>> "theCUBE," presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, welcome back to "theCUBE's" live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante joins me. Dan O'Brien joins us next. The senior vice president of technology solutions at Presidio. Dan, welcome to "theCUBE." >> It's great to be here. Great to be in Vegas too. >> Is it great to be back live in person, three dimensional? >> You have no idea. >> Oh, I know. >> Yeah. >> Just the seeing people again and the vibe here day-one is already fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Talk to us about Presidio and Dell's relationship? What's going on with Presidio? >> Yeah, so I'll tell you just Presidio as as a whole, and part of why I joined about a year ago and I'm still just excited as I was on day one. We're a digital services and solutions provider with deep engineering expertise in networking, cloud, security, collaboration, and modern technologies. And we'll help our customers acquire, deploy, and then operate and manage the solutions that we have. So, we're a Dell titanium black partner. We just got that, we're a super excited about it. And they're a critical part of how we deliver solutions to our customers. >> So, you joined during an interesting time during the pandemic. What are some of the challenges your customers are facing now? Aging infrastructure, labor shortages, supply chain. What do you, what are you seeing from the customers lens? >> Yeah, you know, all of the above. I think when the pandemic first hit, every customer that we spoke with basically said, Cash is king. We want to preserve it, we don't know what the future holds. So, all of the spend that happened was on the things that drove their business forward. So, I got a distributed workforce. How do I go invest in technology to make them productive? A lot of them had to take a digital agenda that was five years long and do it in three months to survive, so they spent it and that generally meant cloud. But what they didn't spend money on, was infrastructure inside the data center. And now what they're finding, is things are old, maintenance bills are going up, the cost to get it is going up. And sometimes supply chain is over 12 months long to be able to actually do something about it. >> You know, when "theCUBE" first started in 2010, it was EFC World 2010 now, 'cause Dell is really our legacy here. So, we said that companies that sell, it's kind of a pejorative, but sell boxes are going to be in trouble because of the cloud. Interesting, right? So, it was partly true because the cloud just intermediated a lot of that sort of box selling business. We said they have to become more value added players, identify. And so, when I watched Presidio, the transformation that you guys went through, and you're relatively new. Cloud has actually become an opportunity. And you're doing stuff around digital, a lot of stuff around security. It's cyber, probably automation, life cycle management. >> True. >> Talk about that transformation? And I'm interested in why you joined Presidio? >> So, I'll tell you why I joined Presidio, is I was talking to a lot of customers every day in my old role, I love doing that part. And the conversation started with, "Dan, I can't spend money on my data center right now because we're in a pandemic. I've got to innovate faster and the answer is to cloud. I don't know how to actually make my workforce productive because they're all over the place now. And we didn't invest in technology. And now I've got a threat surface with people working everywhere in workloads in different places. I don't know how to approach that." And I looked at what Presidio had built, I'm like, that's exactly what we did. But what's been fun for me, has been the answer to most of our customers is this the end? It's not the public cloud, it's not the private cloud. It's, you need to do both of them really well and have the skills and expertise to leverage 'em for the right application, or workload, or use case. And that's why I'm super excited to be here, 'cause we're really helping our customers in both areas. >> You mentioned security. We've seen a number of announcements today from Dell Technologies with respect to cybersecurity. We know the stats are what they are. It's no longer a matter of, if we're going to get hit by a cyber attack, it's when? Most organizations are going to get hit by 2025. Where is security in the conversation now? How high up in the priority is it? >> I would say it's, we don't have a single customer meeting without having that conversation. And what we're finding, is you look at the stats that say, you know, 30% of companies that have a cyber attack, don't come back from it. 20% pay the ransom, and then they don't even get their data back. So, while we want to stop the attacks, I think you're right on that the answer is, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when? But what's great about Dell Technologies, is we have a complete portfolio that can meet any SLA of our customers. It's in backup technology, it's in primary storage, they can do a mutable backups and recoveries everywhere. But what happened this week, where they announced partnerships with the cloud, that's huge because the same resource constraints that customers have in their data centers today, are the same ones you have to deploy infrastructure to be able to make this work and be able to accelerate recovery. So, the partnership and the integration with the public cloud, really gives a great integration point for a lot of our customers. >> At the analyst of the event today, we had a meeting with Jen Felch, the CIO of Dell. And I said to her, you know, our survey data from ETR shows that security now, number one priority, it kind of always was, but it's distance itself from the number two, which is cloud migration. And I asked her, I said, "Obviously, cloud migration is not your number two, 'cause number security number one was number two?" And she said, "Let me help you interpret that data. Because for us, we have the scale, we can do our own cloud essentially." What her interpretation, was what those customers are really saying is modernization. Now, you must see that. Now, of course, you're leaning into cloud. Dell is not defensive really more about cloud, like, hey, we could take advantage of it as well. So, what are you seeing in terms of the changing priorities of IT kind of pre-post pandemic? Is it like a rubber band that goes and then comes back to where it was, or is it kind of permanent? >> I think that the both worlds together are absolutely permanent. And there's no way we're going to go back from one or the other. And then we're always going to have a world where you might lean more into one. To innovate, you might lean more into one for disaster recovery. But I truly think the world and the answer for us and our perspective, has to be both. But you said something to interesting earlier, is the key I think to what customers are doing is you can't just pick up a workload and move it to the cloud, it doesn't solve a problem. You use that term modernize. And we've invested, acquisitions and continued engineering resources that were hiring around modernization because the economics and the true benefit of actually running a workload and running right at the right SLAs and meeting your customer's objectives, aren't going to work right if you're just picking an application up and moving it over there. So, we're really focused there. >> So, Couch Base, just ran a survey. We did a power panel on it with a bunch of database analysts. And it was a survey of 650 CIOs and CTOs. And it was really interesting 'cause it's an IT bias. But they said like 2/3 of the survey base said that IT is responsible for setting the digital transformation strategy of the company. And I went, "Well, I wonder what the business guys say to that. It was sort of a red flag to me. But I wonder what you're seeing 'cause there's obviously you get a difference when you talk to different worlds. So, I guess what is modernization, was kind of one of the big questions that came out of it? And who's driving the agenda? >> So, it really depends upon the customer, right? But the key to what you said, and there was an article that came out. I won't say where it was from, but it really kind of opened my eyes. But the article was titled that, "It's Time To Get Rid of the IT Department." And for someone like me and a lot of customers, that kind of scares people. But the whole underpin of it, was they were studying customers that took IT and actually disparaged, like broke 'em apart and put them into business units. So, it said, it's your turn to wake up every day and figure out what that business unit needs to be successful. Because the answer is, David, it's both, right? You need both parties on board, right? Where, you've got a business stakeholder that clearly knows want to do, understands technology's the answer but you need IT to be able to go make it work and be a true partner, and help go actually make it work. >> It reminds me of when Nicholas Carr wrote that article if you're, you guys are probably too young to remember, "But Does IT Matter?" It was kind of post Y2K, right? And then everybody went crazy. All the CIO was when nuts. And in fact, IT matters more than ever, but it's a different context, as you're saying. A question on things like skill shortages, supply chain, I mean, obviously, top of mind. >> Yeah. >> Are you helping people with that? And if so, how so? >> Yeah, so two ways I would look at this, is when you look at the supply chain, I mean, Intel I think spent a $100 million on standing up new Silicon plants. We won't see a benefit from that from 2025. So, it's real. So, a lot of what we're doing on a supply chain is how can we help a customer reach in and have certain targeted ways to leverage the cloud? Because we can't physically solve for the physics issue. The other part of it, the people shortage. I mean, it's real. I mean, everyone's sitting at home they're pondering whether or not, you know, what they're doing is fulfilling their dreams. Now, geography doesn't matter, you can do a job from anywhere. And technology is the heart of everything. So, the people shortage is real. So, we're finding that our focus on managed services we're essentially allowing our customers to run and deploy things across every technology aspect, is something that we used to have to drive to our customers. And now, we can't get out of a conversation without them asking for it 'cause they just don't have the people- >> Yeah, they're calling you into that need. >> Yeah. >> Can you share that customer example that you think really articulates the value of the Dell Technologies that Presidio is delivering? It's really been able to truly modernize in the last couple of years? >> Yeah, so looking specifically to Dell, I mean, for us, one of the taking technical data out of the data center and modernizing, their HCI portfolio together with VMware, is a complete home run. It takes multiple products, brings it into a single common solution, uses a common tool set for all the operators that are there so you don't need the number of people to run it. But if you do it right, it solves for the portability issue in some of the public cloud options, especially with things like VMC where you can have an on and off-prem and an automation between 'em, so you can pick and choose dynamically. That for us has been a home run in driving modernization strategies. >> From a multi-cloud perspective, it's going to be a big focus of this event the next couple of days. What are you seeing from customers' perspective? They're probably in multi-cloud environments for a variety of reasons, that's going to be persisting. The hyperscalers are all growing. What's going on there? How are you helping customers to manage the multi-cloud environment with just much more simplicity? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple parts to that, right? I mean, obviously, Dell together with VMware has a great set of technologies to be able to manage the deployment of that. But what we're trying to do, is number one, help a customer determine which workload should be running in which place, right? Understand application dependencies. But as we work through a migration strategy with a lot of our customers, the key part that a lot of people don't realize, is we all think security but the networking is probably the hardest part if you want to have portability in a well running cloud. So, having years and years in network heritage, it's been a great synergy on us kind of moving in that direction to help our cloud customers make sure that the right SLA, the right connectivity, and the right availability to make that world work. >> Yeah, so multicloud, obviously, a big topic of of discussion this morning with Chuck Whitten. And that's another one of those, well, what do you mean by that? I have a sort of a premise I want to test on you, Dan. I've always said, it just comes from talking to customers, multi-cloud is kind of multi-vendor. I got to run some workloads in AWS, I run some On Prem. I run some in Google, some in Azure, and many of them, a handful like the big banks, for instance, they say, "Well we're building our own abstraction layer so we can control the policies, the security." And it seems like that's a direction that the industry generally in Dell specifically is headed. Do you buy that? And what's driving that need? >> Yeah, so I would buy it based on the size of the customer. So, when you take a big bank, a lot of what drives them to go to one cloud or the other, is that the big cloud providers they're innovating constantly. Every day there's a new tool or capability that exists there. And certain ones of them are going to match, a use case that, that large customer has- >> You can't resist? >> So, they're going to end up with multiple clouds, so it makes perfect sense. When you get into smaller customer, they really have to want to be successful. They got to pick one, right? They can't afford the people, and the scale, and the process. So, I think that's... The answer would depend based on the customer. The larger ones, I think they're going to build a full orchestration stack and small customers are going to look for one and someone maybe with managed services to help them augment the skills and staffing to make it work. >> For a while, I haven't heard it much lately, but you'd hear about repatriation, people come to me like, "Dave, you got to look into this repatriation thing." And I did, and I was like, "Eh, I really see, it a little bit, little pockets." But I do see hybrid. I mean, that's very clear. And I do see a lot of people went into the cloud, they didn't have a great experience. And okay, so there's some of that going on. I guess you could call that repatriation. But what are you seeing in terms of both of those? Is repatriation a trend or is it really an hybrid? >> So, I've interesting perspective coming from Dell, right? Where we're a very infrastructure focused in there. I see a little bit of repatriation in like a workload, like virtual desktops where you picked it up and you threw it in the cloud and make your workforce productive. But generally speaking, what we're seeing is not repatriation, which is, "Hey I move things. My cost is out of control, I don't know how to manage it. Can you help me get better controls on cost? Can you help me automate a lot of the things that are running here so I've got better control of cost and we're where things are running in my security posture?" So, it's much more about optimization that we're finding than it is. Let's bring it back. >> So, it's fine tuning the knobs? >> There you go. >> Right? And that seems to be the trend over the next couple of years? >> 110%. Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Have you seen any industries, in particular the last year that you've been with Presidio really leading edge in terms of modernization? >> Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting enough. I mean, I could give you a few examples, right? When we look in our public sector business, a lot of the educational institutions had to invest in new platforms they interact and engage with students. Our financial institutions, believe it or not, continue to innovate. I mean, what people don't realize, is the mainframe still has the transaction where your money lives in the ledger, but all the supporting ecosystem is digitalized and is completely modernized to interact with you. And, of course, retail for us. I mean, retail, they had to change their business model in many cases overnight, not even to survive, but to serve the communities they were working in. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we've all learned in the last couple of years, is just the access, the e-commerce, the access online. We expect that now in the brick and mortar stores to be able to deliver that connected store, make sure that they have the inventory that I'm looking for with a frictionless experience. >> Yeah, and I tell you my favorite one, is you look at the healthcare industry, and while obviously with loans, and healthcare, and billing, all had to change. But that was really exciting for us, I mean, as consumers, right? Is the fact that we can interact with doctors online at the click of a button now. I mean, that part for us has been super exciting. >> Everything's at the click of the button now. >> Yeah. >> Oh, my gosh. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, sharing what's new with Presidio, what you guys are doing together with Dell, and how you're helping companies in every industry to modernize. >> Perfect. I appreciate it. >> Great to have you. >> Likewise. >> Thank you. >> With Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of Dell Technologies World live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Stick around, and Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017, everybody. My name is Dave Velante, and this is our day one wrap. I'm here with Peter Burress and David Foyer who have been inside the analyst meeting all day. Peter, I want to start with you. The premise that we wanted to test coming into this show was the following question that we wanted answered: Is VMware's momentum a function of people realizing, experience the data realities of cloud. In other words, as you've phrased it, the reality that they must bring the cloud model to their data, versus trying to force-fit their business model into the cloud. Is that a reality that customers have now come to see, or is this really just kind of an end user, or an enterprise license agreement, product cycle for VMware? Is that what the momentum is behind? >> I don't think it's the latter but I think there's elements to it. So I think, I don't think customers have fully rocked the idea, fully conceived of the idea that their data is the most important asset, not their hardware. And that the goal is not to get rid of hardware, the goal is to get more value out of your data, and that means bringing cloud and cloud experience to your data. But I think also that VMware is interesting because they do have this enormous install base. You know, 500 thousand plus customers, many of whom are vitally dependent upon VMware as a technology. And for many years it looked as though VMware was just going to sit on that and milk it. But in the last two years, it's become very very evident that they're not. There have not been a lot of really hugely successful industry or company transformations in this industry. You can look back at IBM in the 90's, Microsoft has done it a couple times, but there aren't that many companies that have done a really great, hugely successful transformation. VMware may be one of them. So they're able to build on that notion that what's going to matter is: where is your data? And bringing function and capabilities to that data, number one, but leveraging their installed base, and providing the chops to help their customers move forward from where they are, is, in many respects, the core story of what's happening here. >> So David, let me bring you to the conversation. About a year ago, VMware and AWS announced a partnership. We're just starting to see the initial pieces of that, there's obviously a lot of engineering work having to be done and heavy lifting. But the other piece that might be a tailwind for VMware was their cloud strategy was all over the place for years. For the better part of a decade, it was Vcloud Air and then sort of shifting that strategy, owning their own cloud. >> They had no cloud strategy. >> Well, they tried a lot of different things, and none of them worked, and then basically they said "okay look, we're going to partner with IBM," "we're going to partner with Microsoft," "We're going to partner with AWS." In particular, the AWS partnership, it seems like brought a lot of clarity, do you think that made customers feel more comfortable that entering into long-term relationship with VMware, now that they had a clearer cloud strategy both for the customers and the partners, gave VMware a boost over this past year? >> Absolutely, and in particular, the knock on effect of the agreement with AWS gave confidence, I believe, to VMware customers that they knew, they had a path forward. They had a clear path forward. And the same with AWS, and they've extended that now with rack space and I hear that even Google is in the mix, as well. So, they've announced firm relationships with other clouds, they've announced their foundation, which is again, part of making the cloud respects part of the overall platform. >> Well, they really have to make sure it doesn't just become a marketing or markitecture. >> Sure, absolutely. But I'm impressed with the confidence they have. I think their story of any device, any application, on any cloud, the little piece of intrinsic security may be that needs a lot of work on that area. But the first three things I think is a strong, positive, confident start. >> Well, they've been talking about that for a while, but two years ago they had negative license growth, and now it's significant. I mean, double digit license growth, 13% last quarter, we think we've had three quarters of substantive revenue growth, so do we feel as though this is a semi-permanent on the near to mid-term trend? >> There are three platforms, aren't there? There's AWS, there's Lennox, and there's Azure. And at one stage, they were sort of feeding that everything might go to Lennox, I think there are three firm platforms that will, in my opinion, survive at least til the next decade. >> Certainly in the U.S. The global market has to weigh in, there may be some things that happen elsewhere, but certainly in the U.S. No, David's right. Where we are right now, kind of as I said, VMware is going through transformation. It looks like it's going to succeed, it's going to remain relevant, and it's going to be in a position to bring its customers forward, and show them a direction where they could put their money, where they're going to get value as opposed to putting their money where somebody else is going to get value. If they carry on with the transformation they're in, and the commitments that they're making, this is going to be, this is going to remain, one of the top five or eight technologies in the enterprise for the foreseeable future. >> Yeah, and I think people underestimate the power of the ecosystem. That's really kicked in. And I really do feel like it's some of that clarity with the cloud strategy. Now, the other interesting thing is VMware at one point wanted to own its own data centers and manage its own data centers. They just raised four billion dollars in debt. They're going to spend, maybe, a couple a hundred million on capex this year, that's it. I guarantee Google, and Microsoft, and the Hyperscale guys are going to spend a lot more than that. Very efficient operating model from that standpoint. They raised a bunch of cheap debt. They're buying back stock, many people feel like the stock is underpriced. The cash flow is really strong, operating cash flow at three billion dollars, so things are pretty good right now. The data center is on fire. What did you guys learn today, in terms of, that was of interest in terms of product announcements, innovations, other things that were of interest or exciting to you? >> Well, the first thing I think I learned, and David, you and I were talking about this a bit, is that when you peel back every major commitment that they're making right now, every new effort that they're undertaking, buried inside is NSX. Somewhere in there is NSX. And it looks like they're really going to bet heavily on NSX. And that makes some good sense, it's going to be a multi-cloud world, one of the biggest challenges the customers are going to have are how are they going to weave multiple clouds together so that you have a coherent application or set of work loads that you can manage. So that's probably the first thing, is that the last year, NSX started to come to the fore, this year, any conversation you have, blah blah blah, NSX, blah blah blah NSX. So NSX has replaced v sphere as the primary, that core technology that's going forward. >> Because of that multi-cloud imperative. >> Right. >> I would pick another area as perhaps also being very very important, and that was the success they've had with the vSAN. >> Peter: vSAN? >> vSAN. >> Oh yeah, totally. >> They have essentially reducing the cost, straight-forwardly reducing the cost of running a v-sphere environment by being able to put in vSAN, and they didn't have -- >> EFC's finally out of the way. >> Exactly. >> I'll say it. I mean let's face it, EFC held back VMware for years. When we first started coming to VMworld, and we said "wow, this company's in an amazing position" "to really innovate in storage," and storage is a real mess, but they didn't have the resources to do that, and they were sort of publishing these API's saying you guys all figure it out. Finally, you know, under the Gelsinger era, he was able to, I don't know, fight, beg, borrow, steal, who knows how it all went down internally, but they've really taken the handcuffs off. >> They have and it's good, and they're aggressive. >> But there's another thing, and that is the EMC's, EMC's transformation to Flash, absolutely facilitated the emergence of vSAN as a platform for how you're going to handle storage. So, it was a combination of things. I'm not sure if vSAN would've worked as well if EMC was still driving storage raise with this. >> Exactly. In fact, they gave some interesting numbers. >> So, they did. >> Yeah, 60% of vSAN is flash, and of the VX Rail, 71% is all flash. >> 71% is flash. >> And the reason they give, and I think is right, is that it's so much simpler for the VMware, for the VMware operators to manage. >> And that's Flash inside of what, a Dell server? Or an HPE server? Or? >> No, it doesn't matter. But the key thing is, is that, you know, >> Not an array. >> It might very well, not an array. It might very well be that EMC was holding things back, but I think there's also a very practical, technical reality here that the amazing potential of vSAN has become unlocked by the market's adoption of Flash. Which, you know, David was one of the guys that helped move the market many years ago. So it's coming together for them in ways that perhaps they planned from the beginning, but they're taking advantage of the opportunities as they emerge. And you know, I'll say one other thing, Pat Gelsinger took some serious hits over the last 18 months in the rumor mill, and he's still here, and his company's doing pretty well. >> Well, two years ago it was like, oh, Pat's on his way out, and then he gave a really strong keynote. I thought his keynote today was very crisp, and evidently he was a little under the weather, so he did a good job fighting through that, but last thing, any announcements that were exciting to you or things that you're expect, big announcements coming tomorrow? We're hearing about some super secret stuff that's kind of leaking out. >> Yeah, you got to be a little bit careful about that, but what did you hear today, David, that made you go "hmm?" >> Well, I still want to focus on one thing that I think is one of the biggest issues, and that is security. They were very open today, very very open today about what a mess security was. And they came up with something called, what was it, absence? Which is a good idea. >> Now you're making me go to my notes. >> Defense. >> App defense. Which is an idea, but it's just a start. These are huge amounts of greater investment in security, from Dell, from EMC, and from VMware, all together. They have to step up in a much bigger way. >> He said in his keynote today that the industry, as an industry we have let you down. Several years ago, one of the early years when we interviewed Pat in the CUBE I had asked him, is security a do-over? Unequivocally, he said yes, and that was years ago, we're still doing it over. Alright guys, we got to wrap. Thanks very much for coming on and close, I look forward to more analysis from you guys tomorrow and throughout the week. This is day one, we launch tomorrow, we start at 10:30 local time. >> That's pacific time. >> Yes, which is pacific time. We're in Las Vegas, watch siliconangle.tv. Siliconangle.com for all the news, check out wiki.com for all the research. We're out. This is day one, this is the CUBE, we'll see you tomorrow.