>>Hello. Welcome back to our super cloud 22 event. I'm John F host the cue with my co-host Dave ante. Extracting the signal from noise. We're proud to have two amazing cube alumnis here. We got Sanja Putin. Who's now the CEO of cohesive the emo Aaron who's the CTO. Co-founder also former CEO Cub alumni. The father of hyper-converged welcome back to the cube I endorsed the >>Cloud. Absolutely. Is the father. Great >>To see you guys. Thank thanks for coming on and perfect timing. The new job taking over that. The helm Mo it at cohesive big news, but part of super cloud, we wanna dig into it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having >>Us here. So first of all, we'll get into super before we get into the Supercloud. I want to just get the thoughts on the move Sanjay. We've been following your career since 2010. You've been a cube alumni from that point, we followed that your career. Why cohesive? Why now? >>Yeah, John David, thank you first and all for having us here, and it's great to be at your event. You know, when I left VMware last year, I took some time off just really primarily. I hadn't had a sabbatical in probably 18 years. I joined two boards, Phillips and sneak, and then, you know, started just invest and help entrepreneurs. Most of them were, you know, Indian Americans like me who were had great tech, were looking for the kind of go to market connections. And it was just a wonderful year to just de to unwind a bit. And along the, the way came CEO calls. And I'd asked myself, the question is the tech the best in the industry? Could you see value creation that was signi significant and you know, three, four months ago, Mohit and Carl Eschenbach and a few of the board members of cohesive called me and walk me through Mo's decision, which he'll talk about in a second. And we spent the last few months getting to know him, and he's everything you describe. He's not just the father of hyperconverge. And he wrote the Google file system, wicked smart, built a tech platform better than that second time. But we had to really kind of walk through the chemistry between us, which we did in long walks in, in, you know, discrete places so that people wouldn't find us in a Starbucks and start gossiping. So >>Why Sanjay? There you go. >>Actually, I should say it's a combination of two different decisions. The first one was to, for me to take a different role and I run the company as a CEO for, for nine years. And, you know, as a, as a technologist, I always like, you know, going deep into technology at the same time, the CEO duties require a lot of breadth, right? You're talking to customers, you're talking to partners, you're doing so much. And with the way we've been growing the with, you know, we've been fortunate, it was becoming hard to balance both. It's really also not fair to the company. Yeah. So I opted to do the depth job, you know, be the visionary, be the technologist. And that was the first decision to bring a CEO, a great CEO from outside. >>And I saw your video on the site. You said it was your decision. Yes. Go ahead. I have to ask you, cuz this is a real big transition for founders and you know, I have founder artists cuz everyone, you know, calls me that. But being the founder of a company, it's always hard to let go. I mean nine years as CEO, it's not like you had a, you had a great run. So this was it timing for you? Was it, was it a structural shift, like at super cloud, we're talking about a major shift that's happening right now in the industry. Was it a balance issue? Was it more if you wanted to get back in and in the tech >>Look, I, I also wanna answer, you know, why Sanja, but, but I'll address your question first. I always put the company first what's right for the company. Is it for me to start get stuck the co seat and try to juggle this depth and Brad simultaneously. I mean, I can stroke my ego a little bit there, but it's not good for the company. What's best for the company. You know, I'm a technologist. How about I oversee the technology part in partnership with so many great people I have in the company and I bring someone kick ass to be the CEO. And so then that was the second decision. Why Sanja when Sanjay, you know, is a very well known figure. He's managed billions of dollars of business in VMware. You know, been there, done that has, you know, some of the biggest, you know, people in the industry on his speed dial, you know, we were really fortunate to have someone like that, come in and accept the role of the CEO of cohesive. I think we can take the company to new Heights and I'm looking forward to my partnership with, with Sanja on this. >>It it's we, we called it the splash brothers and >>The, >>In the vernacular. It doesn't matter who gets the ball, whether it's step clay, we shoot. And I think if you look at some of the great partnerships, whether it was gates bomber, there, plenty of history of this, where a founder and a someone who was, it has to be complimentary skills. If I was a technologist myself and wanted to code we'd clash. Yeah. But I think this was really a match me in heaven because he, he can, I want him to keep innovating and building the best platform for today in the future. And our customers tell one customer told me, this is the best tech they've seen since VMware, 20 years ago, AWS, 10 years ago. And most recently this was a global 100 big customers. So I feel like this combination, now we have to show that it works. It's, you know, it's been three, four months. My getting to know him, you know, I'm day eight on the job, but I'm loving it. >>Well, it's a sluman model too. It's more modern example. You saw, he did it with Fred Ludy at service now. Yes. And, and of course at, at snowflake, yeah. And his book, you read his book. I dunno if you've read his book, amp it up, but app it up. And he says, I always you'll love this. Give great deference to the founder. Always show great respect. Right. And for good reason. So >>In fact, I mean you could talk to him, you actually met to >>Frank. I actually, you know, a month or so back, I actually had dinner with him in his ranch in Moana. And I posed the question. There was a number of CEOs that went there and I posed him the question. So Frank, you know, many of us, we grow being deaf guys, you know? And eventually when we take on the home of our CEO, we have to do breadth. How do you do it? And he's like, well, let me tell you, I was never a death guy. I'm a breath guy. >>I'm like, >>That's my answer. Yeah. >>So, so I >>Want the short story. So the day I got the job, I, I got a text from Frank and I said, what's your advice the first time CEO, three words, amp it up, >>Amp it up. Right? Yeah. >>And so you're always on brand, man. >>So you're an amazing operator. You've proven that time and time again at SAP, VMware, et cetera, you feel like now you, you, you wanna do both of those skills. You got the board and you got the operations cuz you look, you know, look at sloop when he's got Scarelli wherever he goes, he brings Scarelli with him as sort of the operator. How, how do you, how are you thinking >>About that? I mean it's early days, but yeah. Yeah. Small. I mean I've, you know, when I was, you know, it was 35,000 people at VMware, 80, 90,000 people at SAP, a really good run. The SAP run was 10 to 20 billion innovative products, especially in analytics and VMware six to 12 end user computing cloud. So I learned a lot. I think the company, you know, being about 2000 employees plus not to mayor tomorrow, but over the course next year I can meet everybody. Right? So first off the executive team, 10 of us, we're, we're building more and more cohesiveness if I could use that word between us, which is great, the next, you know, layers of VPs and every manager, I think that's possible. So I I'm a people person and a customer person. So I think when you take that sort of extroverted mindset, we'll bring energy to the workforce to, to retain the best and then recruit the best. >>And you know, even just the week we, we were announced that this announcement happened. Our website traffic went through the roof, the highest it's ever been, lots of resumes coming in. So, and then lots of customer engagement. So I think we'll take this, but I, I feel very good about the possibilities, because see, for me, I didn't wanna walk into the company to a company where the technology risk was high. Okay. I feel like that I can go to bed at night and the technology risk is low. This guy's gonna run a machine at the current and the future. And I'm hearing that from customers. Now, what I gotta do is get the, the amp it up part on the go to market. I know a little thing or too about >>That. You've got that down. I think the partnership is really key here. And again, nine use the CEO and then Sanja points to our super cloud trend that we've been looking at, which is there's another wave happening. There's a structural change in real time happening now, cloud one was done. We saw that transition, AWS cloud native now cloud native with an kind of operating system kind of vibe going on with on-premise hybrid edge. People say multi-cloud, but we're looking at this as an opportunity for companies like cohesive to go to the next level. So I gotta ask you guys, what do you see as structural change right now in the industry? That's disruptive. People are using cloud and scale and data to refactor their business models, change modern cases with cloud native. How are you guys looking at this next structural change that's happening right now? Yeah, >>I'll take that. So, so I'll start by saying that. Number one, data is the new oil and number two data is exploding, right? Every year data just grows like crazy managing data is becoming harder and harder. You mentioned some of those, right? There's so many cloud options available. Cloud one different vendors have different clouds. There is still on-prem there's edge infrastructure. And the number one problem that happens is our data is getting fragmented all over the place and managing so many fragments of data is getting harder and harder even within a cloud or within on-prem or within edge data is fragmented. Right? Number two, I think the hackers out there have realized that, you know, to make money, it's no longer necessary to Rob banks. They can actually see steal the data. So ransomware attacks on the rise it's become a boardroom level discussion. They say there's a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds or so. Right? So protecting your data has become very important security data. Security has become very important. Compliance is important, right? So people are looking for data management solutions, the next gen data management platform that can really provide all this stuff. And that's what cohesive is about. >>What's the difference between data management and backup. Explain that >>Backup is just an entry point. That's one use case. I wanna draw an analogy. Let's draw an analogy to my former company, Google right? Google started by doing Google search, but is Google really just a search engine. They've built a platform that can do multiple things. You know, they might have started with search, but then they went down to roll out Google maps and Gmail and YouTube and so many other things on that platform. So similarly backups might be just the first use case, but it's really about that platform on which you can do more with the data that's next gen data management. >>But, but you am, I correct. You don't consider yourself a security company. One of your competitors is actually pivoting and in positioning themselves as a security company, I've always felt like data management, backup and recovery data protection is an adjacency to security, but those two worlds are coming together. How do you see >>It? Yeah. The way I see it is that security is part of data management. You start maybe by backing with data, but then you secure it and then you do more with that data. If you're only doing security, then you're just securing the data. You, you gotta do more with the data. So data management is much bigger. So >>It's a security is a subset of data. I mean, there you go. Big TA Sanjay. >>Well, I mean I've, and I, I, I I'd agree. And I actually, we don't get into that debate. You know, I've told the company, listen, we'll figure that out. Cuz who cares about the positioning at the bottom? My email, I say we are data management and data security company. Okay. Now what's the best word that describes three nouns, which I think we're gonna do management security and analytics. Okay. He showed me a beautiful diagram, went to his home in the course of one of these, you know, discrete conversations. And this was, I mean, he's done this before. Many, if you watch on YouTube, he showed me a picture of an ice big iceberg. And he said, listen, you know, if you look at companies like snowflake and data bricks, they're doing the management security and mostly analytics of data. That's the top of the iceberg, the stuff you see. >>But a lot of the stuff that's get backed archive is the bottom of the iceberg that you don't see. And you try to, if you try to ask a question on age data, the it guy will say, get a ticket. I'll come back with three days. I'll UNIV the data rehydrate and then you'll put it into a database. And you can think now imagine that you could do live searches analytics on, on age data that's analytics. So I think the management, the security, the analytics of, you know, if you wanna call it secondary data or backed up data or data, that's not hot and live warm, colder is a huge opportunity. Now, what do you wanna call one phrase that describes all of it. Do you call that superpower management security? Okay, whatever you wanna call it. I view it as saying, listen, let's build a platform. >>Some people call Google, a search company. People, some people call Google and information company and we just have to go and pursue every CIO and every CSO that has a management and a security and do course analytics problem. And that's what we're doing. And when I talk to the, you know, I didn't talk to all the 3000 customers, but the biggest customers and I was doing diligence. They're like this thing has got enormous potential. Okay. And we just have to now go focus, get every fortune 1000 company to pick us because this problem, even the first use case you talk back up is a little bit like, you know, razor blades and soap you've needed. You needed it 30 years ago and you'll need it for 30 years. It's just that the tools that were built in the last generation that were companies formed in 1990s, one of them I worked for years ago are aids are not built for the cloud. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity where many of those, those, those nos management security analytics will become part of what we do. And we'll come up with the right phrase for what the companies and do course >>Sanjay. So ma and Sanja. So given that given that's this Google transition, I like that example search was a data problem. They got sequenced to a broader market opportunity. What super cloud we trying to tease out is what does that change over from a data standpoint, cuz now the operating environments change has become more complex and the enterprises are savvy. Developers are savvy. Now they want, they want SAS solutions. They want freemium and expanding. They're gonna drive the operations agenda with DevOps. So what is the complexity that needs to be abstracted away? How do you see that moment? Because this is what people are talking about. They're saying security's built in, driven by developers. Developers are driving operations behavior. So what is the shift? Where do you guys see this new? Yeah. Expansive for cohesive. How do you fit into super cloud? >>So let me build up from that entry point. Maybe back up to what you're saying is the super cloud, right? Let me draw that journey. So let's say the legacy players are just doing backups. How, how sad is it that you have one silo sitting there just for peace of mind as an insurance policy and you do nothing with the data. If you have to do something with the data, you have to build another silo, you have to build another copy. You have to manage it separately. Right. So clearly that's a little bit brain damaged. Right. So, okay. So now you take a little bit of, you know, newer vendors who may take that backup platform and do a little bit more with that. Maybe they provide security, but your problem still remains. How do you do more with the data? How do you do some analytics? >>Like he's saying, right. How do you test development on that? How do you migrate the data to the cloud? How do you manage it? The data at scale? How do you do you provide a unified experience across, across multiple cloud, which you're calling the super cloud. That's where cohesive goes. So what we do, we provide a platform, right? We have tentacles in on-prem in each of the clouds. And on top of that, it looks like one platform that you manage. We have a single control plane, a UI. If you may, a single pin of glass, if, if you may, that our customers can use to manage all of it. And now it looks, starts looking like one platform. You mentioned Google, do you, when you go to, you know, kind Google search or a URL, do you really care? What happens behind the scenes mean behind the scenes? Google's built a platform that spans the whole world. No, >>But it's interesting. What's behind the scenes. It's a beautiful now. And I would say, listen, one other thing to pull on Dave, on the security part, I saw a lot of vendors this day in this space, white washing a security message on top of backup. Okay. And CSO, see through that, they'll offer warranties and guarantees or whatever, have you of X million dollars with a lot of caveats, which will never paid because it's like escape clause here. We won't pay it. Yeah. And, and what people really want is a scalable solution that works. And you know, we can match every warranty that's easy. And what I heard was this was the most scalable solution at scale. And that's why you have to approach this with a Google type mindset. I love the fact that every time you listen to sun pitch, I would, what, what I like about him, the most common word to use is scale. >>We do things at scale. So I found that him and AUR and some of the early Google people who come into the company had thought about scale. And, and even me it's like day eight. I found even the non-tech pieces of it. The processes that, you know, these guys are built for simple things in some cases were better than some of the things I saw are bigger companies I'd been used to. So we just have to continue, you know, building a scale platform with the enterprise. And then our cloud product is gonna be the simple solution for the masses. And my view of the world is there's 5,000 big companies and 5 million small companies we'll push the 5 million small companies as the cloud. Okay. Amazon's an investor in the company. AWS is a big partner. We'll talk about I'm sure knowing John's interest in that area, but that's a cloud play and that's gonna go to the cloud really fast. You not build you're in the marketplace, you're in the marketplace. I mean, maybe talk about the history of the Amazon relationship investing and all that. >>Yeah, absolutely. So in two years back late 2020, we, you know, in collaboration with AWS who also by the way is an investor now. And in cohesive, we rolled out what we call data management as a service. It's our SaaS service where we run our software in the cloud. And literally all customers have to do is just go there and sign on, right? They don't have to manage any infrastructure and stuff. What's nice is they can then combine that with, you know, software that they might have bought from cohesive. And it still looks like one platform. So what I'm trying to say is that they get a choice of the, of the way they wanna consume our software. They can consume it as a SAS service in the cloud. They can buy our software, manage it themselves, offload it to a partner on premises or what have you. But it still looks like that one platform, what you're calling a Supercloud >>Yeah. And developers are saying, they want the bag of Legos to compose their solutions. That's the Nirvana they want to get there. So that's, it has to look the same. >>Well, what is it? What we're calling a Superlo can we, can we test that for a second? So data management and service could span AWS and on-prem with the identical experience. So I guess I would call that a Supercloud I presume it's not gonna through AWS span multiple clouds, but, but >>Why not? >>Well, well interesting cuz we had this, I mean, so, okay. So we could in the future, it doesn't today. Well, >>David enough kind of pause for a second. Everything that we do there, if we do it will be customer driven. So there might be some customers I'll give you one Walmart that may want to store the data in a non AWS cloud risk cuz they're competitors. Right. So, but the control plane could still be in, in, in the way we built it, but the data might be stored somewhere else. >>What about, what about a on-prem customer? Who says, Hey, I, I like cohesive. I've now got multiple clouds. I want the identical experience across clouds. Yeah. Okay. So, so can you do that today? How do you do that today? Can we talk >>About that? Yeah. So basically think roughly about the split between the data plane and the control plane, the data plane is, you know, our cohesive clusters that could be sitting on premises that could be sitting in multiple data centers or you can run an instance of that cluster in the cloud, whichever cloud you choose. Right. That's what he was referring to as the data plane. So collectively all these clusters from the data plane, right? They stored the data, but it can all be managed using the control plane. So you still get that single image, the single experience across all clouds. And by the way, the, the, the, the cloud vendor does actually benefit because here's a customer. He mentioned a customer that may not wanna go to AWS, but when they get the data plane on a different cloud, whether it's Azure, whether it's the Google cloud, they then get data management services. Maybe they're able to replicate the data over to AWS. So AWS also gains. >>And your deployment model is you instantiate the cohesive stack on each of the regions and clouds, is that correct? And you building essentially, >>It all happens behind the scenes. That's right. You know, just like Google probably has their tentacles all over the world. We will instantiate and then make it all look like one platform. >>I mean, you should really think it's like a human body, right? The control planes, the head. Okay. And that controls everything. The data plane is large because it's a lot of the data, right? It's the rest of the body, that data plane could be wherever you want it to be. Traditionally, the part the old days was tape. Then you got disk. Now you got multiple clouds. So that's the way we think about it. And there on that piece of it will be neutral, right? We should be multi-cloud to the data plane being every single place. Cause it's customer demand. Where do you want your store data? Air gapped. On-prem no problem. We'll work with Dell. Okay. You wanna be in a particular cloud, AWS we'll work then optimized with S3 and glacier. So this is where I think the, the path to a multi-cloud or Supercloud is to be customer driven, but the control plane sits in Amazon. So >>We're blessed to have a number of, you know, technical geniuses in here. So earlier we were speaking to Ben wa deja VI, and what they do is different. They don't instantiate an individual, you know, regions. What they do is of a single global. Is there a, is there an advantage of doing it the way the cohesive does it in terms of simplicity or how do you see that? Is that a future direction for you from a technology standpoint? What are the trade offs there? >>So you want to be where the data is when you said single global, I take it that they run somewhere and the data has to go there. And in this day age, correct >>Said that. He said, you gotta move that in this >>Day and >>Age query that's, you know, across regions, look >>In this day and age with the way the data is growing, the way it is, it's hard to move around the data. It's much easier to move around the competition. And in these instances, what have you, so let the data be where it is and you manage it right there. >>So that's the advantage of instantiating in multiple regions. As you don't have to move the >>Data cost, we have the philosophy we call it. Let's bring the, the computation to the data rather than the data to >>The competition and the same security model, same governance model, same. How do you, how do you federate that? >>So it's all based on policies. You know, this overarching platform controlled by, by the control plane, you just, our customers just put in the policies and then the underlying nuts and bolts just take care >>Of, you know, it's when I first heard and start, I started watching some of his old videos, ACE really like hyperconverged brought to secondary storage. In fact, he said, oh yeah, that's great. You got it. Because I first called this idea, hyperconverged secondary storage, because the idea of him inventing hyperconverge was bringing compute to storage. It had never been done. I mean, you had the kind of big VC stuff, but these guys were the first to bring that hyperconverge at, at Nutanix. So I think this is that same idea of bringing computer storage, but now applied not to the warm data, but to the rest of the data, including a >>Lot of, what about developers? What's, what's your relationship with developers? >>Maybe you talk about the marketplace and everything >>He's yeah. And I'm, I'm curious as to do you have a PAs layer, what we call super PAs layer to create an identical developer experience across your Supercloud. I'm gonna my >>Term. So we want our customers not just to benefit from the software that we write. We also want them to benefit from, you know, software that's written by developers by third party people and so on and so forth. So we also support a marketplace on the platform where you can download apps from third party developers and run them on this platform. There's a, a number of successful apps. There's one, you know, look like I said, our entry point might be backups, but even when backups, we don't do everything. Look, for instance, we don't backup mainframes. There is a, a company we partner with, you know, and their software can run in our marketplace. And it's actually used by many, many of our financial customers. So our customers don't get, just get the benefit of what we build, but they also get the benefit of what third parties build. Another analogy I like to draw. You can tell. And front of analogy is I drew an analogy to hyperscale is like Google. Yeah. The second analogy I like to draw is that to a simple smartphone, right? A smartphone starts off by being a great phone. But beyond that, it's also a GPS player. It's a, it's a, it's a music player. It's a camera, it's a flashlight. And it also has a marketplace from where you can download apps and extend the power of that platform. >>Is that a, can we think of that as a PAs layer or no? Is it really not? You can, okay. You can say, is it purpose built for what you're the problem that you're trying to solve? >>So we, we just built APIs. Yeah. Right. We have an SDK that developers can use. And through those APIs, they get to leverage the underlying services that exist on the platform. And now developers can use that to take advantage of all that stuff. >>And it was, that was a key factor for me too. Cause I, what I, you know, I've studied all the six, seven players that sort of so-called leaders. Nobody had a developer ecosystem, nobody. Right? The old folks were built for the hardware era, but anyones were built for the cloud to it didn't have any partners were building on their platform. So I felt for me listen, and that the example of, you know, model nine rights, the name of the company that does back up. So there's, there's companies that are built on and there's a number of others. So our goal is to have a big tent, David, to everybody in the ecosystem to partner with us, to build on this platform. And, and that may take over time, but that's the way we're build >>It. And you have a metadata layer too, that has the intelligence >>To correct. It's all abstract. That that's right. So it's a combination of data and metadata. We have lots of metadata that keeps track of where the data is. You know, it allows you to index the data you can do quick searches. You can actually, you, we talking about the control plan from that >>Tracing, >>You can inject a search that'll through search throughout your multi-cloud environment, right? The super cloud that you call it. We have all that, all that goodness sounds >>Like a Supercloud John. >>Yeah. I mean, data tracing involved can trace the data lineage. >>You, you can trace the data lineage. So we, you know, provide, you know, compliance and stuff. So you can, >>All right. So my final question to wrap up, we guys, first of all, thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy, San Jose. We, we know what you're gonna do. You're gonna amp it up and, you know, knock all your numbers out. Think you always do. But what I'm interested in, what you're gonna jump into, cuz now you're gonna have the creative license to jump in to the product, the platform there has to be the next level in your mind. Can you share your thoughts on where this goes next? Love the control plane, separate out from the data plane. I think that plays well for super. How >>Much time do you have John? This guy's got, he's got a wealth. Ditis keep >>Going. Mark. Give us the most important thing you're gonna focus on. That kind of brings the super cloud and vision together. >>Yeah. Right away. I'm gonna, perhaps I, I can ion into two things. The first one is I like to call it building the, the machine, the system, right. Just to draw an analogy. Look, I draw an analogy to the us traffic system. People from all walks of life, rich, poor Democrats, Republicans, you know, different states. They all work in the, the traffic system and we drive well, right. It's a system that just works. Whereas in some other countries, you know, the system doesn't work. >>We know, >>We know a few of those. >>It's not about works. It's not about the people. It's the same people who would go from here to those countries and, and not dry. Well, so it's all about the system. So the first thing I, I have my sights on is to really strengthen the system that we have in our research development to make it a machine. I mean, it functions quite well even today, but wanna take it to the next level. Right. So that I wanna get to a point where innovation just happens in the grassroots. And it just, just like >>We automations scale optic brings all, >>Just happens without anyone overseeing it. Anyone there's no single point of bottleneck. I don't have to go take any diving catches or have you, there are people just working, you know, in a decentralized fashion and innovation just happens. Yeah. The second thing I work on of course is, you know, my heart and soul is in, you know, driving the vision, you know, the next level. And that of course is part of it. So those are the two things >>We heard from all day in our super cloud event that there's a need for an, an operating system. Yeah. Whether that's defacto standard or open. Correct. Do you see a consortium around the corner potentially to bring people together so that things could work together? Cuz there really isn't no stand there. Isn't a standards bodies. Now we have great hyperscale growth. We have on-prem we got the super cloud thing happening >>And it's a, it's kind of like what is an operating system? Operating system exposes some APIs that the applications can then use. And if you think about what we've been trying to do with the marketplace, right, we've built a huge platform and that platform is exposed through APIs. That third party developers can use. Right? And even we, when we, you know, built more and more services on top, you know, we rolled our D as we rolled out, backup as a service and a ready for thing security as a service governance, as a service, they're using those APIs. So we are building a distributor, putting systems of sorts. >>Well, congratulations on a great journey. Sanja. Congratulations on taking the hem. Thank you've got ball control. Now you're gonna be calling the ball cohesive as they say, it's, >>It's a team. It's, you know, I think I like that African phrase. If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you wanna go far, you go together. So I've always operated with the best deal. I'm so fortunate. This is to me like a dream come true because I always thought I wanted to work with a technologist that frees me up to do what I like. I mean, I started as an engineer, but that's not what I am today. Right? Yeah. So I do understand the product and this category I think is right for disruption. So I feel excited, you know, it's changing growing. Yeah. No. And it's a, it requires innovation with a cloud scale mindset and you guys have been great friends through the years. >>We'll be, we'll be watching you. >>I think it's not only disruption. It's creation. Yeah. There's a lot of white space that just hasn't been created yet. >>You're gonna have to, and you know, the proof, isn't the pudding. Yeah. You already have five of the biggest 10 financial institutions in the us and our customers. 25% of the fortune 500 users, us two of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies in the world use us. Probably, you know, some of the biggest companies, you know, the cars you have, you know, out there probably are customers. So it's already happening. >>I know you got an IPO filed confidentially. I know you can't talk numbers, but I can tell by your confidence, you're feeling good right now we are >>Feeling >>Good. Yeah. One day, one week, one month at a time. I mean, you just, you know, I like the, you know, Jeff Bezos, Andy jazzy expression, which is, it's always day one, you know, just because you've had success, even, you know, if, if a and when an IPO O makes sense, you just have to stay humble and hungry because you realize, okay, we've had a lot of success in the fortune 1000, but there's a lot of white space that hasn't picked USS yet. So let's go, yeah, there's lots of midmarket account >>Product opportunities are still, >>You know, I just stay humble and hungry and if you've got the team and then, you know, I'm really gonna be working also in the ecosystem. I think there's a lot of very good partners. So lots of ideas brew through >>The head. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on our super cloud event and, and, and also doubling up on the news of the new appointment and congratulations on the success guys. Coverage super cloud 22, I'm sure. Dave ante, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more segments after this break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, actually, CUBE virtual coverage of Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE. We're not in person this year. Normally we're on the floor, we're talking to all the guests. This year, obviously, because of the pandemic we're going to be doing remote and of course, I'm proud to have a CUBE alumni back on the program. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing for Dell Technologies. Cheryl, great to see you remotely, bummer we couldn't be in person, thanks for coming on. >> I know, thank you John. It's great to be with you virtually again. >> You know, I just want to just point out that obviously we're not face to face. Normally Dell Technology World is a real celebration. It's the, it's a culmination of all the announcements, all the community, all the partners, it's, it's actually a huge partner event as well as a customer event. You're running global partners. How has this pandemic changed your world? People still got to do business. More pressure for modern apps, programmable infrastructure Hybrid Cloud. The world's not stopping. What is your take on this? Because it's been a real challenge but it's an also an opportunity for the folks who can get through it. What's your take? >> Yeah, it's just been remarkable. You know, I tell people in some ways I find this the great equalizer because it has all of us around the world in the exact same place but our partners have just been remarkable. You know, we see inspirational work all over the place. They're so resilient and they have just been focused on the customer. And so together we have just been really focused on helping all of our customers as we know, in the early weeks and months of this now, you know, it was pivoting to support business continuity and enabling their employees to work remotely. And our partners just rallied to the cause. You know, they bring their expertise and their capabilities and their services. And you know, we've all been talking about digital transformation and the need to modernize all of our infrastructures. And I think we're all seeing it just accelerate. So in so many ways, it's just pushed it to the forefront and a lot of us, because we don't have an alternative, we're all engaging in modalities like this, but we're getting business done, right? We're helping our customers really respond to the needs of the business. And I think in the early stages of this, you know, we've been characterizing it as there was a lot of go fast, go light. Now we're seeing, you know, that we're all recognizing we're going to be in this circumstance for the foreseeable future, a little longer than maybe we all intended and now it's do it right. So we see a lot of just good work around hardening infrastructure, working on security vulnerabilities. How do we harden a VPN environment? So to be candid, you know, the breadth of our portfolio and a lot of the infrastructure solutions, our partnership with VMware has never been more relevant. And a lot of those capabilities our partners are leveraging to be able to support their customers needs and demands. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the VMware and I want to bring that up because I've been doing a lot of interviews and one of the themes for Dell Tech World Digital Experience this year has been the VMware integration. And what's interesting is is that that investment of being tightly coupled with VMware and your other partners is paying off now because as people need to be truly agile and flexible because of the disruption, the way the work environment, the workforce, workloads and the workplace has been changed they really need to lean on Dell. And you guys have that slogan, the power of partnering with Dell Technologies. I want to dig into what that means because the customers, your partners, end user customer there's kind of two spectrums. There's the, this is a tailwind, I have to go faster and put this modern app, I'm going to double down and solve problems. Whether it's a call center is getting stuff built quickly to solve needs. Two, well, this is a pandemic that's integral. So we're going to retool while we're kind of downtime. I won't say downtime, but like, while they're not truly active, whether you're in airlines or whatever, there's different spectrums and everything in between. You guys are bringing a lot to the table through these partnerships and the integrations. Can you talk about how that's paying off and two, how you guys are helping your partners and give some examples? >> Yeah, well, thank you John. And, you know, we have been saying for some time that we really do think the cross sell up, sell opportunity is a differentiated opportunity for our partners teaming with Dell Technologies. You know, even in the last several months while we've all been kind of working from home, our innovation engine hasn't stopped. I mean, we've launched nine new products in nine weeks all of which are just innovations that continue to represent areas where partners can team with us to bring those modernized applications to bear. And to your point, many of our partners and our customers are using this time when we're all remote and you can't go onsite, they're doubling down on their training. You know, we've seen an unbelievable demand in our competency training and our certification capabilities, clearly with the product launches. I just mentioned, there's new training to enable them around the new offerings. Our PowerStore product was just launched. So unbelievable opportunities. And as you said with VMware, you know, we have been for some time, when we talk about cross sell our partners that sell two and three lines of business, their revenues are multiples higher than partners that don't and candidly partners that sell three lines of business and sell VMware are selling like 148 times the revenue and I think it's a reflection of their engaging in strategic sticky services, rich deployments of hybrid cloud implementations with their customers, and the customers need their help and expertise like never before. So I think the results are showing true. And I also think in this dynamic of everything's gone digital, everything's pivoted to digital, you know, our partners have been asking how can we help them be more effective and successful in their digital marketing efforts and activities? How can we assist them in virtual selling? You know, everybody's accustomed to face to face sales contacts and we've all learned how to use your platform and Zoom and teams and all these other modalities that allow us to frankly be highly effective and efficient. And our partners candidly are leaning into some of our services and tools and capabilities that honestly have been there for some time, but like remote diagnostics, for example, remote capabilities so that you don't have to go on the data center floor and you can still be doing assessments and provisioning and orchestration and deployment for your customers in this time. And you're right, some customers and partners are using this as an opportunity to invest so that, you know, when the world opens up, this will end at some point, they are incredibly well positioned to move forward and take advantage of what's already been a fast moving market. And I just think this environment it's accelerated, the move and adoption, like never before. >> Yeah, and to your point, I think the thing we're seeing is that the vendors and the customers that have been prepared, suppliers and customers that have been thinking about it, you can see them having performance. Even in the challenging handcuffed environment that they're in with the whole, you know, disruption working at home to the data center because the edge and the data center are now connecting and you've got hybrid public, multi-cloud developing and everyone's got to learn and build out at the same time. So it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because you know, the word virtual event has been kicked around. We have our own virtual event thing and everyone's doing it. This is theCUBE virtual but they don't use the word digital, but we say digital transformation. Is it digital, virtual transformation? So you've got virtual, I guess, reality virtual spaces, digital as digital, explain this from your perspective, how you see digital and virtual marketing and, or learning as a critical part of your program offerings because people still got to get the new things, they got to learn. >> I honestly, I think it's gone from a nice to have, and we all acknowledge that it's a transformation in the world of marketing to a, now it's a must have, right? I mean, when you no longer can do in person events, and many of our partners would have looked at that as a demand generation activity, they'd be capturing the leads from all the conversations we'd be having on a solution expo floor. We'd be having our in person events to now, we're going to convey our information and knowledge and maybe a virtual setting but that pivot to digital marketing, your online presence, the personalization at scale, making sure we acknowledged and understand that we have to meet our buyers and acknowledge the buyer journey has changed. And I think it's a must have now. So it's no longer a nice to have and we've all been describing the pace of change. But I think when you couple some of the trends in the industry with just the reality of this pandemic, that's making each of us be more resourceful than ever. You know, we, for example, I've seen our partners pivot the utilization of their MDF dollars into digital alternatives. They are certainly doing these Zoom experiences but they're also investing in their web properties and their search and making sure that as we pivot to digital we, for example, on the marketing side, we pivoted quickly to kind of stand up what we're calling an agile pod and it was a digital first agile pod that was frankly all aimed at training, enablement, social media guides, webinars on expertise on how we as a company were responding. What was our internal communication strategy, our external communication strategy. And I just think this appetite for training, knowledge. Some of it was necessity and some of it is we're all home and we have time and we want to hone our skills to ensure that we're ready. So I've never been busier as much as we're all working from home. We have never been busier on supporting the great and innovative work that our partners are doing but also really focused on the training, best practice sharing, enablement and webinars on how we're in it together, right? How can we help each other really respond in a sustaining way? Honestly, not just an interim way of our new digital capabilities, marketing capabilities. And I think we're experiencing, you know, what I think the opportunity of this digital trend in marketing is the handshake between marketing and sales has never been tighter. And I think really done well, we are going to provide a more personalized experience for our prospects and our customers. We're going to make our sellers more productive. We're going to be engaging along that continuum. We kind of it a digital heartbeat. We're going to be responding to where they are online and then we're also going to be meeting in person or over a virtual Zoom. And you're going to be accelerating in a highly relevant, much more personalized way to drive to the outcome of these solutions. It's a richer experience. So it's less about is marketing creating a bunch of leads that I can hand over to my sellers as much as what's the overall customer experience? And that experience needs to be a rich, personalized one that kind of transcends over marketing and sales. >> Yeah, Cheryl, you have an amazing vision, I think that is so spot on, you're on point. And I think you bring up a whole kind of sea change. It's really transformational just in the thinking, you mentioned, oh, just put out leads, also just, it's not about just standing up events either. You mentioned sustainability, how to have that heartbeat. This is a whole new level of thinking. I mean, every company the adage used to be, every company used to be a data company, every company will be a data company, true. Now you're seeing every company becoming a media company. Where you are probably doing more hosting of things. You're on camera more. So this new media API is developing where you want the command control, you want the truth, you want the community, you want the authenticity. This is the new, this is the new digital marketing, real time, agile and fast and relevant and cool too. What's your, expand more on your vision? >> And test and learn, you know, is a word we use a lot because instead of, you know, having to build something, go put it out, let's have some metrics and measures on how effective it was. The speed with which you can garner real time feedback. You know, everything needs to be more modular in natures, you know, snackable, if you will in nature, so that you can adapt and respond to what your customers are telling you, right? And I mean, I think we've been talking about consumerization of IT for some time. And I think this digital marketing is just the expression within marketing of how each of us come to work. And we're all at home as consumers engaging in this digital way as a consumer every day. So now when we bring it to work we bring our own preferences and in a B2B setting and a B2B context, we want to engage and it accelerates just the learning cycle. So I think it's a combination of the tools, the automation that exists now. So when you talk about leveraging AI and machine learning in the context of marketing automation, it's just putting to use all these technical trends that we've been discussing for some time in the context of customer experience. So I think this, like I said, the handshake between marketing and sales it's all about staying customer centric, listening to what the customers are telling you, their interests and preferences are. How do we respond in the most, highly relevant way around how we can help them, and done well, it's a positive experience but it's also an accelerated experience. You can get to the answer faster. And as long as we get to the answer faster, that's what the customer is looking for. Then it's a win, win for everybody. >> That's awesome, I love, I love that conversation because this brings up kind of the future for that, for your organization and your customers as you guys have this global partner network. Okay, and one of the things that the pandemic has shown is that with these digital technologies and virtual technologies, it's not a physical event, it's global. I mean, instantly Dell Technologies World you'd have to fly there, certainly from overseas, you could certainly do that. But now with one click of a button, you're in The programs that you have are global in nature. I'm sure there's some regional segmentation that's done with cloud and all that good stuff but you aren't going to have to recast your partner programs. Can you share how you're helping partners with their digital transformation? Didn't just give a couple examples of specifics of if I'm a partner what's in for me, Cheryl, what's going on? How is Dell helping me today? >> Yeah, well, I commented a little bit about this digital first kind of agile pod work we did. Some of that is selling guides, social media guides, how to actually do social selling, how to pivot some best practices around, you know, what activities can you put your MDF to good use that is showing really positive returns in the short term. So it's a lot of best practice sharing. And then candidly, we as a company, as we put campaigns in market, or we're giving marketing assets, collateral, social opportunities to our partners, it's all about how to help them get educated and use what we're already providing for them. So we recognize that, you know, partner's capabilities will vary across the board and certainly regionally, as you said but we definitely are helping them with, you know, here's what we're seeing around industry solutions. Here are certain industry verticals we know are responding or, you know, coming out of this environment faster than others. Here's campaigns that you can leverage both modularly or full-term key to be able to drive that. So to your point, the handshake, the support, the overall engagement of our partner community has never been higher. I mean, I'll give you a good example. You know, we talked about training and this opportunity to reach more people through these forums than in person. You know, we conduct trainings of presale technical teams around the world. We call it our heroes events, and these are in, you know, typically in person, but now they've gone virtual. We've trained over 18,000 presales technical engineers just in the first half alone to be able leverage our remote tools lean in and leverage the integration around VMware like we were just discussing. What are the new capabilities that have launched around, you know, VxRail with VCF Foundation and how they can go deploy. So in many ways we actually are touching and addressing the audience much wider than we might have otherwise. And I can put my subject matter experts, my best experts in the company on a Zoom forum like this. And I can have him in Sydney, Australia, Paris. I can have them in San Francisco on the same day and they never leave their home. So it's actually, we've all been very resilient, but are finding I think in the go-forward world, it'll be a hybrid model. We're going to leverage some of these best practices and tools. Even when the world reopens, we certainly will be doing in person events, again, that's going to come back but I do think it will be forever changed. And we're going to leverage this hybrid model with our partners and they're bringing their expertise to bear. And a lot of the vertical industry capabilities they bring, they're able to reach an audience broader over capabilities like this. >> You know, it's going to be a lot of fun too, all this new learning and all this headroom from asynchronous progressions that are nonlinear. As you mentioned training, people are getting trained faster to made for TV experiences. You're going to start to see, and then when hybrid events come back, they're going to be different. They may be more intimate. All new opportunities to learn and move fast and that's something that you guys have done. So congratulations, Cheryl, thanks for that great insight. My final question for you, this year for the partners watching who are there in person, 'cause we're not, we're remote. What should they take away from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience event this year? What's your, what's your, what's your summary here? >> Well, I hope they enjoy the couple of days and you certainly have heard, you know, Michael and Jeff and Pat and others talk about the innovation engine at Dell Technologies is not slowing down. You know, the tight partnership we have with VMware and the level of capabilities that we're bringing in this as a service, Hybrid Cloud, 5G, world of Hybrid Cloud deployments. We absolutely have our foot on the gas and are going to continue to be that partner to provide the world's best infrastructure and capabilities. And when you look at the power of partnership and to your point on what we're describing with our global alliance partners, the innovative and inspirational work, some of our OEM customers and partners have done is just remarkable. And like I said, we are growing faster than the competition, even in this environment. So we just really appreciate the partnership very much. And I want them to lean in with Dell Technologies because it's not going to slow down as we've just been discussing. I think it's going to continue to move fast and we absolutely are committed for the longterm to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to market. >> Well, certainly people who have good business performance in this environment certainly are relevant and have the right product mix, made the right moves and it's paying off, a lot more to do. Cheryl, congratulations for all the success and the you're a great leader heading up the global partner marketing group over there. Congratulations, you've got a great vision, we totally agree. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John, it's been a pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here with Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, theCUBE virtual covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies, World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. This is theCUBE virtual. It's a virtual event. We're not in person this year, obviously because of the COVID pandemic, our guest Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies. Great to see him back on again and remotely. Michael, sorry we couldn't be there in person but thank you for coming on virtually. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be with you John. >> You know what a year it's been. I got to say, it's been one of those years where you don't know what's going to happen next. And it's been kind of crazy. I want to get your take on how you guys are getting through it. And specifically you guys have had great business performance. We've seen the results of what's going on with Dell Technologies, VMware, but there's a crisis. People need more machines, they need more internet access. There's a huge demand for modern applications with cloud and on-premises, not everyone's going to be there on-premises. So the workplace, the workforce, the workloads are all changing, but you hit all of them. The consumer from having a great machine, internet access, this kind of digital divide where people are remote schooling is super important. Can you talk about how you guys are doing, how the company's doing, how you're doing and what you guys are doing to help bridge this new cultural environment of this digital divide? >> Sure. So again, great to be with you and thanks for all your great coverage at Dell Technologies World. Once again this time virtually. Look, I think having a resilient supply chain is always important but these last eight months it's been incredibly important. Demand has certainly shifted around and having you know, secure remote work from anywhere has been a high priority for lots of organizations. I think something like 4.5 billion people were asked to go stay in their homes. So, you know it was work from home, learn from home, entertainment, E-commerce, telemedicine, everything went online and I think we got a glimpse of the future. And I think a lot of this actually gets carried forward. And certainly the priorities that we've been focused on, you know multicloud, app modernization and containers, the tremendous growth at the edge, data management, software defining the networks, AI, 5G, all these things I think get accelerated. So amid the tragedy and the challenges. I do think there's a great acceleration of the fourth industrial revolution. >> You brought this up last time, last year as well. And again this is pre everything's kind of going to be before COVID kind of after the COVID world, but you were kind of teasing this out last year and I want to get your thoughts because now more than ever, you mentioned some people don't have laptops to even do the remote work and remote schooling. And then internet access has been discussed for generation of having more broadband in areas that are underserved. This is a super important piece. Can you just share some of the initiatives that you guys are taking because I know you guys have some things going on, you're doing a lot of philanthropy. Again the supply chain is on the business side is super important, but you know specifically this society, how are you guys helping? >> Right. So, you know just in the United States, you've got roughly 15 million kids who don't have either the broadband access or a device. And we've got a pilot program running to begin to address this. And, you know it's part of the broader 2030 moonshot goals that we laid out, you know actually last year for the next decade. But I do think, you know what the pandemic exposed, it exposed the fault lines in our society in access to healthcare, to education, to justice and certainly, you know we have a kind of digital inequality, right? If you don't have a device and you don't have access, you're left out of economic opportunity and you know that's something we should all be focused on. We believe, our broader ecosystem can make a big difference there. And it's one of our priorities. >> You know technology has been a big enabler over the years. You know we've talked many times privately also on theCUBE around these inflection points. I mean you started Dell technologies in your dorm room and now you got kids doing stuff in the elementary, (indistinct) to the thing on space with, you know cybersecurity and space is a big trend and they're starting early in elementary school. Now you got the boardroom and everywhere in between. The tech trends are the big opportunity. You know I want to dig into it. And I want to get your thoughts because you know with cloud computing, gen one, you say check, scale, it matters. But the big wave right now is everything as a service. And so you got to be nimble. You got to be agile. But that's easy to say and hard to do. I want to get your thoughts on how you see everything as a service from platform to SaaS, to developer as a service, to cube as a service, to Dell as a service. Everything is becoming a service. What's under the covers there because it's not easy. Automation machine learning. What do you seek? This is going to get us out of the pandemic as more people are agile. Give me your thoughts. >> That's right. So, you know we've actually, as you point out, we've been at this for awhile and you know if you look on our balance sheet, you'll see almost $24 billion deferred revenues. So it's not a completely new idea to us. And we are aggressively expanding as a service. So our customers and partners can access our solutions anyway they want and we're committed to making everything that we provide available as a service. And one of the things we're talking a lot about here at Dell Technologies World is providing a consistent experience no matter where customers run their workloads. And so we've unveiled project Apex, which is really bringing together all of our as a service and cloud offerings into a consistent unified effort. We're enhancing the Dell technologies cloud console. And this is going to give customers the power to manage every aspect of their cloud journey. And as a service journey through a simple unified self service experience. We're going to be talking a lot about storage as a service. Storage is always important to Dell technologies and providing scalable lastic storage resources that can be deployed, owned and managed on premise, but owned by Dell Technologies. And we're going to bring some updates to the Dell Technologies cloud platform to make it easier, simpler to consume, lower the barriers to entry and extending our subscription availability. >> You know in the platform businesses and all the people talk about platforms. And over the years, when you have a platform business you have to kind of dog food or kind of you know, do it first before the customers dig in to using the service. You mentioned, you guys have been doing Dell as a service across your product lines, and we've documented that certainly on SiliconANGLE in theCUBE, but now you got to bring it to customers. Can you tell me how that's going because with the pandemic, some things are obviously customers need to double down on building modern apps, having programmable infrastructure. As you guys have everything as a service from the Dell side. Now the customers have to do their part. They've turned their offerings into as a service. Can you take us through trends you're seeing in your customer base around the pandemic? And you know this is a permanent is a cyclical. What's the customer impact of everything as a service. >> I think this is clearly the demand, you know trend (laughs) from customers. And, as I said we've been embracing it for some time. One of the reasons we created this project Apex is to bring it all together because I would say we want to to go faster right? (laughs) And we always want to to go faster. And the, you know what you've seen from customers in the last eight months is you kind of exposed the digitally enabled and the not so much digitally enabled. And, a lot of customers have accelerated their progress on their digital journey quite a bit during these last eight months. And, you know as I said, I think a lot of that gets carried forward. You know we ourselves, over a weekend basically said, okay everybody work from home now has worked really well. There's lots of benefits to that. There are productivity benefits, environmental benefits. And I think we're all finding ways that we could be more productive. And I think a lot of this will persist after the pandemic. >> Yeah. When we were covering VMworld just recently this event that they had the virtual event. What came out of that was the 5G trend. And some of the conversation was 5G is not a consumer app. It's really a business app. Could you share your thoughts on 5G? Because it will enable the edge, intelligent edge 5G is super important. What's your vision on how 5G will roll out? Do you agree with it more as a business app not so much consumer? >> Yeah. I mean the first application will be, hey let's have 5G phones. Great. But you really can't talk faster all right, on your 5G phone. (laughs) So what is this all about? It's about making things intelligent and having the things talk to each other and they're going to be way more things talking to each other than there are people. Imagine every arm processor or embedded processor out there in the world now being connected and intelligent, the amount of data that gets created. So it's really about connecting all the things. And that is you know incredibly exciting possibility. Organizations have to reimagine themselves. Given that future and 5G will be the digital fabric that allows this new future to be created. >> When you look at Dell Technologies out 10 years to 2030, what does it look like as you eliminate about the internet things and the edge, what's the vision for Dell 2030? >> So first I think you're going to have autonomous infrastructure and it's going to be highly distributed on the intelligent edge. And that's going to enable enormous advances in really all human endeavors and Dell Technologies is going to be the essential infrastructure company to power all of this. And, you know our moonshot goals point the way in another sense, where we talk about advancing sustainability, cultivating inclusion, transforming lives and upholding ethics and data privacy. And you know we didn't create those priorities for the last eight months, but certainly the last eight months put a real magnifying glass and exclamation point on their importance. And, you know we continue to be super optimistic about the role technology has in the world and the role that we can play in helping customers achieve that. >> And the role of cloud is cloud going to be abstracted away? Is that cloud going to continue to be a big part of it as cloud on premise, mean as these environments look more cloud-like operationally and autonomous, does that kind of go away in 10 years? Do you see that becoming just part of the resource pool? How do you view that? >> Well, clouds are infrastructure, right? So you can have a public cloud, you can have an edge cloud, a private cloud, a Telco cloud, or hybrid cloud, or multicloud, here cloud, there cloud, everywhere cloud cloud. Yet, they'll all be there, but it's basically infrastructure. And how do you make that as easy to consume and create the flexibility that enables everything. >> Yeah. And we saw that VMware, they had talked about telco cloud as a trend. We see that everything's going to be a cloud. Everything will be a service. That's our view. I want to get your thoughts on entrepreneurial thinking. You've always been an entrepreneur, even as you've got this massively billions of dollars in companies out there you're still innovating. Right now entrepreneurial thinking is needed more than ever. And can you share your advice to people out there who wanted to be more digitally enabled, who have to think about the next 10 years. What entrepreneurial thinking can they apply now? Because let's face it COVID has exposed what needs to be worked on what should not be worked on. So there's clearly a digital push there. What entrepreneurial tactics what would you share with the folks out there who really want to be on the wave here and be digitally enabled position for the future? >> Well, you know I kind of started with experiment, take a risk, find a new problem and figure out how to go solve it. And look, I continue to be inspired by all the new entrepreneurs and new companies out there being created. And while there's certainly, you know one trend in consolidation in parts of our industry, there are always new and interesting things happening in the world of technology. And that's where you see a lot of these new companies being created. And you know that always excites me. I don't see too much of a shortage of entrepreneurial thinking out there, but well you know use more of it because that's how the world pushes forward when you have people with new ideas, willing to take risks, capital available to, you know support that risk-taking, you know that's where you get new innovation. >> Yeah. I could see the opportunities executed on them. I want to get your thoughts on AI, obviously as we've seen huge backlash on some of the, with the elections here going on, and you got all the, you know, tech for good on one side, tech for bad on the other and everything in between. Technology isn't any abler. And it does have some consequences, but there's some great things going on with technology. I know you've been advocate for the past two years of specifically hardcore for technology for good. As AI becomes more prominent as machine learning and data comes into the picture, can you give your thoughts on where we are with technology for good? What are some of the highlights and what areas we need to work more on? And how has the role data and AI play in it? >> I do think technology is overwhelmingly used for good and, you know long time ago, you know fire was technology, right? Somebody came to the village and said, "Hey we got this new thing you know called fire. "And you know it can warm a home "or it could burn down the whole village." But overwhelmingly technology innovations have advanced human progress. And I only think it's accelerating from here. And as everything becomes intelligent and connected, AI is the only way to double reason over all that data, especially the streaming data in real time. And all of that is going to accrue positively to great human outcomes. And every business has to reimagine itself, to create better products and services, to create better outcomes for the students, the patients, for manufacturing to create success and competitive advantage, and you know AI machine learning. These are just tools. Sure there are always going to be challenges, but we as humans have to make sure that the tools are used overwhelmingly for good. Again, I tend to be optimistic. I think the vast majority of people do want to do good things in the world. And so prevent against the kind of worst case scenarios but, I remain optimistic. >> Why are the wheel tools? It's all about the humans running them. And that's a big impact. Michael, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate you coming on virtually with theCUBE and thanks for allowing us to be part of your virtual digital experience. For the final word just share for a minute, what people should walk away with this year. I know it's virtual. It's not face to face. It's a very intimate event when it's held face to face, but you're doing a virtual, a lot of content out there. But for the people watching, what should they walk away with this year from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience? What's the main message? >> So you know Dell Technologies wants as ever to be your best partner in the digital transformation. And we're investing heavily in multicloud, in the edge, in data management, software defining the networks, providing the compute to deal with all these enormous workloads with AI, at 5G and continuing to create this secure work from anywhere environment. So, again, thanks to our customers and partners for the tremendous trust they place in us. And we're looking forward to a great year ahead. >> Well thanks for everything that you do. I know you're just planning a lot of equipment for kids in school and for businesses and continue to innovate. You're doing your part with the supply chain. Thank you for having your team stay on that. Of course, we're doing our part trying our best to get the content out there. Thank you so much for the time, Michael. Great to see you. I hope to see you in person soon. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin, welcoming back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Travis Vigil, the SVP of Product Management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >> Hey, how's it going Lisa? >> Not bad, nice to connect with you virtually, of course this year, everything is so different. You've already done virtual CUBEs. So welcome back to our very-- >> Yeah, this is my third one. >> Socially distance program. Third one? Third time lucky. >> Yeah. >> All right, so back in May, you were on theCUBE talking about the launch of PowerStore. Really what Dell Technologies was doing to kind of converge formerly overlapping technologies by Acquisitions, Compellent, XtremeIO, give us an update last few months of what's going on with PowerStore, customer adoption, momentum, stuff like that. >> Yeah, it's been almost six months that we've launched the product, and it's been an unbelievable experience. Let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, we had to launch PowerStore into a very different world than we had anticipated. The global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everything around the world. Our first priority at Dell is the health and safety of our customers, of our team members, of our partners. And it was a very interesting experience in that, this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad backdrop against which we had to launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic momentum. Since launch, we've shipped world wide over 40, we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. And we have the biggest pipeline that we've ever generated for our product in the history of Dell and EMC at this point in its life. But, I think to really talk about momentum and what's going on, it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Start maybe with a healthcare example, a healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt PowerStore as a multimillion dollar deal. And what they were trying to do was modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. There was a lot of technical debt and they wanted to modernize things, make things more autonomous. And at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into most... Still they had data centers across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites. And with PowerStore because of the efficiency, because of the deduplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual Opex they have related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year by going to PowerMax, I'm sorry, by going to PowerStore. So that was a big one. Another good example was an AMEA high-tech customer. They adopted PowerStore because of PowerStore's ability to scale performance and capacity independently. And in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications, and the other is kind of a variable and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this nearly million dollar deal with them. And then other one that's one of my favorites, an entertainment company in the APJ region, obviously with all of us staying home, I can speak for my kids that are remote learning right over my shoulder. There's a lot more video games going on. And so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing PowerStore. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decreased costs of storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development, and decreased costs. So those are just a couple of the examples that we have for PowerStore. We're seeing great adoption, great traction, and really, customers and partners are really excited about what we've brought to market. >> You talked about some of the things that are essential, that even back in May when PowerStore was launched, no one would have thought here in October, 2020, we'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce, businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company, and APJ being essential, as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption, for example, the healthcare organization that you talked about in North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization to upgrade or migrate to PowerStore so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about, but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site, if it was on-prem, 'cause of course it was all the challenges there, right? >> Yeah, it's a really good question. This was a brand new product for us. And in order to enable proof of concept, in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product, it's taken an enormous amount of coordination and enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so, it's actually taken a little bit more time than had we been able to fly people around the world to do it, but we've gotten very proficient at organizing with the customer, being able to host the demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely, be able to do our customer briefings remotely. So it is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >> So PowerStore was big from the beginning. There was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history. >> The largest beta that we'd ever done, yes. >> Launching it during a pandemic that was unpredictable and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through, when you're talking to customers, what are some of the key differentiators that really make PowerStore unique? >> Yeah, I like to start at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about PowerStore, because with storage products, the architecture is the thing that all features and capabilities are built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of PowerStore, was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today and the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that be NVMe or SCM, it was microservices based so that it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. When we first launched this array, and this fact is true today, we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today, that was seven times more performant and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So, that core performance is kind of point number one. Point number two, data reduction. Data reduction is the new normal. And with PowerStore, we have a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of mid range storage devices. And in their particular environment, they saw 4.6:1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4:1. So being very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, and I talked about it in the high tech company that I mentioned, the European high tech company. The ability to scale performance and capacity independently in our scale out design is another differentiator. For folks that have been around storage arrays, a long time, traditional storage array, you would add capacity sometimes when you needed performance or you'd add performance sometimes when you needed capacity. By being able to separate those two things, customers can really get optimized in their environment for what their needs are. They need more performance, they can add more performance. They need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners. And then above and beyond that, we brought some industry only capability to market in that we are the only purpose built storage appliance with a built in VMware, ESXi hypervisor. So what this allows customers to do is, run VMware based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage that's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables a whole new host of use cases where customers can change the way that they're optimized in the core. And also there's a lot of good edge deployments that this new capability can help enable. So it's being architectually advanced in performance, efficiency, and scale up and scale out, and bringing industry only capabilities in our integration, especially with VMware to market that have really resonated with our customers. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that the VMware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate with massively scattered workforce that some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding, device proliferation. What are some of the new use cases that what PowerStore can deliver uniquely as you said, is going to be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >> Yeah, I think that there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core, but I think the new, either remote site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less. And so if you can have hardware that is able to provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability, those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device, which leads to easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having to deploy multiple devices. >> So you, great with the stats, you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with PowerStore, all the testing what you're seeing actually in customer environments, which is fantastic. When you're talking with analysts, looking at what Dell Technologies has done and to develop PowerStore. And like I said, merging technologies from Compellent and XtremeIO, et cetera. Are analysts looking at this as maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing? >> Yeah, there was some press that was written when we announced that the release of PowerStore established a new benchmark of what was expected from a mid range storage array which was something that was really fulfilling, especially after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about, that ended the innovation that we had put into it over the course of a multi-year journey. And so, what we're seeing, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio. That we're able to direct our R&D investments into a single platform to bring more and more capability to that platform over time. And that message is resonating very strongly. >> So wrapping things up here, PowerStore is in its first five or six months. And during that time, crazy things have happened in the world. We're in a state of still disarray, if you will, no pun intended. What is next for the second half of PowerStore's first year? How is Dell Technologies going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now, into thriving so that they can be the winners of tomorrow? >> Yeah, I think the first half of this year was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners trained up on it, getting those key early wins, establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of more customers, getting it into that... Enabling our partners to amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're going to see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of more adoption, more momentum and more success on PowerStore. And for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture, comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come, when new media comes, when new interfaces or interconnect technologies come, when we invest in even tighter integration with VMware, like at VMworld just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VMware on a new interconnect technology and NVMe-over-TCP. That core architecture is so flexible that it can adopt with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market evolves. >> And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about, the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well. Travis, thank you so much for sharing with us the moments for the first half of PowerStore's first year and what we can look to see in its, not just second half, but going forward, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> My pleasure, for Travis Vigil, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 Digital Experience. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem >>partners. Hello and welcome to the Cube. Special coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for host of the Cube were stupid men Day volonte all doing interviews covering the virtual version of VM World. First time it's ever happened. We've been covering VM World for over 10 years, our 11th season with Cube at VM World. And of course, it's difference virtual. But we're doing our part. We're getting in the programs. We need to get the stories out and we got a great guest here. Submit to on who's the chief customer officer of the M where, uh, back to VM, where he ran the end user computing of which we covered air. Watch a lot of great announcements Submit. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on to the Q. Virtual >>John. Great to see you again. And great to be back on the Cube. >>So great to see you. And again I know you. You came in your back into the wheelhouse of VM ware. But as the theme of this show is putting the digital foundation for an unpredictable world. Also, with Covidien going virtual makes a lot of sense. However, VM Ware has been doing extremely well on the business performance side and making all the right tech moves we've been covering them to Cuba is well documented, the business models evolving. The performance is there. You are in a new role for VM, where its newly created chief customer officer tell us why you're back. Why this role? Why is it important? >>Yeah, great question, John. You know, I I joined the anywhere because we end where I look at sort of what bm where is trying to do all aligned with what customers want If you think about customers, they have been up until now, dabbling with cloud building sort of strategies on how to embrace Cloud, which applications will go to which parts off the cloud. And it has been something that has been more off slow RL strategy and with the multi cloud transition plan. Now, VM Ware provides to some extent this, you know, started out with operating system for the hardware, and it has evolved to provide operating system for the cloud it truly runs applications across multiple clouds. And with our partnerships with AWS Azure, Microsoft Google, we're able to sort of give our customers this multi cloud platform for them to run any application, whether that's traditional or modern, in a sort of unified operational fashion. Now this is a different subscription world for customers, right and customers in the world of cloud, especially when they're going into this kind of a transformational journey. Um, you know, it requires we anywhere to think slightly differently. It's not just the traditional cell implement support kind of customer model. You have really help them achieve their out, come over a period of time and then make them successful as they continue to sort of face the uncertainties off the multi cloud world. So So So Pat and Sanjay decided to create this new customer experience office and all different functions from success support digital engagement as well a czar insulting professional services. Tam's were put together so that we can offer integrated experiences to the customer. And that sounded exciting and, you know, we're making tons off interesting innovations there. Some announced that GM World and, uh, very much aligned with an objective to help our customers. >>E. I want to dig into the news and the announcement because I think there's a specific thing I'd like to drill into. But I want to get your thoughts submit because I think VM Ware and I thought to Sanjay about this as well as Pat. Clearly. Cooper Days is the dial tone of the Internet investment cloud Native Project. Monterey speaks to Multi cloud, totally get it. But Cove it has accelerated not only VM where every company, whether they're on the delivery side of it selling side or even consuming of the technology cloud, for instance, has forced the digital transformation. And it's catching some people off guard, right? So what are your thoughts? Because, you know, you have a value projects, you sell it to customers, you implement it, you support it. I mean, that >>was a >>nice grew swing for enterprise vendors like VM Ware. But now, with cove, it and all the digital transformation acceleration, it's causing a lot of people to be ready faster. How >>do you get >>that readiness? What do you bring to the table? What's your view on this? What's your reaction? Because people >>try to >>figure this out. It's confusing. >>I mean, I You know what it's it's very interesting. For example, I will give you an example. There's like, two extremes, and both of them are dealing with a very similar situation, all caused because of prove it. Okay, On one end of the spectrum, there are customers who are saying, Listen, our business is doing extremely well because of digital, and all of a sudden, uh, business needs this rapid agility, which can only be achieved through modern applications, and they're able to sort of move these applications because of elasticity of the cloud and leveraging multiple clouds. To do so is extremely important. If you're on one side of the spectrum on your business, where the business is doing extremely well, you have a percentage of the business that was coming from e commerce. All of a sudden that e commerce has accelerated. You know you can think off certain retailers, you know. Large scale retailers in that segment, and their their multi cloud journeys are accelerated, mostly because off just this surge in demand and change in capabilities that are needed to perform digital engagement with customers at a much much rapid pace, which are very difficult to do without leveraging multiple clouds. That's one extreme. The other extreme is, you know, I'll give you an example from large scale airlines and we all know in the travel hospitality airline business, this is extremely slow business for them, right at this point of time, and they're using the opportunity off this sort of time when things are slower to say, Okay, why don't we take this opportunity to fundamentally change our distilling it and truly embraced multi cloud while doing so? Because there is an opportunity to do so. The workload on the application than the infrastructure does not high little more technology reasons. A little bit more sort of a for downtime reason sort of go through the transformation faster. In other words, both ends of the spectrum. I'm seeing customers move the words sort of this destination fast it. And guess what? There is really no one at this stage outside of VM ware who can help them achieve that because otherwise you set a single voice. You know, there are their players who died. You tow their singular cloud solution and running. You know what I what I tell customers is multi cloud doesn't mean you are running two different architectures on two different clouds, right? That's not multi cloud. Multi cloud means running a singular architectures on multiple clouds, because that's when you get through governance and true operational scale and true experience and elasticity and control. And that's what we, um, where is all about? So we are now engaged with those conversations and helping customers at both the front end right when they're engaged with us at this stage. But we have also down tailored our service delivery and our success off offerings and are how we engage with customers digitally and sort of technically and through people. Uh, in once they start their journey with us, Um, and they sort of embark on leveraging the technology into multi cloud I want. So So that's the sort of shift that has occurred. >>Yeah, I want to unpack the offering in a second, but I want to stay in the customer experience for a minute. We've heard that cliche a customer experience. So digital transmission. Okay, it's actually happening now, and I totally agree with you, by the way there's there's the modernization trend. You just basically spoke to the spectrums. But it's about modernization. Okay, if you think modernization, you think business model business model is Hey, it's pretty light right now. I'm not a lot of people traveling. Let's retool, Let's modernize, Let's use our resource is and modernize our business, which is a lot of applications. It's everything up and down the stack. And then the companies that have a tailwind with Covic, who have had the epiphany and saying, If we don't building modern app or have modern APS in market, we're out of business. So there's a critical urgency to, uh, coming out of it with a growth strategy that's a business model transformation. Totally get that. That's where the customers are. So the question for you is okay. How do you talk to the customer that is saying, Hey, I'm building a modern app. We have to pivot, were forced to pivot whatever word you want to use force to survive. They're now they have to build a modern app. How do you guys support that customer? How does that customer? What does that customer need to be successful? >>Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with an architectural approach right. We bring to the customers and architectural approach across multiple clouds that helped them when they go for their existing applications or new modern applications conforming toe, one operating model and one architectures. Because in this in this time, you know, customers have many critical line of business applications. This airline customer I was talking about, they have 600 applications that are quite critical. They sort of segment them out on which one they will truly modernize because of the business model modernization like you mentioned and which ones they will live with, the way they are for multiple reasons and how it starts with connecting them with a unified architect chair and a unified operating model is how we start with customers. Okay. And that is where the power off the younger comes in. Because, like I said, it becomes this architectural operating system for for the customers to run and adopt multiple clouds. >>You gotta be the chief customer officer. You're the quarterback. You're the one in charge of making sure customers were happy. Okay? And they get what they need. And again, there's different aspects of it. What do you guys announcing it? VM World 2020 virtual, um, that people should pay attention thio around servicing customers in this new subscription and SAS world. >>Yeah, I think besides the technology announcements in terms off modern, sort off, multi cloud platform, the architectural with Project Monterey from the customer experience side, we did announcement to announcements. One was for customers embarking on a journey. We want to make sure that customers get everything they need to be successful on the journey on an ongoing basis. Some off these journeys for large customers, John can take not just sort of three months, but three years because they're dealing with various applications. So for that we announced two pretty simple and easy to embrace offerings. One is AP navigator. AP Navigator enables customers to quickly assess which applications I have to be, you know, on one end, you know, rewritten, completely rewritten and on the other end simply sort of re hosted. Okay, and there are multiple options in between, and we call them as a five, our model with customers, and we guide customers through our own assessment and working with customers on how to sort of segment their applications and use a common architectures across all of them that we can then help and it and secondly, toe help them with. We announced something called Success 3 60 Success 3 60 is Our Mechanism Toe guide and help customers on an ongoing basis for a success plan with continuous, sort off adoption guidance designed workshops as well as providing they're dedicated support that customers need for embracing multiple cloud across all the cloud. With this architectural this way, customers get assured that they're able to get the right up front sort of assessment on applications and ongoing success. Okay, And that's sort of what we announced within customer experience side. And we have been able all of this available two people you know there are critical for large scale engagements, but also digital, you know, just like our customers are innovating with digital. We innovated with our own digital environment, and we brought it all together with something called customer Connect, all available with one single digital experience that's mobile friendly, alert driven, search driven. You know, all the AI that's needed at this point of time in terms of engaging with customers with proactive notifications and guidance in terms of how they're doing with success built into a singular experience so that they can engage with us, and we can engage with them to make them successful. >>And so it's people in technology you guys are bringing to the table. What can customers expect? Because, you know, as they've worked with the M where you've always had great technical support outside its have been a technology driven company. Um, but as you start getting into SAS, you're starting to get into the business model transformation. How do you guys impacting the customers and how you go to market and how you, uh, service your customer base? >>Yeah, I think there are two elements What customers can expect one. They don't have to stand up and engagement and experience mortal completely separate for a small set of applications on a completely different you know, cloud architectures. They could just fit and build a single experience off dealing with the M, where, as a mechanism to enable all of their applications to be hosted, regardless of which cloud there in Uh huh Sandvik they do it at their own pace, right? As then when they're ready for applications. Secondly, and more importantly, for the business model transformation side. We have a model where we continue to show them the value realization. Okay, because these are true business model transformations. At this stage, there is lot off investment that's coming into I P while at the same time, the rest off the business is doing belt type. So there is a continuous pressure on Earth. Customers are I t. That is the champion for the customers, and they're working with developers in line of business teams, and they have to continue to show how what they're investing into as a singular platform or in architecture is going to deliver some kind of a value on an ongoing basis. So we have delivered on an ongoing basis rip boards and feed back and continuous sort of information back to the customers so that they can take back to their businesses on all the investments they're making now are ongoing basis what value the business is getting, because at the end of the day in this, this is probably the first time in the where I I t is probably getting the least belt tightening in the case off sort of an economic downturn, and in fact, it is being looked at as a way to invest out off the downturn. Right? So they're going to be, in a way where there sometimes even going into the boardroom and showing not just governance, but also sort of the investments they made, what kind of value they they got. So those are the two things were providing seamless and at at pace move toe multi cloud with a common experience and second, ongoing value realization that they can communicate whoever they need. Toe >>submit. You know, we've been following VM where for many me personally of persons that was founded. But with the Cube since 2010 star 11th year, You know, we've been critical of times and pointing out the obvious and in some cases, not so obvious successes and challenges. Um and so we've seen the completeness of vision evolved and pat, certainly. You know, he he held the line and he did the right things. And then he executed. So, you know, as you look at the emerald, we're now been complimentary on some of the moves. Certainly on the technology side that you guys have made and then we again we've talked about this many times on the Cube. So complete in this, uh, vision check. Okay, this is wholesome. Michael Dell issues, but gave talks about that. So good vision complete executed business performance is there. But as you talk about sass and subscription, your ability to execute is going to be a key variable and things like the Gartner Magic quadrant for the areas you're competing in. Multi cloud talk about how you guys just set up financially to support that personnel. What is your organization gonna do? Can you share your vision? How you going to be able to execute customers success programs as this uncertainty around multi cloud continues to become reality and things are changing. >>Yeah, I think a couple of things firstly, you know, to be absolutely candid, you know, the pace at which the customers are going to the new multi cloud models is faster now than it was nine months ago. We just discussed that. Okay, so I wouldn't I would be misrepresenting if I said we always were ready for this kind of the case. We're also adjusting and innovating at this stage as fast as possible. The good news is that we were headed in the right direction. Okay, if we were headed in the wrong direction, it would have been much, much harder. Okay. Secondly, I think there is a very strong leadership, the leadership team. I mean, at the end of the day, it's vision, leadership, team investment, the components and, of course, diligence to execute that comes in for the execution. To me vision and the direction was always very, very strong. It motivated me to join the anywhere for this important mission. Second and many other exact. If second the leadership team is as strong as they get, the four team is extremely strong. We have strong leadership team leadership from Pat Michael, of course, as well as Sanjay Rgu Rajiv. Everyone provides strong leadership and then third, you asked about sort of the financial element. You know, they're The company continues to perform quite well, right? We have core businesses that some critical for customers to use as technologies to enable them, you know, to come out off this sort off economic issue we're facing and they're facing. So as a result, you know, financially, we're in a good position to be able to invest back into the business and Secondly, we have made now we've always, always been extremely strong on the technology front. Okay, now with Sanjay and packed sort of saying that we're going to be extremely strong in terms of customer experience front because the world of subscription, the world of cloud, the world off the SAS requires not just great technology but also a great customer experience. So we're seeing tremendous in a continued sort of support financially in terms of investing into the customer experience, from both getting the right set of people offerings as well as technology. So I believe we have all three things. Having said that, you know, some of these things that we're investing in. They need a lot of work, and I'm. While I'm proud of what we have accomplished, I truly believe you know the best is yet to come, and the right investments that we're making are going to continue to sort of enhance our offerings both through people as well as technology. But there's work to be done. You >>know, it's all about, you know, having the consume ability of the technology thio, the value proposition of VM ware and also also is a company being um, open and easy to work with and consumable that way. So I think this is a great time. Certainly. Product wise. Business wise, You guys do extremely well. Congratulations on your new role on the senior leadership is the chief customer officer of VM Ware will be following the stories of your customers. So I really appreciate you taking the time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much, John. Excited to be back. Great >>to have you back on the queue here. VM world coverage of 2020 virtual. I'm John for this. The host of Cube Virtual. Check us out cube dot Net. And also our new cube 3 65 where it's our new modern application for virtual events. Of course, we want to continue to tell the most important stories and cover all the key people making it happen. Submit. Thank you for coming on. This is the Cube. Thanks for watching

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat last year in 2019 IBM made the biggest M&A move of the year with a 34 billion dollar acquisition of red hat it positioned IBM for the next decade after what was a very tumultuous tenure by CEO Ginni Rometty who had to shrink in order to grow unfortunately she didn't have enough time to do the grille part that has now gone toward Arvind Krishna the new CEO of IBM this is Dave Volante and I'm here with Stu minimun and this is our Red Hat keynote analysis is our 7th year doing the Red Hat summit and we're very excited to be here this is our first year doing Stu the Red Hat summit post IVM acquisition we've also got IBM think next week so what we want to do for you today is review what's going on at the Red Hat summits do you've been wall-to-wall with the interviews we're gonna break down the announcements IBM had just announced its quarter so we get some glimpse as to what's happening in the business and then we're gonna talk about going forward what the prognosis is for both IBM and Red Hat well and Dave of course our audience understands there's a reason why we're sitting farther apart than normal in our studio and you know why we're not in San Francisco where the show is supposed to be this year last year it's in Boston Red Hat summit goes coast-to-coast every year it's our seventh year doing the show first year doing it all digital of course our community is always online but you know real focus you know we're gonna talk about Dave you know you listen to the keynote speeches it's not the as we sit in our preview it's not the hoopla we had a preview with pork or mayor ahead of the event where they're not making big announcements most of the product pieces we're all out front it's open source anyway we know when it's coming for the most part some big partnership news of course strong customer momentum but a different tenor and the customers that Red Hat's lined up for me their interview all talking you know essential services like medical your your energy services your communication services so you know real focus I think Dave both IBM and right making sure that they are setting the appropriate tone in these challenging times yeah I mean everybody who we talked to says look at the employees and safety comes first once we get them working from home and we know that they're safe and healthy we want to get productive and so you've seen as we've reported that that shift to the work from home infrastructure and investments in that and so now it's all about how do we get closer to clients how do we stay close to clients and be there for them and I actually have you know business going forward you know the good news for IBM is it's got strong cash flow it's got a strong balance sheet despite you know the acquisition I mean it's just you know raise some more you know low low cost debt which you know gives them some dry powder going forward so I think IBM is gonna be fine it's just there's a lot of uncertainty but let's go back to your takeaways from the Red Hat Summit you've done you know dozens of interviews you got a good take on the company what are you top three takeaways - yeah so first of all Dave you know the focus everybody has is you know what does Red Hat do for the cloud story for IBM OpenShift especially is absolutely a highlight over 2,000 customers now from some really large ones you know last year I interviewed you know Delta you've got you know forward and Verizon up on stage for the keynote strong partnership with Microsoft talking about what they're doing so OpenShift has really strong momentum if you talk about you know where is the leadership in this whole kubernetes space Red Hat absolutely needs to be in that discussion not only are they you know other than Google the top contributor really there but from a customer standpoint the experience what they've built there but what I really liked from Red Hat standpoint is it's not just an infrastructure discussion it's not OPM's and containers and there's things we want to talk about about VMs and containers and even server lists from Red Hat standpoint but Red Hat at its core what it is it they started out as an operating system company rel Red Hat Enterprise Linux what's the tie between the OS and the application oh my god they've got decades of experience how do you build applications everything from how they're modernizing Java with a project called Korkis through how their really helping customers through this digital transformation I hear a similar message from Red Hat and their customers that I hear from Satya Nadella at Microsoft is we're building lots of applications we need to modernize what they're doing in Red Hat well positioned across the stack to not only be the platform for it but to help all of the pieces to help me modernize my applications build new ones modernize some of the existing ones so OpenShift a big piece of it you know automation has been a critical thing for a while we did the cube last year at ansible fest for the first time from Red Hat took that acquisition has helped accelerate that community in growth and they're really Dave pulling all the pieces together so it's what you hear from Stephanie shirasu ironically enough came over from IBM to run that business inside a Red Hat well you know now she's running it inside Red Hat and there's places that this product proliferate into the IBM portfolio next week when we get where it I didn't think I'm sure we'll hear a lot about IBM cloud packs and look at what's underneath IBM cloud packs there's open shift there's rel all those pieces so you know I know one of the things we want to talk about Davis you know what does that dynamic of Red Hat and IBM mean so you know open shift automation the full integration both of the Red Hat portfolio and how it ties in with IBM would be my top three well red hat is now IBM I mean it's a clearly part of the company it's there's a company strategy going forward the CEO Arvind Krishna is the architect of the Red Hat acquisition and so you know that it's all in on Red Hat Dave I mean just the nuance there of course is the the thing you hear over and over from the Red Hatters is Red Hat remains Red Hat that cultural shift is something I'd love to discuss because you know Jim Whitehurst now he's no longer a Red Hat employee he's an IBM employee so you've got Red Hat employees IBM employees they are keeping that you know separation wall but obviously there's flowing in technology and come on so come on in tech you look at it's not even close to what VMware is VMware is a separate public company has separate reporting Red Hat doesn't I mean yes I hear you yo you got the Red Hat culture and that's good but it's a far cry from you know a separate entity with full transparency the financials and and so I I hear you but I'm not fully buying it but let's let's get into it let's take a look at at the quarter because that I think will give us an indication as to how much we actually can understand about RedHat and and again my belief is it's really about IBM and RedHat together I think that is their opportunity so Alex if you wouldn't mind pulling up the first slide these are highlights from IBM's q1 and you know we won't spend much time on the the the IBM side of the business although we wanted to bring some of that in but hit the key here as you see red hat at 20% revenue growth so still solid revenue growth you know maybe a little less robust than it was you know sequentially last quarter but still very very strong and that really is IBM's opportunity here 2,200 clients using red hat and an IBM container platforms the key here is when Ginni Rometty announced this acquisition along with Arvind Krishna and Jim Whitehurst she said this is going to be this is going to be cash flow free cash flow accretive in year one they've already achieved that they said it's gonna be EPS accretive by year two they are well on their way to achieving that why we talked about this do it's because iBM has a huge services organization that it can plug open shift right into and begin to modernize applications that are out there I think they cited on the call that they had a hundred ongoing projects and that is driving immediate revenue and allows IBM to from a financial standpoint to get an immediate return so the numbers are pretty solid yeah absolutely Dave and you know talking about that there is a little bit of the blurring a line between the companies one of the product pieces that came out at the show is IBM has had for a couple of years think you know MCM multi cloud management there was announced that there were actually some of the personnel and some of the products from IBM has cut have come into Retta of course Red Hat doing what they always do they're making it open source and they're it's advanced cluster management really from my viewpoint this is an answer to what we've seen in the kubernetes community for the last year there is not one kubernetes distribution to rule them all I'm going to use what my platforms have and therefore how do I manage across my various cloud environments so Red Hat for years is OpenShift lives everywhere it sits on top of VMware virtualization environments it's on top of AWS Azure in Google or it just lives in your Linux farms but ACM now is how do I manage my kubernetes environment of course you know super optimized to work with OpenShift and the roadmap as to how it can manage with Azure kubernetes and some of the other environments so you know you now have some former IBM RS that are there and as you said Dave some good acceleration in the growth from the Red Hat numbers we'd seen like right around the time that the acquisition happened Red Hat had a little bit of a down quarter so you know absolutely the services and the the scale that IBM can bring should help to bring new logos of course right now Dave with the current global situation it's a little bit tough to go and be going after new business yeah and we'll talk about that a little bit but but I want to come back to sort of when I was pressing you before on the trip the true independence of Red Hat by the way I don't think that's necessarily a wrong thing I'll give an example look at Dell right now why is Dell relevant and cloud well okay but if Dell goes to market says we're relevant in cloud because of VMware well then why am I talking to you why don't I talk to VMware and so so my point is that that in some regards you know having that integration is there is a real advantage no you know you were that you know EMC and the time when they were sort of flip-flopping back and forth between integrated and not and separate and not it's obviously worked out for them but it's not necessarily clear-cut and I would say in the case of IBM I think it's the right move why is that every Krista talked about three enduring platforms that IBM has developed one is mainframe that's you know gonna here to stay the second was middleware and the third is services and he's saying that hybrid cloud is now the fourth and during platform that they want to build well how do they gonna build that what are they gonna build that on they're gonna build that an open shift they they're there other challenges to kind of retool their entire middleware portfolio around OpenShift not unlike what Oracle did with with Fusion when it when it bought Sun part of the reason - pod Sun was for Java so these are these are key levers not necessarily in and of themselves you know huge revenue drivers but they lead to awesome revenue opportunities so that's why I actually think it's the right move that what IBM is doing keep the Red Hat to the brand and culture but integrate as fast as possible to get cash flow or creative we've achieved that and get EPS accretive that to me makes a lot of sense yeah Dave I've heard you talk often you know if you're not a leader in a position or you know here John Chambers from Cisco when he was running it you know if I'm not number one or number two why am I in it how many places did IBM have a leadership position Red Hat's a really interesting company because they have a leadership position in Linux obviously they have a leadership position now in kubernetes Red Hat culturally of course isn't one to jump up and down and talk about you know how they're number one in all of these spaces because it's about open source it's about community and you know that does require a little bit of a cultural shift as IBM works with them but interesting times and yeah Red Hat is quietly an important piece of the ecosystem let me let me bring in some meteor data Alex if you pull up that that's that second slide well and I've shown this before in braking analysis and what this slide shows in the vertical axis shows net score net score is a measure of spending momentum spending velocity the the horizontal axis is is is called market share it's really not market share it's it's really a measure of pervasiveness the the mentions in the data set we're talking about 899 responses here out of over 1200 in the April survey and this is a multi cloud landscape so what I did here Stu I pulled on containers container platforms of container management and cloud and we positioned the companies on this sort of XY axis and you can see here you obviously have in the upper right you've got Azure in AWS why do I include AWS and the multi cloud landscape you answered that question before but yesterday because Dave even though Amazon might not allow you to even use the word multi cloud you can't have a discussion of multi cloud without having Amazon in that discussion and they've shifted on hybrid expect them to adjust their position on multi-cloud in the future yeah now coming back to this this this data you see kubernetes is on the kubernetes I know is another company but ETR actually tracks kubernetes you can see how hot it is in terms of its net score and spending momentum yeah I mean Dave do you know the thing the the obvious thing to look at there is if you see how strong kubernetes is if IBM plus red hat can keep that leadership in kubernetes they should do much better in that space than they would have on with just their products alone and that's really the lead of this chart that really cuts to the chase do is you see you see red Red Hat openshift has really strong spending momentum although I will say if you back up back up to say April July October 18 19 it actually was a little higher so it's been pushed down remember this is the April survey that what's ran from mid-march to mid April so we're talking right in the middle of the pandemic okay so everybody's down but nonetheless you can see the opportunity is for IBM and Red Hat to kind of meet in the middle leverage IBM's massive install base in its in its services presence in its market presence its pervasiveness so AKA market share in this rubric and then use Red Hat's momentum and kind of meet in the middle and that's the kind of point that we have here with IBM's opportunity and that really is why IBM is a leader in at least a favorite in my view in multi cloud well Dave if you'd look two years ago and you said what was the competitive landscape Red Hat was an early leader in the kubernetes you know multi-cloud discussion today if you ask everybody well who's doing great and kubernetes you have to talk about all the different options that amazon has Amazon still has their own container management with ACS of course IKS is doing strong and well and Amazon whatever they do they we know they're going to be competitive Microsoft's there but it's not all about competition in this space Dave because you know we see Red Hat partnering across these environments they do have a partnership with AWS they do have you know partnership with you know Microsoft up on stage there so where it was really interesting Dave you know one of the things I was coming into this show looking is what is Red Hat's answer to what VMware is really starting to do in this space so vSphere 7 rolled out and that is the ga of project Pacific so taking virtualization in containers and putting them together Red Hat of course has had virtualization for a long time with KVM they have a different answer of how they're doing openshift virtualization and it rather than saying here's my virtual environment and i can also do kubernetes on it they're saying containers are the future and where you want to go and we can bring your VMs into containers really shift them the way you have really kind of a lift and shift but then modernize them Dave customers are good you know you want to meet customers where they are you want to help them move forward virtualization in general has been a you don't want to touch your applications you want to just you know let it ride forever but the real the real driver for companies today is I've got to build new apps I need to modernize on my environment and you know Red Hat is positioning and you know I like what I'm hearing from them I like what I'm hearing from my dad's customers on how they're helping take both the physical the virtual the containers in the cloud and bring them all into this modern era yeah and and you know IBM made an early bet on on kubernetes and obviously around Red Hat you could see actually on that earlier slide we showed you IBM we didn't really talk about it they said they had 23% growth in cloud which is that they're a twenty two billion dollar business for IBM you're smiling yeah look good for IBM they're gonna redefine cloud you know let AWS you know kick and scream they're gonna say hey here's how we define cloud we include our own pram we include Cano portions of our consulting business I mean I honestly have no idea what's in the 22 billion and how if they're growing 22 billion at 23% wow that's pretty awesome I'm not sure I think they're kind of mixing apples and oranges there but it makes for a good slide yeah you would say wait shouldn't that be four billion you added he only added two or three billion you know numbers can tell a story but you can also manipulate but the point is the point is I've always said this near term the to get you know return on this deal it's about plugging OpenShift into services and modernizing applications long term it's about maintaining IBM and red-hats relevance in the hybrid cloud world which is I don't know how big it is it's a probably a trillion-dollar opportunity that really is critical from a strategy standpoint do I want to ask you about the announcements what about any announcements that you saw coming from Red Hat are relevant what do we need to know there yeah so you know one of the bigger ones we already talked about that you know multi cloud manager what Red Hat has the advanced cluster management or ACM absolutely is an era an area we should look VMware Tong's ooh Azure Ark Google anthos and now ACM from Red Hat in partnership with IBM is an area still really early Dave I talked to some of the executives in the space and say you know are we going to learn from the mistakes of multi vendor management Dave you know you think about the CA and BMC you know exactly of the past will we have learned for those is this the right way to do it it is early but Red Hat obviously has a position here and they're doing it um did hear plenty about how Red Hat is plugging into all the IBM environments Dave Z power you know the cloud solutions and of course you know IBM solutions across the board my point of getting a little blue wash but hey it's got to happen I think that's a smart move right you know we talked about you know really modernizing the applications in the environments I talked a bit about the virtualization piece the other one if you say okay how do I pull the virtualization forward what about the future so openshift serverless is the other one it's really a tech preview at this point it's built off of the K native project which is part of the CNC F which is basically how do I still have you know containers and kubernetes underneath can that plug into server list order server let's get it rid of it everything so IBM Oracle Red Hat and others really been pushing hard on this Kay native solution it is matured a lot there's an ecosystem growing as how it can connect to Asher how it can connect to AWS so definitely something from that appdev piece to watch and Dave that's where I had some really good discussions with customers as well as the the Red Hat execs and their partners that boundary between the infrastructure team and the app dev team they're hoping to pull them together and some of the tooling actually helps ansible is a great example of that in the past but you know others in the portfolio and lastly if you want to talk a huge opportunity for Red Hat IBM and it's a jump ball for everyone is edge computing so Red Hat I've talked to them for years about what they were doing in the opened stack community with network function virtualization or NFV Verizon was up on stage I've got an interview for Red Hat summit with Vodafone idea which has 300 million subscribers in India and you know the Red Hat portfolio really helping a lot of the customers there so it's the telco edge is where we see a strong push there it's definitely something we've been watching from the you know the big cloud players and those partnerships Dave so you know last year Satya Nadella was up on the main stage with Red Hat this year Scott Guthrie you know there he's at every Microsoft show and he's not the red head show so it is still ironic for those of us that have watched this industry and you say okay where are some of the important partnerships for Red Hat its Microsoft I mean you know we all remember when you know open-source was the you know evil enemy for from Microsoft and of course Satya Nadella has changed things a lot it's interesting to watch I'm sure we'll talk more at think Dave you know Arvind Krishna the culture he will bring in with the support of Jim Whitehurst comes over from IBM compared to what Satya has successfully done at Microsoft well let's talk about that let's let's talk about let's bring it home with the sort of near-term midterm and really I want to talk about the long term strategic aspects of IBM and Red Hat's future so near-term IBM is suspended guidance like everybody okay they don't have great visibility some some some things to watch by the way a lot of people are saying no just you know kind of draw draw a red line through this quarter you just generally ignore it I disagree look at cash flow look balance sheets look at what companies are doing and how they're positioning that's very important right now and will give us some clues and so there's a couple of things that we're watching with IBM one is their software business crashed in March and software deals usually come in big deals come in at the end of the quarter people were too distracted they they stopped spending so that's a concern Jim Cavanaugh on the call talked about how they're really paying attention to those services contracts to see how they're going are they continuing what's the average price of those so that's something that you got to watch you know near-term okay fine again as I said I think IBM will get through this what really I want to talk about to do is the the prospects going forward I'm really excited about the choice that IBM made the board putting Arvind Krishna in charge and the move that he made in terms of promoting you know Jim Whitehurst to IBM so let's talk about that for a minute Arvind is a technical visionary and it's it's high time that I VM got back to it being a technology company first because that's what IBM is and and I mean Lou Gerstner you know arguably save the company they pivoted to services Sam Palmisano continue that when Ginny came in you know she had a services heritage she did the PWC deal and IBM really became a services company first in my view Arvind is saying explicitly we want to lead with technology and I think that's the right move of course iBM is going to deliver outcomes that's what high-beams heritage has been for the last 20 years but they are a technology company and having a technology visionary at the lead is very important why because IBM essentially is the leader prior to Red Hat and one thing mainframes IBM used to lead in database that used to lead in storage they used to lead in the semiconductors on and on and on servers now they lead in mainframes and and now switch to look at Red Hat Red Hat's a leader you know they got the best product out there so I want you to talk about how you see that shift to more of a sort of technical and and product focus preserving obviously but your thoughts on the move the culture you're putting Jim as the president I love it I think it was actually absolutely brilliant yeah did Dave absolutely I know we were excited because we you know personally we know both of those leaders they are strong leaders they are strong technically Dave when I think about all the companies we look at I challenge anybody to find a more consistent and reliable pair of companies than IBM and Red Hat you know for years it was you know red hat being an open-source company and you know the way their business model said it it's not the you know Evan flow of product releases we know what the product is going to be the roadmaps are all online and they're gonna consistently grow what we've seen Red Hat go from kind of traditional software models to the subscription model and there are some of the product things we didn't get into too much as to things that they have built into you know Red Hat Enterprise Linux and expanding really their cloud and SAS offerings to enhance those environments and that that's where IBM is pushing to so you know there's been some retooling for the modern era they are well positioned to help customers through that you know digital transformation and as you said Dave you and I we both read the open organization by Jim lighters you know he came in to Red Hat you know really gave some strong leadership the culture is strong they they have maintained you know really strong morale and I talked to people inside you know was their concern inside when IBM was making the acquisition of course there was we've all seen some acquisitions that have gone great when IBM has blue washed them they're trying to make really strong that Red Hat stays Red Hat to your point you know Dave we've already seen some IBM people go in and some of the leadership now is on the IBM side so you know can they improve the product include though improve those customer outcomes and can Red Hat's culture actually help move IBM forward you know company with over a hundred years and over 200,000 employees you'd normally look and say can a 12,000 person company change that well with a new CEO with his wing and you know being whitehurst driving that there's a possibility so it's an interesting one to watch you know absolutely current situations are challenging you know red hats growth is really about adding new logos and that will be challenged in the short term yeah Dave I I love you shouldn't let people off the hook for q2 maybe they need to go like our kids this semester is a pass/fail rather than a grid then and then a letter grade yeah yeah and I guess my point is that there's information and you got to squint through it and I think that look at to me you know this is like Arvin's timing couldn't be better not that he orchestrated it but I mean you know when Ginny took over I mean was over a hundred million a hundred billion I said many times that I beams got a shrink to grow she just ran out of time for the Gro part that's now on Arvind and I think that so he's got the cove in mulligan first of all you know the stocks been been pressured down so you know his tenure he's got a great opportunity to do with IBM in a way what such an adela did is doing at Microsoft you think about it they're both deep technologists you know Arvind hardcore you know computer scientist Indian Institute of Technology Indian Institute of Technology different school than Satya went to but still steeped in in a technical understanding a technical visionary who can really Drive you know product greatness you know in a I would with with Watson we've talked a lot about hybrid cloud quantum is something that IBM is really investing heavily in and that's a super exciting area things like blockchain some of these new areas that I think IBM can lead and it's all running on the cloud you know look IBM generally has been pretty good with acquisitions they yes they fumbled a few but I've always made the point they are in the cloud game IBM and Oracle yeah they're behind from a you know market share standpoint but they're in the game and they have their software estate in their pass a state to insulate them from the race to the bottom so I really like their prospects and I like the the organizational structure that they put in place in it by the way it's not just Arvind Jim you mentioned Paul Cormier you know Rob Thomas has been been elevated to senior VP really important in the data analytic space so a lot of good things going on there yeah and Dave one of the questions you've been asking and we've been all talking to leaders in the industry you know what changes permanently after the this current situation you know automation you know more adoption of cloud the importance of developers are there's even more of a spotlight on those environments and Red Hat has strong positioning in that space a lot of experience that they help their customers and being open source you know very transparent there I both IBM and Red Hat are doing a lot to try to help the community they've got contests going online to you know help get you know open source and hackers and people working on things and you know strong leadership to help lead through these stormy weathers so Stuart's gonna be really interesting decade and the cube will be here to cover it hopefully hopefully events will come back until they do will be socially responsible and and socially distant but Stu thanks for helping us break down the the red hat and sort of tipping our toe into IBM more coverage and IBM think and next week this is Dave alotta for Stu minimun you're watching the cube and our continuous coverage of the Red Hat summit keep it right there be back after this short break you [Music]