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

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

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by the VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here in VMworld 2018. Joining me is my guest host John Troyer, and I am Stu Miniman. And coming to the program, it's hard to believe, for our first time, Jay Krone, who's a senior consultant, Storage Portfolio with Dell EMC. And I say that just to give our audience some context. Jay works for Dell EMC, but we both worked for a company called EMC back in the day. And Jay's has had a number of roles where he's brought lots of people on the program, has known theCUBE since its inception. >> Inception, yeah. >> Yeah,ninth year doing it, and now you've made it. >> Right, I'm finally here. >> All right, so Jay, give our audience a little bit of your background, what you're working on these days. >> So, I'm a longterm storage veteran, as Stu said. I worked for the old EMC back when the only product we had was a scuzzy connected symmetrix and have been though the fiber channel wars. I've been through the SAS wars, the SATA wars, the SSD wars. I'm now working on a couple of cross-portfolio programs. The one we're here to talk about today is the Future-Proof Loyalty Program. >> Yeah, and for the audience that doesn't know what a scuzzy connector is. (Jay laughing) It was this really fat plug that plugged in, It had actual pins-- >> And lots of wires. >> That were designed for-- >> Lots of wires. >> On and off, so those kind of protocols have kind of changed and everything. But when I interviewed at EMC in 2000, it was like, oh, that connection, that I would take two computers and connect them. That was a scuzzy cable. >> Right. >> And it was relatively short-length, so wow. We can go down our memory lane later. But Jay, you're talking about something specific. We talk about the future, and it's tough to predict it. But Dell's going to make sure that everything's future proof, right? >> Of course. >> All right, what's that mean? >> What that means, what's interesting, back in the day we were competing and innovating primarily just in a technology dimension. And a lot of us technologists. We've had fun time doing that. But as people have gotten more sophisticated about the way they buy technology, they're looking for other assurances that vendors are going to be there for them when something goes wrong. So, there are nine different, what we call offers or pillars in the Future-Proof Program that are really intended to give customers peace of mind, probably most importantly, protect their investment, the money that they spend on IT, and to your point, give them a path forward. So, what we've done is looked across the inventory of things that Dell EMC already offered. Many of these were business practices that we already had in place. And what we've done is turned up the volume and made them more, basically, more visible to customers and to our selling forces, and the response has been really good. And the financial ones, of course, are the ones that people, shall we say, gravitate to at the beginning because when they're making a purchase, whether its effectively an extended warranty or a trade-in credit on their old stuff. Think of it, when you go buy a car, you get a trade-in, so you're protecting the investment you made in the car. These are all things that customers are interested in getting and we get from Dell EMC. >> OK, and just in case, people didn't catch that. I think the umbrella for the program is the Dell EMC Future-Proof Loyalty Program? >> Correct! Is that it? OK. >> OK, and one of the things that's important for folks that have been watching, it was started originally as the Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program because it was generated out of our storage business. And what happened is the customers and sales people were so excited about it, they said, "Can you add more?" And we said, "Yes, we can." And so in July, for example, we added data protection, the IDPA DP4400 product, along with a guarantee specifically tailored for that product. We're here, one of the reasons that I'm here, and we are here at VMware is we added VXRail on Monday. That one's extremely exciting because even before it was officially in the program, we helped a customer with a six-figure purchase through one of the Future-Proof benefits. And then, we have another, we have an eight-figure deal in the wind right now, on VXRail based on some of the pillars of the Future-Proof Program. >> And so, Jay, when you talk about some of the, you're talking about some of the pillars, some of the motivators for the customer then. I mean, some of it's just the transparent financial, some of it's kind of dedupe and storage guarantees. >> Correct. >> All those, you're including all these. >> Correct, correct. And then, yeah, 'cause part of it is to make... Bring Dell and EMC together was complex. >> Gotcha. >> Or created some complexity and some confusion, shall we say. Part of the reason we created this program was to make it simpler to consume and to make some of the things easier to find. >> Yeah, right, right, I mean, much, I mean, like buying a car, right? Enterprise hardware has always been a little bit mysterious. Like, what does cost? Well, how much money do you have? And then I tell you how much it cost. >> Exactly. >> And shady. I mean, not shady, but discounts, and it's not very, it's very opaque. But a lot of these things are real clear, out in the open. Actually, I just went through the website. >> Exactly. >> We guarantee you're going to get this, you can do this. >> Right, right. >> And in three years or five years, we guarantee this, and it's pretty upfront. >> Exactly, and I mean, what you mentioned is the Clear Price Maintenance Program. I mean, again, as we all know, there were some pricing practices with customers that were neither clear nor predictable on maintenance renewals. And so that's been something that's been extremely exciting. That is, in fact, one of the things VXRail folks are excited about, where what ends up happening from a customer perspective is when they get the quote, the quoting system automatically generates your prepaid maintenance price and your renewal price, either three year or five years from now, depending upon the contract you pick, and it's right there on the paper. And I can't get clearer and I can't get more predictable. Here's what you going to pay now, and here is what you going to pay later. >> As a cultural shift, was there any kind of discussion internally about, well, wait a minute, sometimes I hold these, I hold a couple points for a partner. I hold a couple points to make sure I get a deal. Was there a discussion about the changing culture of being so open? >> Well, yes, is the short answer. I'll say it was a culture change. But what's happened is the industry is shift. We don't use scuzzy cables any more, and that maintenance pricing practice has pretty much been voted down by the customer. So, its innovate or die. And so, and part of what I want to say is the innovation is not only in the products. We're doing some innovation on the business side as well. >> Yeah, Jay, I'm curious. We've said on theCUBE many times, the bar the customers will measure everything against is how they do things in the cloud. So, how I consume it, how I think about it. >> Right. >> But one of the challenges with the cloud is sometimes there's uncertainty as to what that bill's going to be next month. >> Right. >> So, maybe you can give us a compare-contrast as of what you've learned. And is there a comparison between this program and what you're talking about? >> Well, so this program is targeted at the infrastructure products. So, it's not so much to compare against the cloud pricing itself; however, what we've done here, also announced this week as part of the larger Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace is what we call the Cloud Consumption Models. And this is a couple of the cloud financing programs. Again, they were already in place from Dell Financial Services. They give customers the ability, if they really want to buy infrastructure that they put in their data centers in an Opex model, you can do that. And it's called Flex on Demand. There's a couple of really exciting high-velocity, they call it Flex on Demand Velocity for Unity and X2 where again, there's a rate card. So you are not coming in and having the sales person sharpen the pencil and say, here's what the price is. So they'll come in with the rate card on how to consume that. And when we take a look at that, that pricing model versus both some of our system vendor competitors, as well as some of your, shall we say, more prominent cloud competitors, as Michael said, the cloud is an operating model, not a place. If you want to have that operating model for the way you pay for the infrastructure, buying an XtremIO capacity from us with the cloud model is cheaper than buying SSD capacity from one of the cloud providers. >> All right, Jay, want to give you the final word. Believe there's a website if people want to find out more. What is the final takeaway you'd want people to have about this program? >> Well, basically, investment protection is number one. Peace of mind is really important. There are a number of guarantees about product performance. And as we've said, the future is bright. We're giving you a way to go there. >> All right, Jay Krone. Pleasure to catch up with you on camera. >> Likewise, thank you. >> As it is always off camera. For John Troyer I am Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here, theCUBE, VMworld 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic musical flourish)