemic. And you're seeing this hybrid approach where we're, organizations are having to fund their digital transformation. They're having to support a hybrid workforce and their headquarters investments, their traditional data center investments have been neglected. And the other thing is there's very clearly a skills gap, a shortage of talent. So to the extent that you have something like APEX that where I don't have to be provisioning lungs and spending all time, both waiting and provisioning and tuning, that allows me to free up talent and really deliver on some of those problematic areas that are forcing me today to do a trade-off. So I think that really resonates with me Akanksha, so. >> You're exactly right and we're what kind of refactoring applications, learning new skillset, hiring new people. If the part that resonates with you is that agility and simplicity, you know, why not have it where it makes sense in a skill set? >> So APEX is new way of thinking. I mean, certainly for Dell in terms of how you deliver for way customers consume, can you be specific on some of the offerings that we can expect from DTW this year? >> Yes, we've got a variety of announcements, let me talk about those. Let's start with the APEX console. This is a unified experience for the entire APEX journey. It provides self-service access to our catalog of APEX services. As I mentioned customers simply select the outcomes that they're looking for and it's ascribed to the technology services that best meets their needs and then we'll take it from there. From a day two operation standpoint the console will also give customers insight and oversight into other aspects of the APEX experience. For example, they can limit access to the functionality by role. They can modify, view their subscriptions and then modify it. They can engage and kind of provisioning type tasks. They can see costs transparent, review billing and payment information each month and use it for things like show back or charge back to, you know, various business units within their organization. Over time, we will also be integrating the console with common procurement and provisioning systems so that they can further streamline approval workflows as well as published API for further integration from developers at the customer site. So, Net-Net console will be the single place for us to procure, operate and monitor APEX services and we think it's going to become an important way for us to interact with our customers as well as our partners to interact with Dell Technologies going forward. >> Yes, please, no carry on, thanks. >> The next announcement is APEX data storage services. This one is a first in a series of outcome-based turnkey services in the APEX portfolio. At the end this essentially delivers storage resources at the customers at the location that they would prefer. When subscribing to this which is four parameters that the customers need to think about, what type of data services they're looking for, file block and soon it'll be object. What performance tier, the application that the customer is going to run on these resources needs, they can be in three levels, what base capacity they want where they can start at 50 terabytes and then the time length that they're looking for, the subscription length. We also announced a partnership with Equinix. So if a customer wants they can deploy these resources at Equinix's data centers all around the world and still get a unified bill from us and that's it. Once they make those four selections, they subscribe to the service, we take it from there, there's no selecting what product do you want, what configuration on that product, etc, etc. You know, we take care of all of that, include the right services and then kind of deliver it to them. So it's really an outcome-based way of procuring technology as easily as you would provision resources in a public cloud. >> Awesome, so again console, data storage, cloud services, which are key... >> Now, they check the cloud services. >> And then the partner piece with Equinix for latency and proximity, speed of light type stuff, okay, cool. >> Exactly. Cloud services very quickly are integrated solutions to help simplify that adoption and they support both cloud native as well as traditional workloads. Customers can subscribe either to a private cloud offer or a hybrid cloud offer depending on the level of control that they're looking for and the operational consistency that they need. And again, similar to storage services they pick from kind of four simple steps and we'll deliver it to them within 14 days. And then finally, we've got something called custom solutions. These are for customers who are looking for a more flexible as a service environment, they're available right now in over 30 countries, also available to our partner network. Comes in two flavors, APEX Flex On Demand, which takes anything within our broad infrastructure portfolio, servers, storage, data protection, you name it and we can turn that into a paper use environment. You can also select what services you'd like to include. So if a customer wants it managed, we can manage it for them. If they don't want to managed again, you know, include it without those services. And essentially they can configure their own as a service experience. And the data center utility takes it to the next level and offers even more customization in terms of customer elementary options, etc, etc. So that's kind of a quick summary of the announcements in the APEX portfolio. >> Okay, I think I got it. Five buckets, the console, which gives you that full life cycle, that self-service, the storage piece, the cloud services, the Equinix partnership and the partners, that's a whole nother conversation and then the custom piece if you really want to customize it for your... >> And storage services. >> All right, good, okay, you guys have been busy. So you announced project APEX last fall and so I presume you've been out talking to customers about this, prototyping it, testing it out. Maybe you could share some examples of customers who've tried it out and what the feedback has been and the use cases. >> Yeah, let me give you a couple of examples. We'll start with APEX data storage services. As I said, this one's going generally available now. At Dell we believe in drinking our own champagne. So our own IT team has been engaged in a private data of this service for the past several months and their feedback has helped shape the offer. The feedback that they've given us is that they really liked that, like simple life cycle management. You know, they tell us that it speeds up their folks to do a lot of other things. And that are kind of higher level order tasks if you will versus managing the infrastructure. They're seeing greater efficiencies in the past in performance management, they like not having to worry about building a capacity pipeline. And they like being able to kind of build on a charge back process that will allow them to build internal views based on what's being used. And so they think it's going to be a game changer for them. And, you know, that's the feedback that they and of course they've given us lots of feedback that we've also put into building the product itself, in short they really liked the flexibility of it. Let me give you a, maybe a customer example and then a partner example as well. APEX cloud services. This is one where more and more customers are realizing that for compliance, regulatory or performance reasons, maybe public cloud doesn't really work for them. And so they've been looking for ways to get that experience within their data center. APEX hybrid cloud enables this, using this as a foundation customers are quickly able to extend workloads like VDI into these different environments. A global technology consulting firm wanted to focus on their business of providing consulting service versus you know, managing our infrastructure. And so what they also really liked was the people use model and the ability to scale up without having to engage and kind of renegotiating terms. They also appreciated and like the cost transparency that we provided and their feedback to us that it was sort of unmatched with other solutions that they'd seen and they like sort of cost-containment benefits because it give them much more control over their budget. And then from a partner standpoint, APEX custom solutions as I said is available in over 30 countries today, it's available through our vast partner network. We've got a series of lucrative partner options for them. A recent win that we saw in the space was with a healthcare provider. This particular healthcare provider was constantly challenging their IT team to improve service delivery. They wanted to onboard customers faster, drive services deployment while ensuring the compliance of their healthcare data as you I'm sure know their, you know, some strict requirements in this space. With Flex On Demand they were able to dramatically cut that onboarding time from months to days, they were able to be just as agile while simplifying their compliance with industry regulations for data privacy and sovereignty. And so their feedback with that since they were able to be just as agilent just as cost effective as a cloud solution but without the concerns over data residency. So those are a few use cases and then real customer examples of customers that have tried out these services. >> Awesome, thanks for that. And the real transformation for the partners as well. I think actually if partners leaned in they can make a lot of money doing this. >> It means so much in profitability. >> Yeah, well, hey, that's what the channel cares about. I mean, it's different from the past of selling boxes, That was to do, okay, I know you got my margin there, but this I think actually huge opportunities to get deeper into the customer, add value in so many other different ways, the channel is undergoing tremendous transformation. I have to ask you, so I think the first time I saw it, so you have flexible consumption, you've had that for a number of years. I think the first time I saw it it was like late '90s or early 2000s when I saw these types of models emerge. So can you explain how APEX differs from your past as a service offerings? And I got another sort of second part of the question after that. >> Yeah, you're right. We've offered these solutions for a while and very successfully so I should add, certainly over the past year our business has seen tremendous momentum. And if you listen to our earnings you've probably heard that. What's different here is that we're caking, think of this as APEX is a two durdle of that. So we've been doing that. We're going to continue doing that, but what I talked about in APEX customer solutions is what we've been delivering for a while. And of course, we continue to improve it as we get customer feedback on it. What we're doing here on the turnkey side is that we're taking out a product based, not a service based but really an outcome based approach and what's different there and what I mean by that is we're truly looking to bypass complexity throughout the entire technology life cycle. We're truly kind of looking to figure out where can we remove a significant amount of time and effort from IT teams by delivering them an offer that's simple from the get-go. Each of these offers have been designed from the ground up to provide not just the innovative technology that our customers have known us forever, but to so with greater simplicity, to deliver greater agility while still retaining the control that we know our customers want. That is what is different. And by doing that, by making this consistently available in a very kind of simple way we believe we can scale that experience. That along with backed up with our services, our scale, our supply chain leadership that we've had for awhile built on our industry leading portfolio, the broadest in the industry then delivering that with unmatched time to value at whatever location the customer is looking for, by doing these three things we believe we're combining not just the agility that our customers want and as well as the control that they need and putting it all together in the simplest way possible and delivering it with our partners. So I think that's what's different with what we're doing now and frankly that's also our commitment going forward. So you can imagine today, I talked to you about our cloud solutions, our infrastructure solutions, but imagine going forward all of our solutions, server, storage, data protection, workload, end user devices telecom solutions, Edge Solutions, gaming devices all of them kind of delivered in this way. And you know, only the way that Dell Technologies and our partner community camp. >> When I hear you say outcome based a lot of people may say, well, what's that? I'll tell you what I think it is. The outcome I want is I want is I want my IT to be fast, I want it to be reliable, I want it to be at a fair price. I don't want to run out of storage for example and if I need more, I want it fast and I want it simple. I mean, that's the outcome that I want. Is that what you mean by outcome based? >> Absolutely, those are exactly the types of, you know, it's a combinations like you've said of business as well as technology outcomes that we're targeting. But those are exactly it availability, uptime, performance, you know, time to value. Those are exactly the types of outcomes that we're targeting with these offers and that's what our services are designed from the ground up to do. >> Okay, last question, second part of my other question is, I mean, it's essentially, you've got the cloud model. You're bringing that to on-prem, you've got other on-prem competitors, what's different with Dell from the competition? >> Yeah, so I would say from a competitive standpoint as you've said, we certainly have a series of competitors in the on-prem space, and then we've got another set of competitors in the cloud space. And what we are truly trying to do is, you know, bring the best of that experience to wherever our customers want to deploy these resources. From an on-prem standpoint I think our differentiation always has and will continue to be the breadth of our portfolio. You know, the technology that we provide and bringing this APEX experience in a very simple and consistent way across that entire breadth of products. The other differentiation that I believe we have is frankly our pricing model, right? You mentioned it a few times, I talked a little bit about it earlier as well. If I use storage as an example we are not going to have, you know, we're not going to charge you a penalty if you need to scale up and down. We understand and realize that businesses, you know, need to have that flexibility to be able to go up and down and having a simple clear consistent rate that they understand very clearly upfront, that they have visibility to that, you know, charges them in kind of a fair way is another kind of point of differentiation. So not having that kind of surge pricing, if you will. And then finally, the third differences are our services, our scale, our supply chain leadership and then just say-do ratio, right? When we say something we're going to do it and we're going to deliver it. From a cloud clearer standpoint it's really interesting. You know, I talk about this trade off that our customers often have to make. You have to give up control to get this simplicity and agility, and we're not going to make you do that, right? As an IT DN you manage, you know, you've got full control of that infrastructure while still getting the benefits of the agility and the simplicity that today you often have to go to public cloud for. Again, from a pricing standpoint, the other differentiation that we have is you're not going to be paying to access your old data. You pay a clear rate and it stays consistent, there's no egress ingress charges. There's no retraining of your sales force. There's no refactoring of the application to move it there. There's all these kind of unspoken costs that go into moving an application into public cloud that you're not going to see with us. And then finally, from a performance standpoint we do believe that the performance that we have at APEX Solution is significantly better. You know, just the fact that you've got dedicated infrastructure, like you're not running into issues with noisy neighbors, for example, as well as just the underlying quality of the technology that we deliver. I mean, the experience that we've had and not just in the space, but then delivering it to, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds and thousands of locations there's a very good at optimizing for a few locations for hundreds of thousands of customers, but we've been for years delivering this experience, across the world, across hundreds and thousands of data centers and the expertise that our services, our supply chain, and in fact their product teams have built out I think will serve as well. >> Great, a lot of depth there Akanshka, thanks so much. And congratulations for giving birth formerly to APEX and best of luck, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> Thanks Dave, thank you for having me. >> And it was really our pleasure. And thank you for watching everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage ongoing coverage of Dell Tech World 2021, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE I'm pleased to welcome Bill Wavro, the president and GM, Dell Financial Services at Dell Technologies. Bill. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. It's really great to be here with you. >> So we heard in Alison Doos keynote, Dell Technologies all in on as a service APEX. She's the executive lead. So really passionate about that. Talk about DFS in that context, you've always had a way to help people shift CapEx to OPEX but what's your specific role regarding APEX? >> Yeah, well, thanks Dave. Look, we're really excited about APEX in DFS we think APEX solutions gives customers access to the broadest range of infrastructured solutions in the industry if you combine that with the Dell Technologies portfolio of ISG technology and solutions, that's a great combination for customers but you asked about DFS and in DFS we've been delivering consumption solutions for over 15 years. So taking a look at the APEX portfolio you can broadly divided into two categories, turnkey, APEX turnkey solutions, like data storage services and then APEX custom solutions like data center utility and Flex on Demand and those custom solutions are with DFS plays. And as I said we've been offering those for over 15 years. We have a lot of experience with customers, what customers are looking for? We have tens of thousands of assets out there today with hundreds of customers that are being metered on a regular basis that we're billing monthly. So we're getting a lot of feedback from customers. And I think the APEX solutions announcements that you heard here at Dell Technologies World are a further expansion of that. They're built on the backbone of what DFS has been delivering for a long time. So we've taken I think the best of those solutions and we've listened to customers, what are they looking for? What do they want? And we've got even new and improved offerings in the current announcement that we made. So, I think when you talk to customers they want a couple of things. They want simplicity. They want to be able to understand how they're going to acquire it and how those payment solutions work and they want choice. And I think the APEX solutions gives customers both of those things. And the good news is they're available on all sorts of ISD hardware be it servers storage, hyper-converged, converged infrastructures. Customers can choose what technology they're looking for and they can create their own demand environment. And the last thing I'll do is a little plug for DFS. We've been in the payment solution business for over 25 years. So we not only offer consumption solutions but we offer traditional leases and financing. And so when you add all that together and you go talk to a customer about technology and how they want to pay for it we think we've got the broadest range in the industry. And we're really proud of that. >> Okay, cool. So you have the two areas that you simplified it. That which is great. You've got that standard off the shelf and then you've got the custom solutions. The standard stuff is like console data storage and then cloud services that breaks down even further. And then the custom, I got my notes, APEX Flex on Demand and APEX data center utility, how do APEX custom solutions differ from those turnkey offerings. >> Yeah. Well, the beautiful thing about APEX is it gives customers choice. So as you mentioned, you have turnkey. So if you think data storage services that's one of our new turnkey type offerings and those turnkey offerings are outcome-based. So think about it as an outcome. What is a customer looking for? Do they want file versus block storage? What sort of capacity do they need? What performance level are they looking for? But it's thinking of those outcomes. And Dell Technology is going to take care of the rest, right? A customer can go to the APEX console and they can review those choices. They can make their selections and then they can turn it over to Dell and we'll deploy that technology, we'll manage it, we'll upgrade it and we'll service it over the life of the term. So the customer can focus on outcomes versus on acquiring and managing technology. So that's the turnkey solution and that's probably the biggest and newest part of our announcement of APEX solutions. And then we have the custom, the custom, as you mentioned data center utility Flex on-demand. That's what DFS has been delivering for many years now. And that's for our customer who wants to select the product. So think of it as a product-based solution where a customer wants to select the technology. They may want to manage it themselves. They may want to have a partner manage it. They may want to include different services. So they're able to put that together in a custom way and satisfy whatever problem they're trying to solve. So we found that many customers are going to want to select that custom solution because they're in a part of their data transformation journey where they still want to control some of that technology and others will want to go the turnkey route. So again, it kind of goes back to the customer choice in allowing them to acquire it the way that they want to acquire it. >> Okay. So like an example might be, I'm just making this up. I'm a financial institution, I'm a big VMAX customer. I got some kind of special process that I use, that I wrote that gives me competitive differentiation because I can get a millisecond faster than my competitor speed or whatever. And I want that I'm not going to take it. That's not part of your turnkey solution but that's part of my value add, I want that but I want your help in sort of customizing that and making it as a service. Is that like reasonable example? >> That's a great example. And so let me talk about that a little bit. So let me give you a couple of examples of use cases and what the products provide. So think about, let's talk about data center utility first because when you think of the data center utility think data center, right? These are the large deployments. They're big customers. They they're most likely a global customer and they want to get out of the data center business, right? They want to get out of the day-to-day management of that and be able to focus on, hey, how do we as I as a CIO deliver value to my business? I want to make a difference in that business strategy. CIO is more and more being asked to help the business and enable that business strategy. And so many of them want to get out of the data center management business and this is where a data center utility product can come in. It allows us to go in as Dell and help that customer manage that data center. So it has the most flexibility in terms of, custom building, custom reporting, very low if any minimum commitments. And one of the best features is we have a delivery manager who's assigned to every account who can help that customer procure assets, manage assets, deal with capacity management. So we really can take over the management of that data center and allow the customers IT group to focus on delivering value to the business. So we think that's a really important aspect of it. And it allows us to manage even existing assets that are sitting out at the customer as well as new purchases. And then back to the kind of example that you gave, where a customer really wants that high performance they have specific hardware in mind. They can also use a Flex On Demand type product so that the customer is able to pick the hardware whether it be servers, storage, converged infrastructure, hyper-converged and they can select the technology that they want to use. They can sign up for a very flexible period of time. So they can go from one year to five years. They may only need this hardware for a limited period of time. Maybe they're working on a project where they're going to need additional storage capacity for the next couple of years, so they can sign up for a two year contract if they want, they can sign up for the commitment level that they want to use. So, one of the great things that customers are looking for is they want that cloudlike operating model. They want to pay for that technology as they utilize it. And they don't want to be locked in to having to purchase a large amount of data if potentially they're not going to use it. So Flex On Demand gives them that flexibility. They could sign up for 50% of a storage arrays capacity and only pay for usage above and beyond that 50%. So it offers customers a lot of choice and a lot of ability to get the technology they want and be a very flexible utilization method as they go forward. >> So, I don't think a lot of people realize that you said very low or no minimum commitments. And so maybe you could explain that a little bit and who owns the asset? >> When we talk about Flex on Demand it is still owned by Dell. So Dell owns that asset and the customer can commit. And we think we have the broadest range of commitment levels in the industry. So if you think about a Flex on Demand type offering and let's say you want to purchase a storage array you can sign up for a 50% minimum commitment. So again, you've got flexibility on the term. So you can go one to five years you can sign up for 50% commitment. So you're going to get a bill for 50% of that storage usage every month but you're not going to get a bill for anything more unless you utilize it. Now, let's say one month you go to 60%, right? So you're going to pay that extra 10% only when you use it. If you go back down to 50% the following month, you don't pay. And let me point something out on this because I think this is where we differ from a lot of our competition. The rate you pay is the same. So it's the same for the minimum commitment level of 50% as it is for the incremental 10% or 20% that you use above that. Some of our competitors have surge pricing. So basically once you go above your commitment you're paying a premium. We don't do that. We've heard from customers. They don't like that. They want it simple. They want to pay one rate per gigabyte throughout the life of that contract. And so we do that. Another unique feature which we kind of just implemented recently is that the max that you can pay is 85% on that storage usage. So if you sign up for a 50% minimum commitment and let's say you use 90% of it so you've got a pretty significant increase off your minimum. We will only charge you up to 85%. And that's a new feature that we added to all our Flex on Demand products recently for future customers as well as previous customer. So you've actually gone back to all our current customers and said, this applies to you even though that wasn't part of the original offering we're going to cap you at that 85% level. And the reason we did that is because a lot of customers love, pay for things as they use them. They're a little uncomfortable on uncertainty of maybe paying too much, right? So we put this in to help protect customers that they wouldn't have to worry about paying more than they expected to. So we think that's a pretty cool feature of what we offer. >> Yeah. So to summarize the features, I got the portfolio, I got the whole portfolio I have access to, I get the flexibility that you just described in great detail and then pricing transparency or certainty. And then the other piece of that is the value the 85% cap. So that's pretty cool. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So you've been doing this for a while. You have data and experience with real customers, with different types of customs solutions. Maybe you could share some of the business impacts and benefits that customers have seen. >> Yeah. Well, let me give you example. So data center utility like we had a large multinational manufacturer who again as I mentioned earlier they wanted to get out of the data center environment. They don't want to manage that anymore. They had a complex data center. It was managed with about 50% of their own internal IT department and 50% with a third-party service provider. They had multiple hardware vendors, multiple third parties providing services. It was very very complex. So they came to Dell Technologies. We took that data center put it into a data center and utility contract. And we took over management of the data center. So it freed up that 50% of their own IT staff to work on other things. It provided value to the business. And then we were able to take that consolidate vendors make it a lot simpler and improve the efficiency of the data center. And that's an important thing. So it's not just about how you pay for it, that you pay for it in a variable manner. It's how efficient can you make that data center? And no one knows Dell Technologies assets and hardware better than us, right? So we were able to create tremendous value by utilizing those assets more efficiently. So they were getting more productivity out of the underlying IT assets. We simplified it for them. And we were able to take their team out of that day-to-day management which is what they were looking for. So there's a great example of a win-win on both sides. And what we've found with these customers is once they go to this kind of model, they stay with it. They like it. And we actually ended up expanding our relationship with these customers. So it's good for us in a lot of ways. And one of the things we didn't talk about earlier is another benefit that maybe isn't so obvious, particularly when you look at a Flex on Demand type product. So let's think about Flex on Demand. One of the things customers are struggling with is how to predict how much data storage they're going to need in the future. There's this huge data explosion going on in the world. We've talked about that many times. And CIO's often have trouble trying to predict how much capacity they're going to need in the future, right? They don't know exactly where it's going to go. And so one of the struggles that they have is when they have a need for that data it takes time to get it available. So if you think about a CIO that all of a sudden has additional capacity they need to add to their infrastructure, it could take 90 days to get that out on the floor. They've got to go through their internal requisition process. They've got to select a vendor, they've got to acquire the hardware to get it all set up. This all takes time. 90 days later is too late. One of the things that Flex on Demand offers is that you're able to get that capacity on the floor and at the push of the button you can have it up and running. So you're not paying for it until you use it but once you do need it you can have it available really quickly. And that's one of the benefits that maybe people don't expect when they use this Flex on Demand product but provides tremendous value for customers. So we've seen that kind of time and time again with Flex on Demand we had a large pharmaceutical customer who went to one of these, had a mandate that they wanted to go to a cloud operating model for all their IT purchases. So they wanted to free up cash flow that was kind of a directive from the top, free up cashflow, let's get out of the CapEx business and Flex on Demand was a perfect answer to that because it freed up the cashflow. They paid for the technology over time and they were able to have this capacity available whenever they needed it. So we've seen that as a tremendous benefit of the custom Flex on Demand model. >> I've done a lot of TCO studies Bill and I'll tell you that the upfront planning, the capacity planning, the asset management, the procurement, these are a big chunk of the labor cost associated with total costs. Okay. So we've got the turnkey with the three components. We've got the custom with the two components. There was a fifth bucket in my notes here which is the partners in the channel. And I'm really interested in how the channel is transforming, no longer can you just be a box seller in the channel. Those days are gone. Made a lot of money doing that, good deal. But, now you got to add value. The cloud has really changed everything there. And of course it's all about the margin and profitability. So talk about the channel. You've always had relationships and how APEX fits with channel partners. >> Yeah, well look Dave, we've had great experience working with our partners. I mean, partners are hearing the same thing from customers that were here, they want a cloud-based type operating model. They want to pay for their technology as they use it. So partners are looking to provide the same value to customers. And we found that working with partners expands our reach tremendously and they have a lot of expertise. So the APEX custom solutions are designed to work with partners. Partners can either sell those for themselves so they can sort of resell our solution to them or they can just refer the business to us. And they're going to get a 20% uplift on the committed contract value for those contracts. So this is really financially attractive to our channel partners. And it allows us to work with those partners to get to more customers, right? And as I mentioned earlier these custom solutions can include services from the partners so we can provide the hardware piece to them. They can add on their services on top of that and they can be the primary relationship with a customer or again they can refer it over to us. So we found that to be a really good value proposition for partners. And we think they're pretty happy about it. I mean, we have an example, RelateCare as a company that supports healthcare organizations around the world. So helping with patient communication appointment scheduling tele-health which is a really big area right now as you know with the pandemic still going across the world this is an area for medics growth. So RelateCare was working with one of our partners, Arc Fire and they needed more flexibility in the data center. And so these APEX Flex on Demand was a perfect solution for that. It allowed them to deliver a secure flexible data center and work with their partner to really improve the service level that was occurring in that relationship. And if you think about it, one of the things we didn't mention is particularly for a lot of healthcare companies and companies and customers who have a high sensitivity around data security and where that data resides. One of the advantages of on-prem solutions like APEX Flex on Demand or data center utility is know where your data is. The public cloud can move the data around often without you knowing about it. And so that security of that assurance that you know exactly where your data is, is really important to a lot of our customers. So its kind of another feature that has been official for customers. And again, we're seeing partners adopt this more and more. And I think over time that is going to continue to grow. >> Yeah. So 20 points on the uplift plus additional services that I can bring in because they have a tighter relationship, in this model, right? The renewal starts when you sign the contract. So it's a much, much deeper relationship. Can the partners, can they white label the service? Is it co-branded? Is it all Dell branded? >> Yeah. Well, they have the choice. I mean, the partner can financially take on the billing and relationship primarily if that's what they would like to do. And again, so that's one of the offerings or they can refer it to us. Many partners they don't have the back end or the infrastructure to do all that billing and collecting themselves. So they prefer just to refer it to us. Another part is at large they do have those capabilities and they want to take on the primary relationships. So we can work with them both ways and we have worked with them both ways. >> Nice. We're out of time, Bill, but give us the bottom line. You've touched on some of this but why APEX over the competition? >> Yeah. Well, look, I think it goes back. The first thing is Dell Technologies, right? Dell Technologies has the broadest selection of products and services means. So you combine that with APEX solutions you've got a win-win, it's unbeatable in my opinion. We also I think have the best range of flexibility in those payments solutions. So you can go from a minimum commitment of 40% all the way up to 85%, you can go one to five years, no surcharges, right? The rate is the rate. The rate goes from the minimum all the way to the maximum. We have the storage cap that I talked about, HCI cap at 85%. So you're going to be capped. So you don't have unexpected costs that you didn't forecast and you can flex up and down, right? So you flex up, you could flex down, some of our competition once flex up you can't flex back down. And that's a real negative in my opinion. And we've got 15 years of experience of doing this. So that's really important. We work with a lot of customers. We've learned a lot during those journeys and we think we're the best equipped to provide you with consumption solutions and as a service solutions that really work with customers. >> Financial flexibility, asset management, the really key part of IT that we don't spend enough time talking about. Bill, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. >> Thanks, Dave. Really glad to be here. Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Tech World 2021 the virtual edition. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> In 1946, the acerbic manager of the Dodgers, Leo the Lip Durocher famously said of baseball, great Mel Ott who was player manager of the Giants at the time. You know what happens to nice guys. They finished in last place. The phrase nice guys finish last was born. It became popular outside of baseball. Well joining me today is someone who was a consummate gentlemen and a nice guy who proves that idiom absolutely isn't true at all. He's also written a new book "Play nice and Win" Michael Dell chairman and CEO of Dell technologies, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, Dave, always great to be with you. Wonderful to be on the CUBE and thanks for your great coverage of Dell technologies world. >> Yeah. We're very excited to be covering the virtual version this year, next year we're back face to face I'm Sure. And we're going to talk about your book but I want to start by asking you to comment on the past 12 months, how are you going to remember 2020? >> I'm going to remember it by the resiliency of the world and our team, the adaptability the acceleration of digital transformation which is pretty amazing around the world. The vital role that technology played in addressing some of the biggest challenges, whether it was the creation of vaccines or, you know, decoding the virus itself or just addressing all the challenges that the world had. You know, I think it's a game changer in terms of disease identification and how we prevent these kinds of things going forward. You know, there's still a long way to go in terms of how do we get 7.5 billion people vaccinated and safe. I also think it exposed, you know some of the fault lines in our society. And that's a great learning for all of us in terms of access to healthcare and education and, you know, the digital resources that power the world. And so, yeah, those are some of the things that really stand out for me. >> Well, I mean, I think leaders like yourself and position of influence, absolutely passionate about some of those changes that we see coming in society. So hopefully we'll have time to talk about that but I wanted to get into the business. I think a lot of people, myself included felt that 2020 was going to be a down year for big tech companies like yours and that relied heavily on selling products that data centers and central offices but the remote work trend and the laptop, boom offset, some of those on-prem softness and headwinds combined with VMware the financial performance of Dell technologies was actually quite amazing. Why were you able to do so well last year? >> Well, first of all, you're right. We did, we had record pretty much everything record revenues, record operating income, record cashflow and be also paid down a record amount of debt. And so I think the strength and resiliency of our supply chain, as well as the broad diversified nature of what we provide our customers continue to serve us very well as they moved to this sort of do anything from anywhere in the world. And it continues the first part of this year, business is very strong >> You know, a few weeks ago, of course you officially announced the spinoff of Dell technologies. Wasn't a huge surprise but the 81% equity ownership of VMware are you worried about untethering VMware from Dell or maybe you can share more on what this means for the future of, your two companies and your customers. >> Right? So, I think this will drive additional growth opportunities for both Dell Tech and VMware, while it unlocks a lot of value for our stakeholders. What we've done is to formalize the commercial relationship into a series of agreements and those are unique and differentiated and they provide lots of flexibility and we've driven a tremendous amount of innovation together and that's going to continue and it will, one of the things we said back in 2015 you'll remember is our commitment to keep the VMware ecosystem open and independent and working across the whole industry. We've done that. You'll continue to see us innovate together with Edge solutions, certainly all the great work we've done with VxRail SD LAN, you know Tanzu creates this platform to modernize applications and VMware Cloud and Dell technologies are the easy path to a multi-cloud architecture. And, that continues to work super well and is not going to be slowed down at all. So... and of course, I'll continue to be a chairman of both companies and we're not selling VMware we're distributing our ownership to our shareholders. >> Well, of course, Dell is the largest sort channel if you will, for VMware. So that's ... you guys got a tight relationship but I want to ask you about digital transformation and everybody talked about it pre COVID but nobody really knew exactly what it was but COVID sort of brought that into focus very quickly. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So going forward, how do you see that whole digital transformation playing out? >> You know I think the plot of any company is to figure out how it can use its data and turn that into insights and outcomes and better results and ultimately competitive advantage faster. And as you said, you know, if it's not able to do that, it's probably going to go out of business. And that agenda just got massively accelerated because it was kind of digital was sort of the only thing that worked during this, this past period. So every organization has figured out that technology is not the IT department, it's actually the fulcrum of progress in the entire company. And so we're seeing sort of across the board a dramatic acceleration in the investment in digital technologies, you know, Edge is growing very fast. I think 5G just accelerates this and, you know you're seeing it in all the demand trends. It's quite positive and, you know, I think you'll see even a more rapid separation from those companies that are able to take advantage of this and quickly adjust their businesses their organizations, and those that are >> You better hop on board or get left behind, you know, the Edge. You mentioned the Edge it's a little bit like digital transformation, you know kind of pre COVID and even post COVID. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people but the telecoms transformation and 5G they have there certainly real. How do you see the Edge? >> You know, the Edges is ... think of it as actually the real world, right? It's, not a data center sitting in the center of the universe somewhere. And look today, you know only 10% of data is processed outside of the data center, but, you know, it's estimated by 2025 you got 75% of enterprise data will be processed outside of a traditional data center or a Cloud. And so as everything becomes intelligent connected 5G accelerates that it's going to be a huge acceleration of this whole process of digital transformation. And you know, again, think about this. I mean, the cost of making something intelligent used to be really expensive. Now it's asymptotically approaching zero. And of course all those things are connected. They're talking to each other and exactly what does this mean for every industry. Nobody's really quite sure and not everything is going to work, but, you know we're seeing it in manufacturing, in retail, in healthcare and the growth on the Edge is really accelerating in a meaningful way. And it's not so much about, you know people talking people with machines, we know how to do that. Now it's about the thing right And, you know you've got like 200 billion arm processors, you know out there in the last couple of years, all those things talking to the other things, generating data it happens in the real world. That's what the Edge is. >> Yeah as you know, we're a big fans of the arm model. And I think it just presents huge opportunities for companies like Dell. I want to ask you about Cloud. And I have to say, I think, you know companies like Dell have been maybe a little bit defensive over the last several years when it comes to Cloud but I think you starting to see the Cloud as a gift with all that CAPEX that's being built out by these hyperscalers. You know, thank you. It seems to me, you can build on top of that. How are you thinking about the Cloud as an opportunity for you and your customers especially as the definition of Cloud evolves? >> Well, first, you know, what we see is and the Edge is kind of the third place or the third premise, right? You got Clouds in the public form, you've got the Colo which is really growing fast and, you know the private hybrid Clouds, and now you've got the Edge. And so you've got infrastructure all over the place with Edge being the fastest growing. You know, one of the big things we see is that customers want a consistent way to operate and execute across that whole platform. And, you know, one of the other things that we've been focused on at Dell technologies is how can we move our business to more of a service and subscription on demand and provide customers that flexibility to to pay as they consume. And so, to some extent this is an evolution of, you know, products to services to managed services, to everything as a service. And so, you know, looking at our balance sheet you'll see over $40 billion in remaining performance obligations as we moved the business to that kind of model and it's been growing double digits for several quarters in a row. And so, you know, we're embracing Cloud and on-demand, and as a service, and obviously here at Dell technologies world we're talking a lot about Apex and our continuing initiatives to move our whole business in that direction. >> Yeah. Apex is a real accelerator for that model. I want to switch topics a little bit. I got a long list of things I want to talk about ESG, sustainability, inclusion, you know, is another topic that, that I'm interested in. I want it. And I said before, people like yourself in a position of influence to influence public policy and obviously the employees and your ecosystem why is it not just the right thing to do? Why is... why are those things good business, Michael? >> Well, it's good business because people want to be part of something that is important and purposeful. You know, it's not just make a profit and earn a living right? You know, people want to be inspired and feel that they're part of something special. And look, I think if you look at the positive changes that have occurred in the world certainly you could turn on the news and see the horrible things that happened in the last 24 hours or something like that. But if you step back and think about the amazing progress that's happened in the last several decades, you know a lot of it's been driven by technology and by businesses that have stepped up and made a difference and made commitments. And, you know, we're one of those companies that has made a series of commitments you know, 10 years ago, we set out with our 2020 goals. We accomplished significant majority of those retired those. Now we set out our progress made real 2030 goals all around the ESD themes. And it's not only the right thing to do but it is good for business. It inspires our team members, our customers and I think initiatives like progress made real at Dell and thousands of other companies. Ultimately, those are the things that are going to drive progress forward. I believe, you know, more so than government edicts or regulation, those can play a role. But I think, companies voluntarily driving things like the circular economy and how we include everyone in our business and provide opportunities for everyone to succeed no matter where they come from. I think those are the things that are really going to drive the world forward. >> Well, I want to ask you about public policy because as you say, it's not just the government, but of course sometimes the government can get in the way. You're seeing a lot of vitriol around Val break up big tech but the same time, you're seeing the US government and the EU very willing to help out with the semiconductor competitiveness in the like I know you were tapped with the new administration President Biden, tapping, you know, the best minds in tech and you were asked to part sort of participate give feedback. What can you tell us about, you know your advice to the US government? >> Well, you know, lots of great discussion with the new administration and it's a delight to see that they're focused on semiconductors and sort of the industries of the future. This is a big deal. I mean, you know, we've got some big global competitors out there other nations that are with a deterministic strategy very focused on the industries of the future. But US, you know if you think about the atomic age and, you know the Apollo missions that created the whole semiconductor industry ARPANET and ultimately the Internet and that kind of stopped right there, you know, there wasn't as much government investment in some of those big R and D initiatives that really drove an enormous creation of industries and success for the United States and its citizens. And so I think focusing on semiconductors and how you build the infrastructure of the future really important for the United States to continue to be a leader in that you know, we were, you know, producing a one point about 37% of the world's semiconductors. It's now down to 12% and dropping and really important that more investments are made in that area. It's a combination of capital, talent, you know education knowledge, and also, you know, the policies that promote the development of these kinds of businesses. >> Yah well, Pat's got a very big challenge ahead of them. And so that's why but we've said Intel's too strategic to fail in our view but I wanted to plug your book a little bit. My former boss, you and I have talked about this. He was also a gentleman who proved Leo Durocher wrong. He was very nice guy, but also a winner, Play Nice But Win, why did you decide to write another book? >> Well, you know, Dave, a lot has happened in the last 20 years and especially the last nine or so years since we went private and, you know merged with EMC and VMware and went public again. And, you know, I'd say we... first of all, you know when I wrote the first book in 1998 I wasn't comfortable disclosing a lot. And, and I wasn't vulnerable enough and didn't feel, you know, able to do that. Now I do, you know, I'm older, you know hopefully a little wiser. And so I think everybody's going to like hearing some of the fun stories about not only my childhood but you know, the dorm room and beyond, and leading up to, you know the pivotal changes that have occurred the last decade my alligator wrestling with Carl Icahn and other, you know there's lots of fun stories in there. I got arrested one time. It was only for speeding tickets, don't worry but you know, lots of fun. I'm really looking forward to the book coming out and being able to talk about it. >> I can't wait. You know, I've said many times anybody who could beat the great icon is interesting to me. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned my old boss, Pat McGovern. I used to say to them all the time, "Pat how come you don't buy more companies?" And he'd say," Dave, you know the vast majority of acquisitions and mergers they failed to meet their objectives." Did you ever imagine, I mean... I did the EMC acquisition. Did... how could it not have exceeded your expectations? I wonder if you could give us your final thoughts on that. >> You know, and I talk about this a lot in the book. I mean, these are kind of the ultimate considered decisions. And in the case of the EMC combination it was something that we had thought about going back to 2008, 2009. And then, you know, started thinking about it in 2014 worked on it for a full year before it got announced in 2015 and finally closed in 2016. But yeah, I mean, you know, we thought it would be great. It turned out to be even better than We thought the revenue synergies were far greater. The teams were quite energized. Customers liked what we were providing and you know it's ... and, of course the markets were supportive Right? You know, we were paying close attention to interest rates and how we could structure the merger in a attractive way. And, you know, thank goodness, lots of hard work lots of determination, you know, it's worked out quite well. >> Yeah, great commitment from the Dell team as well. Congratulations on that. Go ahead, please. >> And any adventure continues right? It's...( both chuckles) >> I can't wait to see the next chapter and I can't wait to get the book, but congratulations on that, all your tremendous success you're you are a winner and a gentleman and a friend of the CUBE, Michael Dell. Thanks so much. >> Thank you so much Dave. >> And thank you for watching. And this is the CUBE continuous coverage of Dell tech world 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back. (upbeat music)