>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm coming to you from Palo Alto. It's a digital event, just like everything else in 2020. But we're excited to have our next guest. I think he's coming in all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. He's Jim Shook, the director of cyber security and compliance practice at Del Technology. Jim, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. It's quite the title there. Thanks for getting all that out. >>I have a big posted notes so that, uh, that's very helpful. But, you know, it's it's actually kind of an interesting thing because you have compliance and cybersecurity and your title, and it's it's It's interesting relationship between compliance as a motivator of behavior versus you know, you need to go a lot further than just what the compliance says. So I'm curious if you can talk about that relationship between yeah, we need to be compliant, and we need to follow the rules. But you need to think a lot bigger than that. >>Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's so many different standards out there and requirements. So typically, what we'll see on the regulatory side is very much a minimum baseline, and leading the way, as usual in the cybersecurity space, will be financial and health care organizations. That's particularly true in the US, but pretty much globally, at least on the financial side. So they'll set some baselines. A lot of industries don't really have many. And so what we look at many times is just general risk to the business. And, of course, if you're a publicly traded company, that might trigger some SEC requirements or other things like that. But again, we really look at those requirements as minimum baselines, and you have to work up from there based on the organization's risk profile. >>Yeah, yeah, and we see that we see that, too, with privacy and a whole a whole bunch of stuff where traditionally the regs and the compliance kind of lag, you know where the technologies and where the markets moving. So let's before we get too deep into it. Let's let's talk about the cove it impact because obviously a huge thing. Insecurity, Uh, you know, a light switch moment in mid March when everybody had to work from home. So suddenly your tax surfaces increase exponentially. People are working out of home environments that you don't necessarily know what's going on there. Who's going on there, The shared networks with the spouse and the kids and and everybody else. And but now we're, you know, 678 months into this. This is something that's going to be going on for a while, and even the new normal will have some type of a hybrid relationship with with, you know, an increased level of remote remote work once they work from home. But it's really work from anywhere. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts about how things have transitioned from you know, what happened in mid March, taking care of your own business and your own people to, you know, then taking care of your customers and the emergencies that they had. But now really thinking in terms of more of kind of a long term, fundamental shift in the security profile that people have with all their data and information >>Yeah. Gosh, it's been really interesting. I think organizations have done an amazing job when you think about the things that they've had to get done just really overnight. So a lot has been written about the pandemic, and you mentioned Jeff to really that expanded threats surface. All of a sudden, you've got people working from home. There wasn't enough VPN capacity. A lot of places. I talked to some organizations. Employees just took their desktop off of their desk and brought it home so it wasn't really ready toe work at a remote location. But organizations really adapted well to it. Meanwhile, that was opportunity for the criminals, and they've taken it. But Jeff, one of the things that I think about two is to an extent, this is the new normal, not necessarily the work from home, but the shift that's going to consistently happen in cybersecurity. Things change. The criminals air really smart, they adapt. So that was work from home. What's the next thing going to be? There's I O T. There's remote devices. There will be some vulnerabilities. We just have to get used to this pace and continue it. Unfortunately, >>right, right, right Yeah, it's always it's always a little bit of, Ah, a cat and mouse game, Right? But what? And then one of the other trends that we're seeing, I don't know, maybe more visibility or maybe higher profile is is the ransomware attacks, right? So we've seen, you know, kind of this thing really interesting continuation of different types of security threats between just the the local kid who's just trying to do it because it's fun versus, you know, competitive stuff where people are trying to take out their competitors versus nation states and nation states being, um, you know, kind of driving these attacks. But the ransom, the ransom where we've seen before, but it seems to be increasing in frequency. Maybe we're just hearing about it. What's special about ransom, where as a specific type of security threat. >>So I started this practice about five years ago, and at that point, ransom or was just barely a blip, it was really about destruction and the way that we talk about it in the cybersecurity spaces. There's this triad, these three components of our data that we're trying to protect. So one of those is confidentiality, and that traces back to the attacks you're talking about. That's when somebody steals your data. You don't want them to do that. That breaks the confidentiality of the data. And that's really where the cybersecurity controls kind of grew up around, that you didn't want credit cards, intellectual property, healthcare information. And that's still a problem with ransom, where they're affecting the availability of the data or the integrity of the data. And those were the other two prongs that go with confidentiality. And so these attacks. That's why they feel different. Their impact in your ability to access the data, which in many cases can shut a business down. There have been headlines over the last couple of months. Some businesses that really were closed off for components of their business that were shut down, and it's because they didn't have their data or their systems, and then eventually they either found a way to recover them. Or perhaps in many cases, the speculation is they paid the ransom to get the data back, >>right. And of course, the problem with ever paying a ransom, um, is that you don't necessarily know you're going to get the data back. That you may just be encouraging them to hit you again. Eso paying the ransom is is not necessarily the best solution. And then then, in talking about this thing, turns out that in fact, not only may it not be the right solution, you may be breaking the law. This is a pretty interesting thing. I had no idea that there's really laws dictating, you know, I guess responding to a criminal threat. What? Where does that go? What's that from? >>Yeah, that's we've talked about this for a while. But it wasn't until about two weeks ago that some information was released from the Department of Treasury. So the idea here is that every not every country, many countries, the US among them have lists of countries and organizations that you can't do business with. So essentially a prohibited or sanctions list. And, as it turns out, many of the ransomware bad actors and Jeff is actually real name of one of them evil court. It sounds like a movie or a book, but that's one of the ransomware bad actors there on those lists. So if you get attacked by an organization that's on the list and you pay them. You have now completed a transaction with a prohibited entity and you're subject to potential sanctions. There was a lot written about this being a new law, or the US came up with this law, and that's not the case. The laws have been on the books for a while. It was the Department of Treasury, kind of issuing some guidance, just nudging people. Hey, by the way, you shouldn't be doing this and some of the research I've done a lot of countries have these laws. So while it's just the US that came out with this advisory, which was very public and certainly a big wake up call, these laws exist in a lot of other countries. So organizations really need to be prepared for what they're going to do if they get hit with the Ransomware attack. Not really counting on paying the ransom for the reasons that you said, Plus, it may be against the law. >>And just to make sure I understand you, it's against the law because you're effectively doing business by having a financial transaction with one of these, prohibited either organizations or they're in a prohibited country complete. >>That's correct Yeah, mostly about the organization, um, and then an interesting component of this and we won't get into too much of the weeds on the legal side. But the law is actually a strict liability. So that means it doesn't matter whether you knew or should have known that the entity was on a prohibited list. The mere fact of having that transaction makes you liable. And then the way that the the regulations are written, you can't get someone else to do your dirty work for you. So if you are facilitating that transaction anyway, you may be running afoul of those laws. >>Jesus. One more thing to worry about where you're trying to get business. You're trying to get your business back up and running, but specifically with with with ransomware and why it's different. I mean, there's been business continuity, planning forever. You know, you guys have backup and recovery solutions. Uh, you know, there's so much effort around that What's different here? Is it just because of the time in which you have to respond the availability of those backups toe to come back and get in production? What makes Ransomware so special from a business continuity perspective besides the fact that you're not allowed to pay him because it might be breaking the law. >>Ah, lot, You hit on a couple things there. So we've known forever that with D R. Disaster recovery One of the major things you're doing there is your replicating data quickly so that if you lose sight A you can pop up its site B With ransomware, you're replicating the corrupted data, so you lose that with backups. The bad guys know, just like you mentioned that if you have a backup, you could use that to recover. So they are more frequently now gathering their credentials and attacking the backup. So many cases we see the backups being deleted or otherwise destroyed. And that's really where we have focused with our power. Protect cyber recovery solution is creating a new, extra offline air gapped copy of the most critical applications. That's not going to be susceptible to the attack or the follow up attack that deletes the data. >>So let's jump into that a little bit, um, in a little bit more detailed. So this is a special solution, really targeted, um, as a defense against Ransomware because of the special attributes that ransom where, uh, e guess threatens threatens or the fact that they they also go after your backup in recovery at the same time, knowing you're gonna use that to basically lower the value of their ransom attack. That's crazy. >>Yeah, they're smart. You know, these these Attackers air smart. There's billions of dollars at stake. E think organizations like Evil Corp estimates are they could be making hundreds of millions of dollars. So they're they're not even small businesses. They're almost industries unto themselves. They have advanced tactics, They're leveraging capabilities, and they have. They have products, essentially. So when you think about your production data, your backups, your disaster recovery, those air, all in environments, that they're not accessible on the Internet. But that's where you're doing business. So there is access there. There's employees that have access, and the bad guys find ways to get in through spear phishing attacks, where they're sending emails that look like they're from somebody else and they get a foothold. Once they have that foothold, they can leverage that access to get throughout that production environment. They have access to that data, and they deleted with cyber recovery. What we're doing is we're creating a vaulted environment that's offline. They can't get there from from where they are, so they can't get access to that data. We lock it down, we analyze it, we make sure that it's good and then this happens automatically and day over day. So you've always got that copy of data. If your worst case scenario develops and you lose your production environment, that happens. You've got this copy of data for your most critical applications. You don't want to copy everything in there, but you can use to actually recover and that recover capability. Jeff is one of the pillars of a cyber security structure, so we focus a lot, kind of like you said before. What's different about these attacks? We focus a lot on protecting data and detecting bad guys. This is the recover capability that is part of all these frameworks, >>right? So there's a lot to unpack there before we get into the recovery. And kinda actually, why don't we just start there and then I want to get into the air gap because that's a great That's a great thing to dig in on the recovery what's kind of your targeted s l A Is it based on the size of the application? Um, is it based on on, you know, a different level of service. I mean, what is what is the hope? If I buy into this this solution that I can get my recovery and get back into business if I choose, not toe to pay these guys? What? What does it? What does that kind of look like? >>Most of the time, we're providing a product that our customers are deploying, and then we have some partners that will deployed as a service to, so the SLS may vary, but what we're targeting is a very secure environment, and you can look at how it's architected and think about the technologies. If it's properly operated, you can't get there. You can't get to the data. So the points that we're really looking at is how frequently do we want to update that data? So in other words, how much data can you afford to lose? And then how long will it take you to recover? And both of those? You can leverage the technologies to shorten those up to kind of your requirements. So loosely speaking, the in the shorter you make the time may cost you a little bit more money, a little bit more effort. But you can tighten those up pretty much what your requirements are going to be, >>right? Right? And then let's talk about air gaps because air gaps. That means something very, very specific. It literally means classically right, an air gap. There is a space in between these systems until electrons learn how to jump. Um, they're they're they're physically separated. Um, but that's harder and harder to do, right, because everything is now a P I based, and everything is an app that's based on a bunch of other APS, and there's calls and there's, you know, everything is so interconnected now. But you talked about something specifically said, an automated air gap. And you also said that you know, we're putting this data where it is not connected for some period of time. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit more detail how that works, how it's usually configured, um t to reintroduce an air gap into this crazy connected world. >>Yeah, it's kind of going backward to go forward in a lot of ways. When we're careful about the term, we'll use the term logical air gap because you're right, Jeff on Air Gap is there's a gap, and what we're doing is we're manipulating that air gap in a way that most of the time that data are are safe. Data are vaulted, data is on the other side of the air gap, so you can't get there. But we'll bring it up in air. Gap will logically enable that air gap so that there is a connection which enables us to update the data that's in the vault, and then we'll bring that connection back down. And the way that we've architected the solution is that even when it's enabled like that, we've minimized the capability to get into the vault. So, really, if you're a bad actor, if you know everything that's going on, you might be able to prevent the update. But you can't get into the vault unless you're physically there. And, of course, we put some controls on that so that even insiders are very limited what they can do if they get inside the vault and the A. P. T s, the advanced persistent threats. People who are coming from other countries. Since they're not physically there, they can't access that data. >>That's good. So it's on its off, but it's usually off most of the time, so the bad guys can't get across there. >>Yeah, and again it's It's important that even when it's on it za minimal exposure there. So you think about our triad, the confidentiality, integrity, availability. You know, we're blocking them from getting in so they can maybe do a denial of service type of attack. But that's it. They can't get into break into the vault and break things and destroy the data like they would in production. >>I want to shift gears a little bit gym, and I've I've gone to our essay, I think, for the last three or four years of fact, I think it was the last big live event we did in 2020 before everything came to a screeching halt. And, you know, one of the things I find interesting about the security industry is this one of these opportunities for cooperative Shin um within the security industry that even though you might work for a company that competes with another company. You know there's opportunities to work with your peers at other companies. So you have more of a unified front against the bad guys as well as learn from what's going on. Uh, with some of the other you know, people. So you can learn from the from the attacks that they're surfacing. There's interesting, uh, organization called Sheltered Harbor that it came across and doing research for this. You guys have joined it. It was basically it looks like it was built around 100 30. This this article is from earlier in the years. Probably groaning is from February 130 participating financial institutions, which collectively hold 72% of all deposit accounts and 71% of all U. S retail brokerage assets. It's a big organization focused on security, Del joined not as a financial institution but as a vendor. I wonder if you can share what this organizations all about. Why did you guys join and what? Where you see some of the benefits both for you as well as your customers? >>Yeah, there's a lot there, Jeff. I've been part of that process for a little bit over two years and kicked it off after we identified. Sheltered Harbor is an organization that we wanted to work with. So, as you said, founded by some of the banks and credit unions and other financial institutions in the US, and what's unique about it is it's designed to protect the U. S. Financial system and consumer confidence. It's not actually designed to protect the bank. So of course, that's an outcome there if you're protecting consumer confidence than it's better for the banks. But that's really the goal. And so it's a standards based organization that looked at the problem of what happens if a bank it's attacked, what happens to the customers. So they actually came up with the specifications, which follows so closely to what we do with cyber recovery. They identified important data. They built requirements, not technologies, but capabilities that a vault would need to have to protect that data. And then the process is to recover that data if an event occurred. So we talked to the team for a while. We're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish with them is the only solution provider in their advisory program, and the work that we've done with the power protect cyber recovery solution. We have some more news coming out. I'm not permitted toe announce it yet. It's pretty soon, so stay tuned, and it's just been a really great initiative for us to work with, and the team over there is fantastic. >>So I just one or two. If you can share your thoughts as as the role of security has changed over the last several years from, you know, kind of a perimeter based point of view and you know, protection and walls and, uh, firewalls and and and all these things which is completely broken down now to more of a integrated security approach and baking security into your data to your encryption to your applications, your access devices, etcetera and really integrating security more into the broader flow of product development and and delivery and and how that's impacted the security of the of the customers and impacted professionals like you that are trying to look down the road and get ahead of the next. You know, kind of two or three bad things that are coming. How is that security posture really benefited everybody out there? >>It gets a really difficult problem that we just keep working at it again. We don't have a goal, because if we're targeting here, the threat actors is a bad actors. They're gonna be here. I was reading an article today about how they're already the bad actors already employing machine learning to improve what they're doing and how they target their phishing attacks and things like that. So thinking about things like security by design is great. We have millions billions of devices, and if we start from the ground up that those devices have security built in, it makes the rest of the job a lot easier. But that whole integration process is really important to I mentioned before the recovery capability and protect and detect Well, if you look at the nice cybersecurity framework has five pillars that have capabilities within each one, and we need to keep focusing on our capabilities in those space, we can't do one and not the other. So we do multi factor authentication. But we need to look at encryption for our devices. We need to build from the ground up. We need to have those recover capabilities. It's just kind of a never ending process. But I feel like one of the most important things that we've done over the last year, partly driven by the changes that we've had, is that we're finally recognizing that cyber security is a business issue. It's not a nightie issue. So if your digital and your assets are digital, how can you confine this to a nightie group? It's It's the business. It's risk. Let's understand what risk is acceptable cover the risk that isn't and treated like a business process that it ISS. >>That's great, because because I always often wonder, you know, if you think of it as an insurance problem, you know, then you're gonna be in trouble because you can't You can't just lock everything down, right? You gotta you gotta do business. And you always think of the, you know, ships or safest, uh, at harbor. But that's not what ships are built for, right? You can't just lock everything down, but if you take it more of a business approach, so you're you're measuring investments and risk and putting dollar amounts on it. Then you can start to figure out how much should I invest in security because you can't spend ah, 100% of your revenue on security. What is the happy medium? How do you decide and how do you apply that investment where, you know, it's kind of a portfolio strategy problem >>it is. And and that's one of the areas that again my five years in the building, the practice we've seen organizations start to move to. So you want to protect your most important assets the best. And then there are things that you still want to protect, but you can't afford the time, the budget, the operational expense of protecting everything. So let's understand what really drives this business if I'm a law firm might be my billion and document management systems and health care. It's a electronic medical record and manufacturing the manufacturing systems. So let's protect the most important things the best and then kind of moved down from there. We have to understand what those systems are before we can actually protect them. And that's where the business really needs to work more closely. And they are with the I T teams with cyber security teams, >>right, and like, I like a lot of big problems, right? You gotta break it down. You gotta You gotta prioritize. You gotta, you know, start just knocking off what's important and not so overwhelmed by, you know, trying to protect everything to the same degree. This is not practical, and it's not not a good investment. >>That's exactly the case. And there's the ongoing discussions about shortage of people in the cybersecurity space, which there are. But there are things that we can do that to really maximize what those people do, get them to focus on the higher level capabilities and let the tools do some of the things that the tools air good at. >>Right. So, you know, you triggered one last point and we'll wrap on this, but I'll give you the last word. Aziz, you look forward. Two things like automation and two things like artificial intelligence and machine learning that you can apply to make those professionals more effective on automate some stuff. Um, how do you see that evolving? And does that give you big smiles or frowns as you think about your use of AI in a nml versus the bad guys, they have some of the same tools as well. >>They dio and look, we have to use those to keep up. I'll give you example with with power, protect cyber recovery. We already use AI and ML to analyze the data that's in our vault. So how do you know that the data is good? We're not gonna have somebody in the vault looking through the files by leveraging those capabilities. We could give a verdict on that data. And so you know that it's good. I think we we have to continue to be careful that we understand what the tools are. We deploy them in the right way. You can't deploy tool just to deploy honor because it's hot or because it's interesting that goes back to understanding the systems that we need to protect the risks that we can accept or perhaps cover with insurance and the risks that gosh, we really can't accept. We need to make sure that the business continues to operate here, so I think it's great. Um, the communities have really come together. There's more information sharing than ever has gone on. And that's really one of our big weapons against the bad actors. >>All right, Well, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your insight. I think your job security is locked in for the foreseeable future. We didn't even get into five G and I o t and ever increasing attack, surface and sophistication of the bad guys. So thank you for doing what you do and helping keep us safe. Keep your data safe and keeping our companies running. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>Alright, He's Jim. Mom. Jeff. Thanks for watching the cubes. Continuous coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Q. Come to you from our Palo Alto studio with our ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The digital experience Let's jump into a really excited to have our next guest CIA Sam Bird, the president of the Client Solutions Group for Dell. Sam, where you joining us from today? >>Hey, I am joining you live from Austin, Texas. Jeff looks beautiful. All weather? Yeah, its's turning really nice. Uh, nice time to be here in Austin, right? So, >>Sam, let's jump into it. I mean, you, you cover, you know, kind of the heart of what Dell started with which was which was PCs. And, you know, it's funny. A couple days ago, Michael tweeted because he likes to tweet, which is fun. An article that said that the PC officially died today. It's a reference back to an article I had to look at the January 26 2010. Officially, the PC officially died today. >>That >>is so bizarre, and that is not in fact, not true, you guys. We're seeing unprecedented demand, so I wonder if it is You Look back at that. And I'm sure you saw Michaels tweet. What kind of goes through your head? Because we're in a very different space than we were 10 years ago. >>Yeah, I think the world's changed a lot, Jeff from 10 years ago. I got to say, uh, the PC died 10 years ago. It feels pretty good being being dead for 10 years. So I think we actually saw a, you know, still alive and very vibrant. PC. So you think about everything that's happened with Cove it We have seen the PC and people using technology to stay connected, whether it's, you know, working in their business, learning from home, staying connected with other family members. So we'd like to talk about it Is the renaissance of the PC. It kind of this rebirth reemergence of this really good friend that you had has become really core toe how we're getting stuff done in the world today, and we've stayed bullish about the opportunity around the PC. Michaels had that view from, you know, when he started this company, and we've since expanded to many other areas beyond selling PCs. But we continue to be really committed to the value of that technology in people's hands, >>right? So just in defense of the of the article, it was written on the launch of the iPad right, which was a new a new form factor. And, you know, we've seen this proliferation of form factors both within PCs and mobile phones, and you know, the sizes of screens getting bigger and the size of green getting smaller and surface all kinds of different things. So I wonder if you could share, you know, kind of your perspective in, you know, kind of the opportunity that opens up when people are looking for different types of form factors. And then, more importantly, I think now it's horses for courses. So when I'm sitting at my desk, you know, I haven't a big giant XPS with all the ram and GPU and stuff Aiken stuff into it. If I'm going to the airport with a long flight, I want something small and light and easy to carry and what's interesting, I think, with cloud it enables you now to basically have the form factor that you need where you need it for the types of work that you're trying to get done. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, if you if you take that 10 years ago, article to today we have had an enormous amount of innovation in the industry that's made the device is exciting and appealing for how people wanna want to operate. So, you know, we've seen Jeff a shift towards more mobile form factors with cove in. So, um, a commercial space that used to be maybe half desktops, half notebooks is now in the 70% range. More mobile form factors which reflects how people want to use them. You know, they're sitting at home, they need that device to be portable. They wanna go between rooms and home. That's the other thing that we found in some of our, you know, research and work on the spaces. You know, people might want to sit at the kitchen table in the morning in the afternoon. Maybe they're outside. They might have their kids do in school from home and have to be around them part of the day, so they still need a mobile kind of form factor, but it's plugged in. I want full power to run my applications. And, like you said, we will get back to a world with travel and people being mobile. And then you need to dial in the right form factor that has maybe a smaller screen, more portable device. So one of the things that's kept this business vibrant, you know, for the past 10 years and right now is a bigger screen experience is really, really valuable. A keyboard and multiple ways of in putting into devices are valuable, so there's core. Things are great. And then we've got systems that are set up for how people want to use them. You know, we still have designers sitting at home using big desktop workstations because the most powerful thing there times really valuable. There's a right system for how you want to use technology, and I think that that's attendant, you know, an approach we take in our business, and that's what we see in the industry. I think that's what's helped keep it very vibrant and alive. >>I love it, I love it. It is truly that work from anywhere and anywhere as you just defined, could be a whole bunch of things, and it doesn't even mean just at home or just at the coffee shop. That's really interesting. Is you even change locations where you're working within within the home. That really supports that. So, >>you >>know, Cove, it hits light switch moment. Everybody's gotta work from home. So huge, huge pressure there. And now, as you said, you know, we're seven months into it. Still gonna be going on for a little bit while a little while before people go back. Huge, huge boost to your guys business. I'm curious if you can share some thoughts in terms of, you know, now, I I need to kind of project a little bit of that office back to the work from anywhere situation. And, you know, you guys are that you're kind of that edge device that ultimately connects back to the mother ship. >>Yeah, I think it's and that's where we've seen people realized. It's a really valuable device that helps keep them, you know, productive and connected. Um, we have seen it's very interesting of it used to be, you know, pre co vid for Most people work with the location, you know, Post Cove. It it's something you do, and suddenly it's very location agnostic, and we see the world operating that way in the future Jeff of these devices at the edge or need gonna be working in a world where sometimes it makes sense to be in an office. Maybe there's collaboration, other things you need to dio. But we're going to see people working from home working from a coffee shop, working from, you know, anywhere in the world, and we're gonna need to stay connected. In that way, it's enabling a great set of talent. It's enabling people to be where they want, you know, get done what they need to do in their personal lives and then be contributing in a great way, thio to a business. So I think technology plays a huge role in going and getting that done. And to me, the world doesn't just return back to a you know, pre cove in space. But we're now in this. We've learned we can operate in this kind of multi modality world where technology can help keep us connected, collaborating, getting stuff done in some cases more productive than ever before, and it's kind of unleashed this new wave of thinking. I think we will continue to see great creativity on stuff we're putting in our devices to enable that, you know, software applications approaches that are gonna enable that that will really take us forward as we look at the future. >>You know, I'm just curious if you could share, uh, you know, kind of Ah, general breakdown by kind of form factor. What do you see between kind of, you know, I don't know if you split high end desktops and low on desktops and then, you know, kind of laptops and Chromebooks, what's kind of the high level kind of breakdown, and how's that? Is it change significantly over the last several years? And you you just mentioned a boost. You know, during the time of Cove in >>Yeah, we've seen a shift towards notebooks. Now you know much Is the article you you pulled up from 10 years ago? I think the death, the death of the desktop has also been much exaggerated. So we're Maurin, a mode of 70% of the systems that were selling our notebooks 70 to 80% range. It's a little higher, and consumer Andi, that's, you know, 20 points up in the commercial space. So we're seeing, you know, people have valued that kind of portability of systems. You know that, said is we talk through some of the ways people use it. There are great uses for desktops, for people are in the same place where I need ultimate ultimate power and then a z your home. We've seen a little more shift Teoh a suddenly you know, portability. That was really valuable because you had Salesforce's engineers on the road all the time. And I really wanted something that, you know, lasted had great battery life and was really easy to carry around. Suddenly we're in a world plugged in at home like we look at our devices, we've gone. Now more than half of our laptops are basically on is we have intelligence built into our systems. That tunes how battery management is done. Empower Management's done. More than half those systems are now in a mode of all, basically, always on a C. So people are, you know, plugged in all the time. They would like a little more powerful system. So whether they're running, zoom or teams or some other app. Multitasking. It's like there's a, you know, different requirements there. I think that changes Azzawi go forward and we get back to, you know, the notebook. It's like the ultimate design people want is a great big screen. That's super light, and the battery lasts forever. And I'm like that keeps our engineers and designers working every day because that's a really hard, complex thing to solve. And, you know, we're we continue to work and and and push that next forward. Now it's a little more biased to power. Sitting on a desk. We will be back in a world where it's gonna be, Yeah, I want power to sit on the desk, be on a video conference, get work done. But I also need to be able to take that on the road with >>Yeah, I just think, you know, because of the proliferation of online applications, right? And you know so much of our work day no pun intended, you know, is done in all these different cloud based applications, whether its sales force or slack or asana or whether we're, you know, working in in, uh, social media applications or even are you know kind of cloud enabled local applications. You know, a lot of times I find you don't have to carry your device right. E can lead the one device of one location, one of the other. I know it's almost like you pick up exactly where you were when you log back into chrome or you log back into whatever your browser is. If you've got it all configured, you know you don't even need to carry. A lot of times I find it's it's it's really nice. And if I have to check a message on the phone, No, it's a very different way of working, and, uh, I think it's really pretty slick. I do want to get into productivity, which you've talked about a lot. You know, I've always said the best productivity investment anybody could make is a second screen on the desktop. I mean, it's so much more productive to have a second screen the third screen. You go to places like Wall Street and the NASDAQ floor, where time matters and productivity matters, their screens all over the place and you guys are doing a ton of fun stuff with screens. Big giant curve things, and you made an interesting observation in other interviews that now people are consuming their entertainment content via those screens, whether it's an over the top service with Netflix or or whatever. So this this kind of shift to, you know, kind of mawr content consumption as this blend between kind of what you do in your personal life and what you do in your work life, both in terms of time and content, you know, continue to mix so lot of exciting stuff happening in big, beautiful screens. >>Yeah, totally agree, Jeff. And we see you know we've looked at productivity and see boosts with a bigger screen around your system. Same thing with exactly as you describe putting two screens around the system or go to a trading floor and their screens everywhere because it's about the you know, it's about the content that you can consume and the, um, you know, the work that you go get done, and it's a lot more efficient to be able to have multiple screens. Whether it's looking at a presentation and doing a call, you know, a video call for work on on one screen or either side of Ah, screen. And we're seeing people build out that, you know, their home office, their work office. I think that's to me. The, you know, the exciting piece of you think about how technology is arming people to get their job done. Like you can't imagine if you had all the technology taken away from you. You're like, Okay, what am I gonna What am I go do? Like if the internet goes down, I don't quite know how to get go. Be productive here. You know, I go try to find someone who has a landline phone on the block and call someone up. Andi have actually have a discussion, but, like, I'm not gonna build out a work, you know, a workspace. I've gotta build out a home space companies that are pretty progressive, the ones that are investing Maurin technology for their employees. We're seeing them be ah, lot more successful in this covert air, which equals go get on the right tools the screen around the system, You know, the extra devices. So it's like, Hey, my postures. Great. I can actually go get work done. And I'm in a nice space. Same thing back in the office. We've built stuff. We're building low blue light technology into our commercial PCs. We put that on our high end consumer PC. So you know, now you can walk into your home office early in the morning. You can goto late at night. It will have you all tune so your body is ready to go to sleep. You know, you don't even have toe. I don't have to talk to your family at all during the day. You could just work all the time from your home office. But I think little pieces like that are going. How do we put technology in this world where it's, like, very easy toe walk in and out of your you know, your office and being tuned on. But, hey, I need to go to sleep or I need to be chilling out after that and get the right technology and capabilities that let people be successful. So I think it's pretty exciting. Everything we've been able to dio, >>right? So I want to shift gears a little bit. Um, talk about user interface. What? One of the reason of this article that we keep referencing 10 years ago was the launch of the iPad, right? And in the launch pad or the iPad didn't have, Ah, traditional keyboard. Um, but I think people found out that not having a traditional keyboard, depending on the type of your work you're doing is a little bit of an inhibitor to your productivity. But it really begs the question as we enter this new world of different types of interaction with these devices and the increased use of voice, whether it's with Siri or or Okay, Google, um, >>we've >>had, you know, regulations on the A d a. In terms of access to websites and this and that. Aziz, you kind of look into the future of of human interaction with these devices as you get more and more horsepower toe work with on the GPU and the CPU and you know, can free up more. Resource is to this type of activity. I know you can't share anything too far down the road. But what? How do you see kind of the future evolving to get beyond this quality keyboard that was designed to slow people down because types were, too. I'm still waiting for the more efficient keyboard option to be to be available. But what's the future of human interaction with these things? To take the the degree of efficiency up another level? >>Hey, Jeff, we will do a custom keyboard for you. So you get me your you get me your high speed layout, we'll get you get you one of those. Um, you know, we do see it is pretty remarkable how long the keyboards been around and we still see it's It's also remarkable to me how powerful that is as a input device for, you know, for some tasks in the world. So what we see is it's not gonna be what replaces the keyboard. And there's one way of going and doing things. But all this compute the sensors that capability on the systems are just gonna allow people to operate the way that they want to operate. So you look at a PC today. It still has this great keyboard. It still has a laptop form factor that has, you know, been there for It's probably 25 years or so. It's actually pretty nice because it fits on your lap. It balances really well on the coffee table. Um, it's, you know, We've looked at so many different form factors, and it actually is a stayed around for a good reason because it it's pretty pretty functional. You know, you take on top of that, though we've built touch in tow, all our systems and screen. So a capability that's available to many of our customers and I go people are just starting. In the beginning, it was like Okay, Hey, how do I take this PC with touch on the screen and then you go? I don't want to do everything with touch, but gosh, it's like how maney you now touch it. If it's something's not touch, you know you have little marks on the screen. I went thio, I went. Thio was looking and working with someone here in a design, a design firm, and, uh, they had a product that was non touch, and it's like I reached in touch the screen to try to make it bigger because my eyes were not quite as good and they were like, Oh yeah, that's not a touch that's not a touch system and everyone touches the screen so it's like that becomes normal voice is going to become normal we have capability on the PC. Like you said, there's a bunch of voice ecosystems. Not everything is easiest to go do invoice. There are some things where you go ahead. I just want to go touch that, you know, gesture in the same way we look at intelligence on the system of also going There are things I wanna have just happen because I always I always do that and I shouldn't have to do voice. I shouldn't have to do gesture, touch everything else like, Hey, maybe I start the morning and I always pull up my calendar. Why doesn't that happen? Or I like to listen to her, You know, a song in the evening as I'm typing away on email on getting things buttoned up for the day. It's like your system can anticipate some of those things and it will just do that for you. So I think I think you're exactly right. We're going to see multiple ways of interacting with technology, and it needs to be natural and easy for us and then let the user pick pick the way that they want to go and do things right. >>Well, you just touched on a whole, you jumped ahead to questions on my list of things I want to talk about. And really, that's the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence, not in a generic way. That's an app that sits inside of the PC, but but in terms of using that intelligence as you just described based on my work flow based on my habit based on the applications I use based on you know what, you can observe and learn about me. Or maybe it SSM dictate down from from the corporate set up. You know how that PC operates for me? Because I think that's it is a really interesting thing, right? Everyone uses their machine differently, and whether they use, you know, shortcuts or not, How many tabs do they have open? You know, the the variability. You must have crazy studies on this in terms of the way people actually operate. These things is so, so high, so huge opportunity to, you know, again kind of remove the the get the signal from the noise and help people decide what they should do. Prioritize what they should do and add a layer of of simplicity to you. know it is a complex amount of notifications firing at me all day long. >>Yeah, I think that's a huge. You know, you talked about the potential you have in a world where more APS that we use our cloud cloud based of going How do I augment the capability in this client device at the edge To be intelligent and helped me go do mawr versus just being, you know, really dumb and serving up this other other content. And I think everything you describe is opportunity that we see We started Jeff about five years ago and have been very aggressive and putting intelligence and machine learning into the systems we started on our work stations, where there is an obvious application of, like, how do I tune a system to get the most performance out of an application? And we saw settings configurations making them different helped tune these very specific, you know, cad engineering programs that developers were running their times really valuable. They want the most performance. We used to have to have people sit down and we go. Okay, let's go run this application. Under this workload, we can put a table together. Here's a bunch of recommendations. We started going well, Hey, how do we have that happened? Automat like, let's try different settings. Figure out what works. The machines should should self tune itself then and figure out what's right and get based on exactly what I'm running. And people can be running different combinations so suddenly got a lot smarter than our great engineer sitting in the lab and figuring out those tables. And then, you know, from that time then we brought it to I think, what's just tip of the iceberg Now, where we start looking at, uh, performance across all our systems? What applications of my running go set things up so that it works? We talked a little bit about batteries and power management. Hey, how am I using this system if I am a really mobile person? Always, you know, taking my battery down to really low levels, hopping on a plane, I need to be quickly charged, like the system can figure out. Hey, I really need to tune things. Not for when, when you go through all the mechanics of a battery, it's like I am willing to sacrifice some on the longevity of the battery to enable really fast charging of that system because Jeffs always on the go Jeff runs his battery down. I need to make sure when he plugs in, he has maximum juice. Hey, here's Sam who's in a work from home mode, always plugged in. It's not great on any battery in the world to always be at, you know, maximum maximum charge every single minute of the day. And Sam has not unplugged his system in the past. You know, five days. Hey, we can run that at 95% and he will have a long life to that battery and be really happy with the system. And he's never gonna run out of power. You can start doing in that space. You can start doing it around sound and the environment that people are in, how we get smart. And I think there's an enormous amount you could do on top of that, like you described just how people have used the systems and it can sound a little eerie, but like it's what we you know, the machine suddenly knows how I'm going to go do stuff, but I'm like I would like that it to be anticipating what I'm doing, and then it starts taking that mundane stuff that we have to do that just eats up time and, you know, goes and gets that done for us. So we could be focused on the creative and the really pushing the boundaries, thinking >>I love it because it always goes back to kind of what do you optimizing for right? And there isn't necessarily one answer to that question, and there's a lot of factors that go into that in terms of the timing. As you said, the person their behavior you know happen to GPS is I'm at an airport. Probably need to plug in for you in the airplane. It's a good stuff. I want to. I want to shift gears a little bit, Sam, to talk about operating systems, Um, and and you know, chromebooks air out now. And you know, it was kind of this breakthrough to go beyond kind of Windows based systems. I think there's a lot of people that you know hope at >>some point >>will be, you know, have the option to run Lennox based systems. But it's just, you know, with a cloud based world and a multi, you know, kind of device interaction with all those different applications, whether it's it's my phone or my my desktop or my laptop or my my chromebook or my whatever. Um, Aziz, you start to think about kind of operating systems and opening up, you know, kind of a new level of innovation with because the expectation now for for like, a chromebook is that it's almost 100% Web based APS, right? That there's really not a lot of need for anything local. Maybe a quick download, a picture too attached to to an email or something. How do you kind of look at the future and kind of operating systems for PC? Specifically? >>Yeah. Well, I think is You describe Jeff, the applications and what you're doing on the system has become increasingly important over time, and it will only become more important as we go go forward. So, you know, from that point of view window, we dio work with windows. We do work with Google and chrome. I mean, Windows 10 is a really good based operating system. Chrome has a lot of nice capability in that operating system, you know, Obviously Apple, a competitor, has a different approach in that space. But I think we have a really good set of offerings that we can put on our our systems. And then we're focused on tuning that experience on top of the operating system. I I think it's still too complicated to go and put a, you know, get a new PC into a work or home environment, retire the old PC and manage that system. And what we look at is independent of that operating system. People want to go get their stuff done. We need to make that great. They wanna get their device, they want to turn it on and they want to go use it. And we want to build a world where, like, as I'm getting a new device, my device should know me well enough to go. Hey, Sam, this is this is the right time to get a device. This is the right kind of device that you should get based on what you're going and doing. Hey, I'm going to just keep you up to date. I am going to you think about any issues with the system. We still have too many things that flow through a traditional Hey, there's an I T. Help desk and then they figure that out and then I go toe level two or level three if they can't sort that out. Hey, how do we put that stuff to your point, Jeff before around intelligence, How do we automate those processes? So we're thinking through You know what needs to happen on that system, keeping it up to date and fixing and remediating that system. So I think there's a huge potential regardless of what operating system is beneath it, and we have very good choices there to go. We've got to make that experience the one that's great for the users and that that's where we're really focusing our, you know, our time and our energy, Right? >>So let me shift gears again a little bit and full disclosure I've bought, and I don't know how many XPS towers in a row. I think I'm on my third or fourth in a row. I love >>it. I >>mean, I'm a desktop. I like to just pack those things full of as much horsepower and GPU and CPU and memory as I possibly can because to me again, Back to an investment and productivity. I don't wanna be waiting for slow machines. I just to me it's a couple 100 bucks for this upgrade. That upgrade, it seems brain dead to me that people don't do that. But in terms of when you get these things now and it comes in the mail, it's basically a >>box and a machine, and >>you think back to the old days right when there was books and warranty cards and, you know, a whole plethora of stuff that kind of fell out of that box. I know you know. That's That's probably a leading indicator on the consumer side, about some of your efforts around sustainability and and being efficient and obviously taking advantage of things like the cloud in terms of activating these machines in this and that. But I wonder if you can share a little bit on what you guys have been doing about sustainability, because I know it's important. You know, there's a big focus around, you know, kind of environmental trash on old electron ICS, which is a riel, a real problem that people are dressing. So I wonder if you can. You know. Take a minute, Thio, to share your guys efforts in this area. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Jeff. It is. It is really important. And we see, you know, arming the world with technology so people can do better. Things really matters, but I love doing stuff outside, like I want the environment to be great. And we need to do that in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. So a couple of places we, you know, pushed really aggressively. You touched on the packaging. So whether that's taking, um, content out of boxes, that doesn't that doesn't need to be there. We've made very aggressive commitments with a series of 2030 goals that we're marching towards is a company where we said, you know, 100% of our packaging will be from sustainable or recyclable sources. So we've already moved aggressively in that space. When you look at what ocean bound plastic we're putting in our boxes, how we think about the materials that were picking, you know, cardboard, and using that in ways that go through the you know, the mail and can be shipped effectively. So we have maximum content there that can be recycled. We've we've committed that we will take back a system for every system that we ship. So getting and building this circular economy for electron ICS, we think is is very important. So we take the stuff that we've got out there and we put that back into a recycle process where you know your old PC can become part of your new cutting edge technology PC and we've led the industry and doing that in plastics were taking plastics from cases and plastics from systems, getting that back into new systems. We've done that with precious metals from the from the, uh, PCB lay board designs inside the systems. We've done that with rare earth metals and magnets, and we think there's opportunity to go farther in that space and then the 3rd 3rd kind of thing that we've committed Jeff is by by 2030 to have half the content of our new systems, be from recycled or renewable content. And we do a good job today of having the content in the systems be recyclable. It's almost over 90% by weight, but what we want to do and the work we need to go do is go get that recycled content going into a cutting edge technology that we're putting out there, and it's not. That's not a simple problem of going. People want things a structurally strong as possible, a super thin as performance as possible. And then we need to you, you know, we gotta use, um, basically waste that comes through and gets turned into new products. So we have our engineers are material science people working on how we make that riel. And we set some aggressive goals with, you know, Michael and the company that will be leadership and that we don't quite exactly know how to get there, but put us on the right kind of edge of pushing and doing the things that we need. Thio. We can have great technology and, you know, be responsible in the way that, as you said, is very important. >>It's great, and it's good to write it down, right? If you don't write it down, then it's just it just disappears into the into the ether. So, Sam, I really enjoyed getting to catch up. I want to give you the final word with a little bit. Look to the path and a little bit look to the future, right? A lot of conversation about Moore's law, and we got to the end of Moore's law and blah, blah, blah. And and I think that, you know, there's obviously technology behind that, and there's some real conversations. But to me, the more interesting topic around Moore's law is really the idea of Moore's law and this continual advancement of technology that's better, faster, cheaper. You've been doing this for 20 years at Del. You've seen tons of, you know, kind of Moore's law impacts and operating in this world where, you know, compute, compute storage and networking just is on this exponential scale on whether you want to talk about GP use or whatever again to me, it's not about the number, of course, and the transistor. It's about the transition in the core. It's about really the concept of this working in a world where you know you're gonna have a lot more. Where is power work with How do you How do you kind of reflect on, you know, the stuff that you're shipping today versus what you were shipping five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and then, more importantly, is you look forward. Um, you know what is what are you excited about? What gets you up in the morning? What puts a big smile on your face? Still come to work after 20 years of Dell? >>Yeah. You know, Jeff, it's a great question because the industry has changed so much over the last 10 20 years. So it's sometimes a fun thing. Toe. Look back at some of the products that we put out before. That seemed amazing at that point in time and you stack them against what we're doing now and then it could bring you down to Earth a little bit. So you see, the, uh, you see just the exponential improvements that we're able to make around the design of the product, the capability of the products. And I see that continuing the thing that gives me, you know, huge thought around this the device and the PC and the role is gonna play at the edge. We just did some research and we were looking at Millennials and Gen Z and looking around the world, and that is a huge and growing part of the population. It will be the the users of technology in the future with the world we're in today, 45% of them. So almost half of them said they would take their dollars and they want a premium, high end PC experience, and they would prioritize that versus other things they spend money on to go and have a great PC as a personal tool. Do you think about that translating to in a work environment they're gonna expect those same kind of great tools? And then to the question you asked, You know, I see a huge opportunity to continue to push forward the value and the way people use these devices, whether it's the intelligence we talked about. That to me is really exciting around building a machine that knows me and does things for me and how I want to use it, our ability to build immersive experiences so that you know, whether I'm gaming after work, collaborating with co workers like how do I put it so that we're together and it's a good Aziz that in person experience, we're gonna be able to do that with technology. You talked in a great questions around. Hey, the ways people interact with the systems, it will become natural. It will become whatever way they want to go and do that. And I think we can do that in a world where, yes, you can walk between all kinds of different devices. There will not be one device to end all. You'll be in a small screen device. You're gonna use a monitor. You're going to use a PC device. There will be technology across the home. But toe have that have that link together in the role that PC is gonna play in. That to me, is exciting. And we continue to, you know, invest aggressively. Michael saw that when he started the company. We continue to believe in the power of technology, and we're gonna figure out and drive those breakthroughs that will make the, you know, products exciting. And I love doing that every day of seeing the innovation we can put together and how that makes a difference for people. To me, that's really an exciting thing. >>Well, Sam, thank you. Thank you for the update. Again, the rumors of the PCs demise were greatly overstated. 10 years and glad to see that you're just kicking tail and doing exciting things. So thanks for for sharing your insight and your experience with us. >>Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Jeff. Great to talk to you. >>Absolutely. All right. He's Sam. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020 The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World del Tech, World 2020. Jeff Clark is here. He is the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me today. Appreciate it. >>Yeah, you're very welcome. When my first question is, when do you have time to be vice chairman? Well, >>you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries. And unless you establish some boundaries so I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally, but also allows me to look after the company and, uh, kind of keep things moving and making progress of Dell. So pretty exciting times. It's certainly been a challenge finding new ways to break through new ways to get things done. But our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. >>Well, you know, a Z. You know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and do it going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew you were obviously, but you have been able to see you know, how you operate in the decision making on how you rally the troops. Your several years now into the new Dell, you had to do a lot of tactical things, you know, including product portfolio rationalizations. But I wanted to start with the macro picture in a particular Can you share some of the acceleration points and the levers that you're really pulling in the operation? >>Well, clearly, if you look back at the company's strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform if you think about the first tenet of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our court marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the course server market in the course storage market, and clearly what we've been able to do and certainly been at this now for Gosh, I think it's three years now that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the I s g side and to the point you referenced earlier. We've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all the power brand and now represents new, fresh modern architecture er modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire eyes. T portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy, which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell Technologies portfolio, we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years, particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our I S G portfolio with the M R. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side will quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace work workspace one are leading services and are leading PC products to be able to bring a different change experience for end users on the PC side on the side. This all started with getting again this competitive portfolio. It started with Dell Technology Cloud a little over a year ago. It now is in joint collaboration around the edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around five g going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out. We now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VM, are now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. >>So it sounds like I mean, covitz change so many things, but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed your thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is gonna pre cove in Post Cove. It you kind of sort of approaching the same playbook, if you will. >>Well, a covert in many levels. While it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world, which we shouldn't, that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and many parts of the world. If you step back and what I try to mention the keynote, what cove it has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations, but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote learning remote the world as we look at it going forward, data driven. It's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade. In many cases the first three years, Uh, this nomenclature that I've talk about is the future is now, and what it's really done is actually reinforced. The points that we thought were going toe happen brought them sooner and has made us believe mawr double down, if you will, that the path we're on is the right path, and we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting? If you look at customers who embrace digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders. They're actually breaking away from the pack, sort of speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector. We think that's a great, obviously proof point of digital transformation. But what all companies will have to go through to compete >>Well, it's interesting we saw early on in the US locked down worldwide, locked down you have you have such a broad portfolio that yeah, maybe some parts of the portfolio or, you know, directly negatively affected. Certainly. For instance, your you know your airline customers or your hospitality customers, etcetera. But the work from home was was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio somewhat, you know, one part of the business that cushioned you, maybe the other part of the business, You felt that. But on balance, you're able to get through that, and part of that was your supply chain. And some of your competitors struggled, you know, for instance, with laptop supplies. But you guys really have done a good job, sort of navigating through that, almost like you've been through it before. But nobody's been through this before. >>No, you know, David, thanks for recognizing it. One of the benefits of the Indian portfolio we have, which no one else has. The Indian portfolio that we do. We're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors, whether it's different parts of the business. And we've been able to do that on our our supply chain has performed well. It's been unbelievably resilient. We think it's appointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace. You couple that with our global service footprint, the two of them working together we designated those capabilities is essential. Very early in the pandemic, we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers and a pretty non disruptive way. Now, behind the scenes are teams were doing all sorts of things to bring, uh, that continuity supply and those expectations we sent to our customers to the forefront. But I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded, and it set us up to where things were going to go. When we think about the future and migrating tomb or integrated solutions, I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed with that services in the supply chain play a key role. >>I guess so much to talk to you about. What? I wanna come back to digital transformation For a minute. I was talking to the C i o the other day and I asked him what was the digital transformation mean to you? He said, David, I got a 15 year old s a P system. Digital transformation means to me I My business has changed in the last 15 years, but my s a P system Hasn't I gotta bring it up to speed. I have to modernize. So there's a spectrum. On the other hand, if if you're not digital today and you're, say, a restaurant, you can't do business. So what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? >>Well, I think your examples were very good. I mean, our industries as a long reputation of overhyping, different constructs. The fact is, the world is rapidly digitizing. It's undeniable. If you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors air now being placed in everything, all of the data that's being collected as a result, That's certainly the forefront of what's happening. And every business has to deal with that. You mean you can't We talked about hospitality. You got hotel rooms that have sensors in them for lights, for water, for a temperature. You think about what's happening in the finance sector in the amount of data that's being created on the edge of that has to be processed on the edge. You think about smart factory smart hospitals in the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront. So in my mind. Digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going. We know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world, and as that acceleration, mhm goes faster and faster and faster, which I absolutely we absolutely believe this happening. Companies have to change the business. They have to change their models. They have to figure out how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes. We tend to get into this digital transformation and everyone to talk about this piece of gear, this piece of gear, this piece of gear. I actually don't spend any time on that. It's where customers are going. What are they doing to really instrument, if you will, the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors. That's where we come in. We help them help them with certainly the gear part of it, but more importantly, the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them, to help them get to where they want to go. Does that help? >>Yes, and it does, and it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud multi cloud. To me, it's edges all part of that and it's critical for your customers. Digital transformations. I mean, what I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on, whether you're on Prem when you're in a public cloud, whether you're at the edge, so multi cloud is part of that. You know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational. It seems to becoming more and more really. Where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? >>Well, I love the way you described it. What we see is the notion of Cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about earlier on when I got this job was the public cloud. No, there's Public Cloud. There's private clouds, and clearly the edge is going to be a cloud operating a model. In fact, we see the world of five G edge and cloud, those three circles intersecting toe high degree. So we're gonna bring a cloud operating model to the edge. We're gonna bring new advanced connectivity data driven connective ity to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created that will have toe have real time analytics done, uh, at the edge we think, is this opportunity to really step back and go well. Those cloud things can't be separate. They have to be a set of systems. In fact, it has to become an integrated system. And we think that integrated system has to be able to move data, be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrate and consistently Dr Operations across those three cloud environments, I think we have gone. Probably the best characterization is early innings. We're certainly not in the first inning. We're not in the ninth inning, but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multi cloud hybrid cloud environment. If you think about what we've done with VM wars enablement or interaction with the public domains, the work that we've done from our private area, we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time, I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us as this spends very quickly and the edge of balls we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself. We have to bring it together. We're bringing into the public and private cloud domains that we have today, >>and I definitely wanna hit on as a service. But since we're on this topic, I wanna I wanna talk about five G and Telco a little bit. Let me just spiel for a bit and then you can respond. So I mean, this seems to be a lot of confusion around five G. There's very high expectations. There's there's a there's a lot of talk, but if it's hard toe sort of identify the true impact, that's that's tangible today, anyway. And then you got the telecom telco transformation going on. We've been We've been hearing this for a long, long time. Meanwhile, you got the over over the top providers. They're living off the infrastructure. The telcos price per bit is declining, but the usage is exploding. And so what do you make of all this? You know, the telcos air reinventing themselves. Five g is a part of that consumers Airway waiting for that. There's a lot of, you know, mixed marketing messages going on. What's your take on this and what's tells role? >>Well, look, I I tend to try to break it down into things. At least I can understand. If I look at five G is the next generation Cellular, which I believe it's far more than that. I mean, I think it's the next data fabric for the data era. I think it's going to be this intersection, as I mentioned moments ago of five g Cloud and Edge, all coming together. But I think about it from the infrastructure side that you describe. What we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before. And I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector, and this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster. So now if you bring a cloud operating model to this which I believe five g enables, there is now the opportunity to bring, I think, um, or standard based infrastructure rather than the proprietary ones. In the past, we now can bring a industry standard set of architectures was softer to find layers in the stack. And for the first time in the telcos space, you have the ran going through significant transformation. And on my mind, Iran is one of the significant control points in the telco or five g stack, and that is going to be more open. And then we have to think of five. G is just more than a cellular network. I mean, we're gonna have private private five G. So to the degree that it displaces why, if I will be interesting to see and unfold. But there's a huge opportunity now. Is those sensors that I talked about in the digitization of hospitals and factories and cities, all interconnected by a bunch of private five G networks, all working in an interactive combined system way. I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation, a standardization orientation, a cloud model, and that's sort of what we do. So I get excited. All of what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point. You've been hearing this discussion for some time, but the opportunity is large for us. It's one of the single biggest largest opportune, single biggest opportunity that we see for Delon View more and we're going to pursue it together. And we think we can take our at scale technologies that we brought to the Enterprise Data Center and bring those to the telco providers in the private five g build out. >>It's amazing, Jeff, when you think about the when you and I started in this business and how far we've come, it's It's just just mind boggling, isn't it? It >>really is. We've been at this a while and things have changed. But again, it's been on this consistent technology curve, this consistent standardization curve, and it's now applying to new sectors >>I want to end with as a service. You mentioned that before and and so you've got actually really growing business in subscriptions? Uh, you got a lot of options for customers, which is good, but sometimes it's confusing. What's the strategy around as a service? What can we expect there? >>Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right, we've made a lot of progress. We launched L Technology on demand last year. We have 2000 plus customers of $1.3 billion revenue run rate, it's growing at 30% so we're pleased. But at the same time, all the data suggest customers we're gonna want to deploy even at a greater rate. So I think I made reference during our keynote. Today, about 75% of the world's data is gonna be created outside of the data center, 75% off the edge. Build out is going to be done as a service, as is half of the infrastructure. So we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level. We announced Project Apex, Project Apex for us to take all of the properties that we have across the company, all of the different activities and to unify them a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward for our entire portfolio. We think the timing is right. We think we have to be able to, if you will project APEC should be translated as the easy button for our customers. It's a way to make things simpler. It's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model, and that's the path Ron, we're pretty excited about this unification, if you will. Galvanizing across the entire organization with Project Apex. >>Awesome. Listen, I know you're super busy. Appreciate all the time you've given us your You're a fun executive toe. Hang around with a mission, man. I wish we were together, but hopefully, hopefully sometime soon we can We could see each other face to face. >>I would like that very much. I missed the interactions themselves. I appreciate the time today. Thank you, Dave. >>All right, We'll see you, Jeff. Thanks again. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there. We're back with our next guest. It del Technology World 2020. You're watching the Cube.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of Dell technologies world digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of Dell technology world. Dell tech world 2020, Jeff Clark is here. He's the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me today, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Well, my first question is when do you have time to be vice chairman? >> Well, you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries unless you establish some boundaries. So I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally but also allows me to look after the company and kind of keep things moving and making progress at Dell. So pretty exciting times, it's certainly been a challenge, finding new ways to break through, new ways to get things done, but our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. >> Well, you know as you know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew who you were obviously but you know, been able to see how you operate and the decision making and how you rally the troops. You're several years now, into the new deal. You had to do a lot of tactical things you know, including product portfolio rationalizations but I wanted to start with the macro picture. And in particular, can you share some of the acceleration points and the leavers that you're really pulling in the operation? >> Well, clearly if you look back at the company strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform, if you think about the first tenant of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our core marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the core server market and the core storage market, and clearly what we've been able to do, and certainly been at this now for, gosh, I think it's three years now that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the ISG side. And to the point you referenced earlier we've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all of the power brand it now represents new fresh, modern architecture, modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire ISG portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell technologies portfolio we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our ISG portfolio with VMware. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side real quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace, workspace one are leading services and are leading PC products to be able to bring a differentiated experience for end users on the PC side. On the ISG side, this all started with getting again, this competitive portfolio, it started with Dell technology cloud a little over a year ago, it now is in joint collaboration around the Edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around 5G going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out, we now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VMware or it now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. >> So it sounds like, I mean, COVID changed so many things, but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed your thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is going to pre COVID, post COVID. You kind of sort of approaching the same playbook if you will. >> Well, COVID many levels, well, it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world which that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and in many parts of the world if you step back and what I try to mention the keynote, what COVID has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote, learning remote, the world, as we look at it, going forward, data driven, it's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade in many cases, the first three years. This nomenclature that I talk about is the future is now. And what it's really done is actually reinforced the points that we thought were going to happen, brought them sooner, and has made us believe more doubled down if you will, that the path we were on is the right path. And we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting, if you look at customers who embraced digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders. They are actually breaking away from the pack, so to speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector, we think that's a great obviously proof point of digital transformation, but what all companies will have to go through to compete. >> Well, it's interesting. We saw early on in the US lockdown, worldwide lockdown, you have such a broad portfolio that yeah maybe some parts of the portfolio were, you know, directly negatively affected, certainly for instance, you know, your airline customers or your hospitality customers, et cetera. But the work from home was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio, somewhat, you know, one part of the business that cushioned you maybe the other part of the business, you felt it but on balance, you're able to get through that. And part of that was your supply chain. And some of your competitors struggled you know, for instance, with laptop supplies but you guys really have done a good job sort of navigating through that. Almost like you'd been through it before, but nobody's been through this before. >> No, you know, Dave, thanks for recognizing that one of the benefits of the end to end portfolio we have which no one else has the Indian portfolio that we do, we're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors, whether it's different parts of the business and we've been able to do that. And our supply chain has performed well. It's been unbelievably resilient. We think it's a pointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace. You couple that with our global service footprint, the two of them working together, we designated those capabilities as essential, very early in the pandemic, we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers in a pretty non-disruptive way. Now behind the scenes, our teams were doing all sorts of things to bring that continuity of supply and those expectations we set to our customers to the forefront but I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded and it set us up to where things are going to go. When we think about the future and migrating to more integrated solutions, I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed but that services in the supply chain play a key role. >> Yeah, I got so much to talk to you about, but I want to come back to digital transformation for a minute. I was talking to the CIO the other day and I asked them what was digital transformation mean to you? He said, "Dave, I got a 15 year old SAP system, Digital transformation means to me, my business has changed in the last 15 years but my SAP system hasn't, I got to bring it up to speed. I have to modernize." So there's a spectrum, on the other hand, if you're not digital today and you're say a restaurant, you can't do business. So what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? >> Well, I think your examples were very good. I mean, our industries, has a long reputation of over hyping different constructs, the fact is the world is rapidly digitizing. It's undeniable. If you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors are now being placed in everything, in all of the data that's being collected as a result, that's certainly the forefront of what's happening and every business has to deal with it. You can't, I mean, we talked about hospitality, you got hotel rooms that have sensors in them, for lights, for water, for temperature. You think about what's happening in the finance sector and the amount of data that's being created on the edge that has to be processed on the edge. You think about smart factory, smart hospitals, and the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront. So in my mind, digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going. We know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world. And as that acceleration goes faster and faster and faster which I absolutely, we absolutely believe is happening, companies have to change the business, they have to change their models, they have to figure out, how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes. We tend to get into this digital transformation and every wants to talk about this piece of gear, or this piece of gear or this piece of gear. I actually don't spend any time on that. It's where customers are going, what are they doing to really instrument if you will, the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors. That's where we come in, we help them, help them with certainly the gear part of it, but more importantly the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them, to help them get to where they want to go. Does that help? >> Yes and it does. And it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, to me, it's the edge is all part of that. And it's critical for your customers, digital transformation. What I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on, whether you're on prem, whether you're in a public cloud, whether you're at the edge. So multicloud is part of that. You know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational. It seems to becoming more and more real. Where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? >> Well, I love the way you described it. What we see is the notion of cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about early on, when I got this job was the public cloud. Now there's public cloud, there's private clouds and clearly The Edge is going to be a cloud operating model. In fact, we see the world of 5G, edge and cloud, those three circles intersecting to a high degree. So we're going to bring a cloud operating model to The Edge. We're going to bring new advanced connectivity, data-driven connectivity, to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created. That we'll have to have real time analytics done at the edge. We think is this opportunity to really step back and go, well, those cloud things can't be separate. They have to be a set of systems. In fact, it has to be done in an integrated system. And we think that integrated system has to be able to move data, be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrated and consistently drive operations across those three cloud environments. I think we have gone probably the best characterization is early innings. We're certainly not in the first ending. We're not in the ninth inning but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multicloud hybrid cloud environment. If you think about what we've done with VMware's enablement or interaction with the public domain, the work that we've done from our private area, we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time. I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us, as this spins very quickly and the edge of evolves, we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself. We have to bring it together or bringing into the public and private cloud domains that we have today. >> And I definitely want to hit on, as a service, but since we're on this topic, I want to, talk about 5G and telco a little bit. Let me just spiel for a bit, and then you can respond. So, I mean, there seems to be a lot of confusion around 5G, there's very high expectations. There's a lot of talk, but if it's hard to sort of identify the true impact that's tangible today anyway and then you got the telco transformation going on, and we've been hearing this for a long, long time. Meanwhile, you've got over the top providers they're living off the infrastructure of the telcos, price per bid is declining, but the usage is exploding. And so what do you make of all this? You know, that the telcos are reinventing themselves. 5G is a part of that. Consumers are waiting for that. There's a lot of, you know, mixed marketing messages going on. What's your take on this and what's Dell's role? >> Well, look, I tend to try to break it down into things at least I can understand. If I look at 5G as the next generation cellular which I believe it's far more than that. I mean, I think it's the next data fabric for the data era. I think it's going to be this intersection as I mentioned moments ago of 5G cloud and edge all coming together. But you think about it from the infrastructure side that you described. What we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before. And I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector. And this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster. So now if you bring a cloud operating model to this, which I believe 5G enables, there's now the opportunity to bring I think, a more standard based infrastructure rather than proprietary ones of the past. We now can bring a industry standard set of architectures with software defined layers in the stack. And for the first time in the telco space you have the RAN going through significant transformation. And on my mind the RAN is one of the significant control points in the telco or 5G stack. And that is going to be more opened. And then we have to think of 5G is just more than a cellular network. I mean, we're going to have private 5G. So to the degree that it displaces wifi will be interesting to see an unfold but there's a huge opportunity. Now, as those sensors that I talked about in the digitization of hospitals, in factories, in cities, all interconnected by a bunch of private 5G networks all working in an interactive and combined system way, I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation, a standardizations orientation, a cloud model, and that's sort of what we do. So I get excited all in what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point. You've been hearing this discussion for some time, but the opportunity is large for us. It's one of the single biggest opportunity that we see for Dell and VMware, and we're going to pursue it together. And we think we can take our at scale technologies that we brought to the enterprise data center and bring those to the telco providers and the private 5G build out. >> Yeah, it's amazing Jeff, when you think about the, when you and I started in this business and how far we've come, but it's just it's mind boggling, isn't it? (laughing) >> It really is. We've been at this a while and things have changed but again, it's been on this consistent technology curve, this consistent standardization curve and it's now applying to new sectors. >> I want to end with, as a service. You mentioned that before. And so you've got actually a really growing business in subscriptions. You got a lot of options for customers which is good, but sometimes it's confusing. What's the strategy around as a service? What can we expect there? >> Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right we've made a lot of progress. We launched Dell technology on demand last year, we have 2000 plus customers at $1.3 billion revenue run rate. It's growing at 30%. So we're pleased but at the same time, all the data suggests customers are going to want to deploy even at a greater rate. So I think I made reference during our keynote today about 75% of the world's data is going to be created outside of the data center, 75% of the edge build out is going to be done as a service as this half of the infrastructure. So we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level. We announced project APEC, project APEC for us to take all of the properties that we have across the company, all of the different activities and to unified them, a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward, for our entire portfolio, we think the timing's right. We think we have to be able to if you will, project APEC should be translated as the easy button for our customers. It's a way to make things simpler. It's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model. And that's the path we're on. We're pretty excited about this unification, if you will galvanizing across the entire organization with project APEC. >> Awesome, listen, I know you're super busy. I appreciate all the time you've given us, you're a fun executive to hang around with a mission man. I wish we were together, but hopefully sometime soon we can see each other face to face. >> I would like that very much. I miss the interactions themselves. I appreciate the time of day. Thank you Dave. >> All right we'll see you Jeff, thanks again. All right, Thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there, will be back with our next guest at Dell technology world 2020. You're watching The Cube. (lighthearted music)