>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our second full day of coverage of theCUBE. Lots going on, lots of announcements. We always love talking to customers, hearing the voice of the customer, and we have a couple of guests, one from Dell Customer at Lowe's, John Dabek is here, the senior director of infrastructure. Ali Biers also joins us, marketing director of edge solutions at Dell Technologies. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for inviting us. Appreciate it. >> So John, let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what the heck is going on in retail. Tremendous change, tremendous transformation, lot of pressures. The last two years have been quite influential. Talk to us about some of the trends that you're seeing in retail, some of the challenges that are going on. >> Absolutely, so COVID has put everything on steroids in terms of the omnichannel experience, so we no longer think of digital as something that's separate. It's all integrated with the store experience. So, interestingly enough, two thirds of our customers shop online before they come into the store, so that shows you the power of having the digital working in harmony with the store. >> So how does that affect your technology strategy? What changes do you see? >> That's a very good question, so we've had to accelerate a number of our new technologies to really create that frictionless experience for the customer. So for example, I'll give you a great example of a technology that we deploy today called pickup lockers. So you order online and then there's a set of pickup lockers right in the vestibule of the store. You go up and you scan it, the locker opens, and then you can take your merchandise and go on, so it's a great experience as to how the technology has changed, and everything from utilizing the mobile applications where customers can now text us when they're in the parking lot, we can deliver their merchandise. Michael Dell put it very well in terms of the strategy in his keynote yesterday. What he talked about was today it's the public cloud, it's the private cloud within the data centers, and it's the edge, and the edge has become very, very important for us because that's where we want to put all of our technologies in the store, closer to the store. >> Ali talk to us about from an overall a Dell vision lens perspective the challenges overall that you're seeing in retail and where the edge is really advantageous for organizations to be competitive. >> Yeah, I mean, really what you're seeing is you've got these incredibly savvy customers who really want to have an experience when they go into the store, and on the other hand, you have the retailer that wants to develop that loyalty but yet they're dealing with tremendous complexity in their footprint, as well as just the pace of change, so trying to modernize and do that at a really fast pace just like what John was talking about and still stick to all the imperatives like being secure and manageable at scale. It's really a big challenge. >> Yeah, and when you talk, Ali, about modernizing at a fast pace, the first 600 stores that we did with VxRail, and we'll go into a little more detail I'm sure about that, we did in three months with the help of Dell technology. >> Lisa: 600 stores in three months? >> In three months, right, and the key was zero disruptions in the store. Now we're talking about 100,000+ square foot stores, so we're talking big stores, and we have a very short window. We can go from midnight to 5:00 AM because 5:00 AM the contractors are there to pick up their materials and we have to be open and ready, so we didn't miss a beat. >> So that's interesting. I heard your CEO the other day talking about how you guys really focused on the contractors, especially during COVID. So that was also another shift. I mean, the volume from contractors probably increased 'cause we give them such great focus. So there's this concept of the intelligent factory. Is there a similar one with the intelligent store? >> John: Oh, without a doubt. So I'll give you an example. We have 140,000 mobile devices deployed in our stores for our employees that can do everything from find merchandise, talk, receive calls. You're going to the store to pick up mulch, and they can take the device and do a checkout from the device instead of you having to come into the store and then go out to pick up your mulch. It doesn't get better than that. >> I love that example cause that one's so relatable, and I think like once you start thinking about how all this to technology in the store can really help, so all of a sudden you know where your customers are spending their time in the store. You can position your customer service people to help in the aisles where people are getting stuck, so it really just puts so many more insights in the hands of retailers to be able to action and make decisions. >> You know, it's funny, sometimes people, when they talk to people in IT, technology like ourselves say, "You know, you guys always talk about, oh, permanent changes. Nah, it's going to be the same. You watch in a few years." Here's an example, there's no way we're ever going back. You know, it's permanent. >> It's permanent, and you know what? All the bad things about about COVID and the pandemic, the great thing is it really accelerated that omnichannel journey. It forced many retailers to do that, including Lowe's. >> Silver lining, but it also, from a forcing factor perspective, it was critical from a competitive standpoint. I mean, we have these expectations as consumers that we can have this consumer experience everywhere which means I want to be able to do my transaction in real time. I want to go onto the website and make sure that they have what I want inventory wise in real time. Real time we learned in the pandemic, not a nice to have anymore. >> No, absolutely. >> Lisa: That is a competitive advantage for every industry, especially retail. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we have a mini data center inside the store with the VxRail, so it was very important for us because we were not able to leverage the new application development on the old platform, so we absolutely need the power of the new platform to enable the stores. It's very, very, critical. >> Paint a picture of what it's like inside of a store. I mean, what's the infrastructure look like, the apps that are running, the data flow? >> John: So if you picture a dedicated room for the technology, unfortunately in a store you don't build a data center, so it's a concrete floor, as you can imagine. But through the help of Dell, they've really helped us harden the environment as well, to put in technologies that help with intelligent power distribution units and other types of technology because we're making such a big investment that we don't want to have power be a disrupter. You get six nines on our network, six nines on our, on our compute infrastructure. We don't want power to be an impact. But in terms of the apps, everything that you need to run a store from a POS perspective runs in the environment, and it's being enhanced every day, because now the communication from the mobile device of the consumer to what happens in the store is integrating, so it really requires a lot of compute power. >> What I really like about the way you guys have done it too is that you guys have really thought about it in terms of planning for the future. So you thought about how to create that foundation that's really going to scale over time. >> And Ali you've brought up a good point because one of the things that we didn't anticipate when we started was the fact that we would need GPUs in the future. and the power of the GPU was required for things like video analytics, AI, and it came to light as we had one of our innovator, person in the lab saying, "Hey in the test system, we want 300 gigs of memory to do a test," and we're going like, oh my God, this would never run in production. So that's when we got into the whole concept of GPU so all of our stores are GPU enabled, so as we need them, we can add that to the store, but thanks for bringing that. >> That's really interesting. So for what, security? Other use cases? AI, you're saying. How are you applying that? Dig into that. >> It could be security, so think of having cameras in the store that watch what people do from a checkout perspective, and it's tied in with the system so it knows the weight of an item, it knows the cost of an item, and it's able to spot potential frauds and alert people. But to do that, you need video analytics, and that requires a lot of processing power. >> How much of that data do you persist? >> We could talk about that for another hour. >> Oh, okay. >> With respect to that. But generally we utilize the data to handle what we're looking to accomplish. We do capture other data for AI and other analytic purposes as well. >> Ali I think I interrupted you. >> Ali: Oh, no worries. I think one of the things about the edges, people have a tendency to go build a technology stack to address the business problem that they're trying to address in that moment, and it's usually driven by the people that are working in the store. They see an opportunity for advancement, but all of a sudden, if you have a lot of those, how now are you going to deploy it, secure it, manage it, and do them all separately? So I think what you're talking about is you've really figured out a way to do that across all those different use cases, and maybe even for the ones that you don't know exist yet so. >> And that's the good point is that we don't know what exists, because we have to, as we build it, we have to build the business case for what makes sense to put into the stores. So you you'll see a lot of continued innovation with inventory aids to help stock shelves, applications that help the customer journey. I saw some deployment of some new apps in the stores where we can tell where people are located real time in the store, so wouldn't it be great if you know that you can dispatch customer service personnel to that area and great opportunity to plus sell in that environment. >> I can't wait for my next trip to Lowe's. This is going to be so fantastic. But John, I got to ask you, you're sitting here with the marketing director, I'm a marketing girl myself, future proof. It's a term that is always interests me because it can mean so many different things. You're working with Dell, I've been working with Dell for a while, how is what you've architected for the connected store? Intelligence store, excuse me. How do you feel like when you don't know what's coming, but do you really feel like we've got a future-proof architecture capabilities and a partner that's going to allow us to scale and grow as things, obviously we couldn't have predicted what happened in the last two years. >> So not too recent in the past where you would primarily have appliances in stores and single purpose servers, separate storage. So now with the VxRail technology, you have hyper converged infrastructure. So things are virtualized, your storage is virtualized, your server host infrastructure is virtualized, and the power of the VxRail is that as we grow and have different needs, we can change out the processor, we can add memory, we can add storage all while we're still running in a store. >> Dave: Bring a GPU in if you need to, right? >> Bring a GPU in, so it was architected to handle the growth and the simplicity of running the store. So we only have a handful of people that manage the stores from a technology standpoint, and thanks to the the technologies that are provided. >> So you could scale it, and you got the blueprint, what's the network look like? >> And that's some good advice for folks who are looking at this. You have to address the network first, so we deployed a software defined network that gave us the capacity and the future growth capacity and the backup we're using. We're transferring to from 4G to 5G for backup purposes, and we're trying to figure out what's the role of 5G in the future? 'Cause it gives you tremendous flexibility. But remember the VxRail and the edge can run independently, so if the network goes down, we operate a store. >> Lisa: And you had that frictionless experience which as consumers, we all had this expectation that it's going to be frictionless, it's going to be seamless, I'm going to be able to get what I want. >> Absolutely. >> Not quite 24/7. Well, yeah, with online, yeah. >> With online, 24/7. >> So last question as we grab, and I wish we had more time to dig into this. What's next? What are some of the future directions as hopefully things return back to "normal". What are some of the things that Lowe's and Dell are going to do next together? >> We have to finish the stores. We'll be done by October. And by the way, we're experiencing supply chain issue, but not with Dell. We're having trouble getting network switches, but last week we had a breakthrough, and right now we're on track to finish all of the stores by October of 2022. But what's next? Continuing to now leverage the platform that we've put in place, to bring the applications and to start working with our innovators to experiment with the GPUs and put it into effect, and I'm sure Ali's got some great things planned as well on the edge with the technology which we're look to take advantage of. >> Yeah I mean, our goal is really to help customers to simplify their edge because it's incredibly complex. They're dealing with an ecosystem of partners, software, hardware, networking, so really being that partner that they can rely on, having that broad end to end portfolio, and being the person and the company that can architect and bring all of that together in a way that you can life cycle manage it over time. >> John: And the great thing is by being software defined, it's all seems very complicated, but it's simple to manage, and that's the key and that's the power that Dell brings to us. >> Simple to manage, famous last words. John, thank you, Ali you as well for joining us, sharing what Dell and Lowe's are doing together to really enable this intelligent store. I really can't wait for my next trip. (everyone laughing) >> Thank you so much. >> Yes, I got to hit the mulch pile. Want 'em to bring into my car's, it's too heavy to carry. Guys thank you so much for sharing your insights. We appreciate the story. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas at the Venetian. Day two of our coverage of Dell Tech World continues right after this short break. (soft music)