(upbeat intro music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in. Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, theCUBE alumni, one of the first, let me go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh my gosh, almost 10 years. That is unbelievable. It's hard to believe so many years of theCUBE. I love it. >> It's been such a great honor to interview you and follow your career. You've had quite the impressive run, executive level woman in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props to that before we get started. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. I, it's my, it's been my honor and privilege. >> Let's talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. >> Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport, and we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities and with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners and growing, and we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well, so I feel right at home. >> You quite have a knack from mastering growth, technology, and building out companies. So congratulations, and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about, how did it all start? Like, I know you had a, you know, bumped into it, you went Microsoft, AWS. Take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened. >> Well, I do like to give a shout out, John, to my roots and heritage, which was a speech and language pathologist. So I did start out in healthcare right out of, you know, university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication, and it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare, and by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there and then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Keyfile Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashua, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into big tech world. We ran on exchange, for everybody who knows that term exchange, and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what my next step was? I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade. I tell this story all the time. Took like three downgrades in my role. I had been a SVP and went to a manager, and it's one of the best moves I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of big tech, and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that, I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010, where I eventually ran all of the U.S. federal government business, which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinch myself some days because we went from two people, no offices, to the time I left we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue, and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and Cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. You know, I was there till 2020, 21 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple projects for Microsoft with CEO, Satya Nadella, who is also an another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me, and I'm at Flexport, so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. >> Yeah, I got to say the Amazon One well-documented, certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watched you rise and scale that thing. And like I said at a time, this will when we look back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean as a zero to massive billions at a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed, but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like, you know, blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings? Because one, you're a Seattle big tech company kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of you got, here's some working capital seed finance and go build that thing, and you're in DC and you're a woman. What did you learn? >> I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with itness, you know. you can't give up and no's not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes. That you have to figure out what are all the questions people are going to ask you. I learned to be very patient, and I think one of the things John, for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves, if we're going to do something super transformative and truly disruptive, like Cloud computing, which the government really had not utilized, we had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions, and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of Cloud computing, we were not going to accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there, who's still there, who's the CISO, and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out. Without them, you know, we would've just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I loved about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development, it was data center operations, it was legal, finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why Cloud computing could be such a transformative game changer for the way government operates globally. >> Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say, you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport. Again, transformative supply chain, not new. Computing wasn't new when before Cloud came. Supply chain, not a new concept, is undergoing radical change and transformation. Online, software supply chain, hardware supply chain, supply chain in general, shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working. Similar kind of thing going on, build out, growth, scale. >> It is, it's very much like that, John, I would say, it's, it's kind of a, the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly, it's not as, there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world, but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain. You don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know, I was at a conference last week in LA, and it was, the themes were so similar about transparency, access to data and information, being able to act quickly, drive change, know what was happening. I was like, wow, this sounds familiar. Data, AI, machine learning, visibility, common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of themes that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea, number one to give access to everyone. We want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods, think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and want at their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one, but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell this story years ago, John, and I don't think Michael Dell would mind that I tell this story. One of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management, and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them, and they had runners and they would run around, you know, they would run around the floor and do their orders, right, to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade, in my mind I still see runners, you know, running around and I think that's moved to a very digital, right, world that all this stuff, you don't need people doing this. You have machines doing this now, and you have access to the information, and you know, we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an under-abundance or an over-abundance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping, in the shipping yards around the world. So we, and the ports, so we need to also, we still have some clearing to do. And that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. >> Yeah, great, great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion, diversity, and equity programs. What do you got going on there? That's been a big conversation in the industry around keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other, but clearly every company, if they don't have a strong program, will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants, diverse workforces, inclusive, equitable, all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy and how are you guys supporting that in the workplace? >> Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am, since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader, that I could have an impact. That the words I used, the actions I took, the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace and the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that, that I could help empower women around the world in the tech industry. Now I'm hoping to do my little part, John, in that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all. I've not been there that long yet, but I'm getting to know we have some, we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more, and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know, while this industry is different than the world I live in day to day, it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know, for us, we're trying to approach every day by saying, let's make sure both our interviewing cycles, the jobs we feel, how we recruit people, how we put people out there on the platforms, that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top, from Dave and all of our leaders, we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something. It's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the, one of the areas, as you know very well, we lost a lot of women during COVID, who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family, and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. >> There's now clear visibility, at least in today's world, not withstanding some of the setbacks from COVID, that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the boardroom. That's a big change. A lot than even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table. The board still underrepresented by most numbers, but at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top, but a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this leveled approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of? And credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were, you know, rising through the ranks? What's different? >> Well, one of the main things, and I honestly do not think about it too much, but there were really no women. There were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally, it was me or not me at the table, but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room, and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through, and that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot in the U.S. You know, if you look at just our U.S. House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate, we now have the increasing number of women. Even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to. Women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share, John, globally in the U.S. one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the U.S. have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters. I have nieces, and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude, that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what what we have to instill in every little girl out there, that they can accomplish anything they want to. The world is theirs, and we need to not just do that in the U.S., but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit, is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East, how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain, over 60% of the tech workers were females and most of them held the the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering. But many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger, but the top, we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go. But again, that part is really changing. >> Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done and I wan to give you props of that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of, you know, causes in in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I would love to get your opinion 'cause I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge, comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive, but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring? It's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? >> Well yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like, I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship. And I like to look at my mentors in different parts of my life because if you want to be a well-rounded person, you may have parts of your life every day that you think I'm doing a great job here and I definitely would like to do better there. Whether it's your spiritual life, your physical life, your work life, you know, your leisure life. But I mean there's, and there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world. And I tried some new things in between roles. I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you're, if you want a mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing. And I don't believe we actually do that still in companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team. When I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that weren't, that had a lot of opportunity for growth, but they just weren't getting a seat at the table. And we brought 'em to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor. They had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring 'em into executive meetings. They would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without, you know, feeling wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environment or setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do. But they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with, John, that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program, and I said two things. I want you to leave this program and say to yourself, I would've never had that experience if I hadn't gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months. It would probably taken me five years to learn. And that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity, and unless you all feel that we are in an inclusive environment sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not going to get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them. That we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held 'em up, taught 'em things that gave them access. And two, selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business. Please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful, and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me that's more sponsorship. I still have people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying, you were so good with me, can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not pray 100%, some things pray fall through the cracks, but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy, who were very honest and upfront with me about my career. >> Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women in tech, paying it forward, but you're quite accomplished and that's why we're so glad to have you on the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously storied career and your other jobs, specifically Amazon I think, is historic in my mind. This next chapter looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you, for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit, what's on your mind with your current job? >> Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners. I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world class enterprise global sales and marketing team. Really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful, that you listen, you learn, and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about, is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me. And flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for Tech for Refugees, which brings assistance to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the horn of Africa, and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria, and Flexport, recently in fact, just did sent three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria. But you know, we're very active in the Ukraine, and we are, our goal for flexport.org, John, is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost effective, easy way, as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so, I'm so happy. And you know, Ryan Peterson, who was our founder, this was his brainchild, and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commercial-ity and giving. And I think Flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. >> Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all the exciting things around sustainability, and we just had Mobile World Congress for Big Cube Broadcast, 5Gs right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. >> Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we are tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's a thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we are doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS, is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with our climate initiatives. >> Well Teresa, it's great to have you on. Security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. >> Well, John, it's an honor, and just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. >> I really appreciate it, it's super important. And these videos have impact, so we're going to do a lot more. And I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. >> Teresa Carlson, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. >> All right, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day 4 of coverage MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix, right? And Netflix is punching back. There maybe are better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg who's the Global Vice President of Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. And Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner, sales lead. Guys, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Great to be here. >> Dave, you heard my, you're welcome. You heard my intro. It's got to be better ways to, for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? >> Yeah, well, well first of all, sort of the promise of 5G, and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise G. Right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue enterprise use cases. And so, it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the companies leaning in on that. The other places network, network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but it's really their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So, we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and and we're making big investments 'cause in most Geos we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and, you know, looking forward to talking more about it. >> So Ken, you know, the space inside and out, we just had at AT&T on... >> Dave Trigg: Yep. >> And they were saying we have to be hypersensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. >> Ken: Yeah. >> So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetize, but yet I'm thinking well, Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and they're, and and that's how they make money. And so the, the telcos are, are shy about doing that for right reasons, but they want to make better offers. They want to put, put forth better bundles. You know, they don't, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So, so what is the answer? If they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? >> Ken: Yeah. >> How do they get there? >> So I, I joined Dell in- at the end of June and brought on, as David said, to, to build and lead this what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best of breed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. And we have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and you know what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators, and we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about, you know combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions solving business outcomes it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. >> What's an example of a, of a, of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for, for both of you and value for the customer? >> Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas, cyber, well, let me start off with connected laptops, cyber, private mobility, and edge. Right? Now, the last two are a little bit squishy, but I'll I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market, we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost, almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the, is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network, that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have the used cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop, but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. >> Dave Vellante: Why does it make sense? It could change the end customer. >> Ken: Yeah. So, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one right? But, but ultimately, you know Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And, and again, the Verizon's, the AT&T's, the T-mobile's, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop could be really a Trojan horse into this IOT journey. Because ultimately, if you sell a thousand laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting a thousand of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that, what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people you could open up the conversation to why don't we we connect your place and, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places. That's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place. Robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And, and so really, so we're on the journey of people, places, things. >> So they got the cyber angle angle in there, Dave. That, that's clear benefit. If you, you know, if you got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. >> Ken: That's right. >> You're going to get hacked worse. >> Yeah. I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is collect, keep collecting the tolls. Whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way the circle of life are. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now we're going to be in trouble. >> So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network I got to tell you they're pretty excited >> Dave Nicholson: So they're receptive? >> Oh my God. They are very receptive >> So that's the big question, right? I mean is, who's, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy but I think from a strategy standpoint I mean that is a potential gold mine. >> Yeah, but it, for, for lot of the telcos and most telcos it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Cause they are used to selling sim cards to some degree and how many sim cards are they selling and how many, what other used cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, 'cause to get into the enterprise to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly. They've got to understand the use case. They got to understand the more complete solution. You know, Dell's been doing that for years. And that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer. 'cause even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really a how do you get better understanding of your customer, right? >> Right. Absolutely. >> And, and combined we're better together 'cause we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is. Cause nobody's ever bought an Edge, right? They're buying an Edge to get a business outcome. You know, back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? Like, you know, they're buying an outcome. They want to use, use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G. And 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which, you know a lot of the wifi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time, you know, for areas where you can't lose connectivity: autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome. But you got to be able to translate that into the en- enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos we can help them as well and, and really go drive that outcome. >> So Dell's bringing its go to market expertise and its technology. The telcos obviously have the the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the... >> Yeah. >> The, the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks. Beautiful. And, and it's interesting you, like, you think about how Dell has transformed prior to EMC, Dell was, you know, PC maker with a subpar enterprise business, right? Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, a company sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware and then brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell powerhouse leader and Michael Dell, you had VMware incredibly strategic and important and it got EMC with amazing go to market. All of a sudden this Dell, Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level. And you've come out of that transition VMware's now a separate company, right? And now, but now you have these relationships and you got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations at companies And actually go partner with the telcos. And you got a very compelling value proposition. >> Well, it's been interesting as in, in this show, again most telcos think of Dell as a server provider, you know? Important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business we've started to invest in things like automation. We've brought together things in our Infra Blocks and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping 'em take costs out of their network we're not helping 'em take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network. And then we're helping 'em drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light. Not done yet, but, you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping 'em drive and generate revenue. >> Yeah. Well, as, as a, as a former EMC person myself, >> Yeah? >> I will assert that that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of, of EMC. And I'm sticking... >> I won't say that. Okay I'll believe you on that. >> I'm sticking with the story. And it makes sense when you think about moving up market, that's the natural thing. What's, what's what's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That's that, that doesn't work. Going the other way works. >> Dave Trigg: Yeah. >> Now, now back to the conversation that you had with, with, with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, you know, oh we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about, about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well I got wifi. No, no, no. I'm thinking I want to sim in my laptop cause I don't want to screw around with wifi. Okay, fine. If I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent wifi connectivity, great. But most of the time it's not excellent. >> That's right. >> So the idea that I could maybe hit F2 and have it switch over to my sim and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high speed connections. Just the convenience of that. >> Ken: Absolutely. >> I'd pay extra for that as an end user consumer. >> Absolutely. >> And I pay for the service. >> Like I tell you, if it interests AT&T I think it's more not, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media >> Dave Nicholson: Business necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see the necessity then they're not going to think about it. >> It's a mentality shift. Yes, but, but when you start talking about private mobility and edge, there's there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your, your business is, is not, not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the, the Dell booth with the beer guys. >> Right. >> You saw that, right? >> I mean that's, I mean that's a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. >> I mean, how many non-digital businesses are that that need to go digital? >> Dave Nicholson: Like, hundred percent of them. >> Everyone. >> Dave Nicholson: Pretty much. >> Yeah. And this, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell our global industries group, right, where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in, that it would be the CTO of manufacturing that gives us a really good opportunity to go to at AT&T or to Verizon or any telco out there, right? To, to say, these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, there's, you said before Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and, and our telecom partners. >> You guys making some serious investments here. I mean I, I've been, I was been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an X86 block, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. >> Dave Trigg: And we would agree. >> Yeah. Right. But, of course, but that's all you had at the time. And so you put some... >> We may not have agreed then, but we would agree. >> You bought, brought some people in, you know, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, you know if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. You know, it's going to take some time but look at the TAM. >> Yep. >> You know, you guys do a good, good TAM. Tennis is a pro at this stuff. >> We've been at, we've been at this two, three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server line really start to get more purpose-built, really start to get in there as we've started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the roadmap. But to your point, it doesn't, you know the ship doesn't turn overnight, you know. >> It could be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm, I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. Here's our telco business. Yeah. The telco business. But that's not going to happen overnight. But you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I, I just don't, it's, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes, you know but they're going to get there first. >> Well we've, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re- they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach. Which is great. You know, you, you learn and adjust. You know, you run into a wall, you, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, Nope, we, we don't believe in open. We don't think we can do it. We don't have the skillset. They're maybe in a geo that it's hard to find the skillset. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that shift. >> We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about, the heck, the Cloud is happening, the Cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the Cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know Capital One's launching Cloud businesses, Western Union, I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. Might, it might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's, it's it's a fate are completely >> I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that. >> Sorry, Dave. >> Wow, that was a low blow, like you know? >> But, but the, but the one thing that is for sure there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know, I know it's, it, it, it, it, it all sounds great to talk about the the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with the revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your con- your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right Dave? >> Yeah, totally Dave. And, but the, the other thing is, telco's a great business. It's, they got monopolies that print money. So... >> Dave Nicholson: It's rational. It's rational. I understand. >> There's less of an incentive to move but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Network coming in saying, we're going to, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Well and it's, you know, revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level know that they have to, you know, do things different. But to your point, it's just hard, and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years literally of gravity of how they've operated their business. To your point, a lot of them, you know, lot- most of 'em were regulated and most Geos around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's, it's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them turn the ship overnight but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with the journey and we do think we are better together. >> IT the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Dave, Nicholson, Dave Vellante here, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news, keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back.

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall to wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today is ecosystem day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. >> Well and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents. We'll talk about that today. >> And we're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Iyer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you. >> Richard Leitao is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at DISH Network. Welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, lots of, this is day one, the theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly. But Dell and DISH have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide cloud-native 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the US. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So thank you again for having me. So DISH had the opportunity of, of going through this experience, of innovating once more. For the ones that know DISH, DISH is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. Of course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum and, you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G , having O-RAN, and we decided to go full in in a greenfield project building national network, 5G O-RAN cloud-based network, one of a kind network in in the US and, and most of all, using O-RAN, it's very important to us, what, what it can bring and it can bring to DISH but to the entire ecosystem of, of this sector in the US. >> Satish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to DISH. >> Oh absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean the telecom network is being desegregated as we speak. You know, companies like DISH and everybody else is looking at what are the best-in-class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, DISH is a big enterprise company. As you know, you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with DISH is Dell, is to bring to DISH is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means best-in-class infrastructure products, best-in-class software products, to allow somebody like DISH to innovate and incre, you know, basically expand and build their O-RAN network. So it's absolutely important for us as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like DISH who's also disrupting as a carrier in that space. >> So it's early days for Open RAN but you've decided, "okay, we're all in". >> Yeah. >> Right? So (chuckling) you burn the bridge, as they say, "go for it". (Lisa chuckles) So when you talk to most people, they say, "okay, it's, it's, it's, it's immature." It's got to be able to get to the levels of, of the, the the hardened stack reliability. But of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? >> Well, it, it's, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator, give us that advantage. Give us the advantage and, and desegregation, it's all about chip sets, boxes and software and the chip sets part and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation. The time that we can use new chip sets coming into the market, the size of the boxes that we are using. Obviously our footprint onsite is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that Dell has been critical in supporting us. Supporting us having the best chip sets, having the smallest footprint and, you know, the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So ma-, it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here O-RAN was more like a, a pilot type of technology. It is not, we are live, we are live for more than 30 million customers in the US and, you know, the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. >> So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud-native 5G network out of the box, you got to- >> No, you don't. >> You got to build it. So I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that, in that build out. >> Right? >> How and how, I'm really curious how to, how you would grade Dell but we'll get there. >> Yeah, I mean, look, yes, you don't. So I think the, the, the first and foremost is again, as, as we, Dell, comes into the telco space, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space, right? It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about desegregated networks, it's important to understand lot of these piece parts have to still be touched together, right? So I think the integration and integration aspects becomes really key which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with DISH Tech, you know Richard was alluding to, is bringing all, not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster, right? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack, it takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI/CD pipelines where if you want to a change done within, within a week's or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. >> I, I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what DISH saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. >> You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID, and we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June, 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell has a world-class supply chain, we felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you, you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network, we want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to, you know, leverage on Dell ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and, and, you know, will change and evolve in time. >> And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a single, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like, you know Michael Dell and Eric Carlson had dinner and they said, "okay, we're going to, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent, "Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech and so you're going to, obviously if you take a chance on us, here's what we promise you." >> Absolutely. >> And vice versa, you guys had to say, "all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world." So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to this has to be a lot of different levels, engineering, senior management, board level discussions. >> You know, we felt a huge buy-in from Dell on the Open RAN concept. >> Right. >> Yeah, okay. >> And, you know, edge computing and, and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product, Intel is is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program and some of these suppliers, So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy-in on the O-RAN concept. We felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. >> Yeah, I mean, I, to add to that, I mean, you know DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating and executing to our roadmap, right? They're one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they're really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation, helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, a lot of our product roadmaps, in terms of what have you built and all that, was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because, you know, there is, it's not a one, one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You are picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. And it's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there is a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint. Supportability, deployment, one of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know. Other Dell's ability to, lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right, in the second part. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time and as you all know, you know what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that lot of these things are done in one place and a factory, and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of, lot of experimentation, lot of, lot, lot of innovation on that. >> So it's 2030, what's this look like? What's the vision if we can work backwards from there? Well, a, a great network coverage to the entire country, bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals, bringing value add to customers and, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years. 2030, I mean, I know, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. (everyone laughs) >> A lot of it is "build it and they will come", right? >> Yeah. >> I mean it really is right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. >> Yeah. And look and and I think the biggest people think about Open RAN in terms of cost, which, you know, you, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in Open RAN. The footprint, the the possibility to diversify suppliers and and have more competition. But for me, Open RAN is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia, I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed, speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and, and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. >> Move fast and break things. >> Well, we also expect that speed- >> Break and fix. (everyone laughs) >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24/7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of, of how the, the Dell partnership is helping DISH to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. >> Well by setting up the system, number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and is supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because, you know, we, we believe they know a lot in this area and they, they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in, in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. You know for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important. We are not compromising that. And I think the future is bright for both of us. >> Yeah, and Dell learns from the experience. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. >> Yeah, I mean, like you said, I mean, you asked a 2030 question and I think that, you know, know six, seven years from now I think people should look at what DISH and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of make, bringing Open RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on a different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly Open RAN network to be successful in commercial. >> Awesome guys. Trailblazers, Dell and DISH. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you- >> Thank you. >> for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you, bye. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Okay, we're back. With Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest, modern, simple power protect data manager software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers. And they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize, and they want us as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX data storage services. >> Okay, so three pieces, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works, and performs great." So what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is, that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property. Components that we've taken, that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities, we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy-to-use and easy-to-scale interface for customers. >> So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on Cyber Recovery, your specific news that you have there? >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance. We are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And Cyber Recovery, especially, when it comes to cloud deployments, it's an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our Cyber Recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major Clouds. And it really provides customers the flexibility to cure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises, in a Colo, at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a Cyber Recovery vault. That really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection, or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always involve my favorite Matt Baker here, It's not a zero-sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay so my other question, Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX Solutions, since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is, that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a one-year term, or a three-year term? And we take it from there. We get them up and running, so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX console. >> Okay, so you're keeping a simple, like, I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this, Jeff, maybe you can- >> So, I'll start and then, pitch me, you know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here so... >> Awesome. >> So first I'd say we offer innovative Multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> 80%? >> 80%. >> That's a big number. Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX solution as well. So really we can provide solutions that helps support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives, Edge core to cloud. The other thing that we're here, as a big differentiator for Dell and Jeff touched on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and Cyber Recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber-attacks, it can help customer speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber-attack and fast recovery should a cyber-attack occur. And you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera that an end-to-end capability that that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your R&D, and now, they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure, Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So we have unmatched capabilities, going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate and we have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we have the trusted market leader, no if and or buts. We're a number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC. And we were just named, for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah. And I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for (indistinct). >> Thank you, sir. Thanks, Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment, I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell and collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music) >> In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical, to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place, because the threat of cyber-attack are imminent. >> PowerProtects Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted we chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been on strategic partner with Dell Technologies, for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale, and grow as we've transition from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> Got installed it by myself, learn it by myself, with very intuitive >> While restoring a machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent Snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the Transparent Snapshots. >> With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extreme important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager. >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection and cyber security must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition, to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace. Specifically, address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system. Taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall earlier this year, we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX backup services. And then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera, really, what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course, that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard, was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market, and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information go to the Data Protection page at Dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and all the videos are available on demand at thecube.net. Check out our series, on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multi-cloud Protection." Made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreau is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padre and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with the high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it is really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multi-cloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >>What does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cybersecurity, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vhi to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? It performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery, you specific news that you have there. >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We can talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis and all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right? Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We have the trusted market leader, no, if and or buts, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc and we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Travis. Good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cyber crime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the Cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreaux is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padro and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And and by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What, what are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're a lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this is, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution in needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach, >>But what does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud in any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So how, what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cyber security, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vehill to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? Performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have at this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. You, you have specific news that you have there? >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so Mike, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right. Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber re attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We are the trusted market leader, no if and or bots, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc. And we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Dave. Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologists has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the world's of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell theCUBE privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly, we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges. And there's a little doubt we're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. While security in the public cloud is certainly world class, the result of multicloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. And at the end of the day, more, not less, . But there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy, industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today, there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but is becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection people, technologies and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello, and welcome to "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into theCUBE two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. Jeff Boudreau is the President and General Manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG, and he's going to share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're going to ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is going to be joined by Travis Vigil. Travis is the Senior Vice-President of Product Management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's going to give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also going to challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. (upbeat music) We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Alright, let's start off Jeff, with the high level. You know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing? You're talking to customers all the time. What are they telling you? >> Sure, as you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. No surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So, they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure and its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay, so maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multicloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that surface as attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity, you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay, so it's nuanced 'cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multicloud complexity and we talk about multicloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this multicloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So, we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lacking consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So, how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the Cisco, now they have this shared responsibility model. They have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So, maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency and specifically, they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. You know, it's funny. I said this in my open. I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency, and now they're like, "Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient." You know, are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things. One's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the Global Data Protected, excuse me, the Global Data Protection Index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus. >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually, that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges. But also it highlights at an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, I've done this many, many years in a row. I'd like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell, from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So, we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multicloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> What does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture. Right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So, we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1,700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge. And that's from deployment to consumption, to management and support. So, our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So, traditional subscription or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, "Well, that's going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk." So, what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So, we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secure by design. And we have some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in immutability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI part recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have, our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity. It's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Jeff: Correct. Yeah. >> All right. In a minute, we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break. Keep it right there. (upbeat music) (upbeat adventurous music) Okay, we're back with Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah. Thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern, simple PowerProtect Data Manager Software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, 1,700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions. They want us to help them modernize. And they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So, that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX Data Storage Services. >> Okay, so three pieces. Let's dig to that. It's interesting, appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works." >> Travis: (laughs) Right. >> It performs great. So, what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >> So, the premise that I've been putting forth for months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So, I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. Your specific news that you have there. >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So, what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running on-premises, in Acolo, at the Edge, in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always invoke my favorite Matt Baker here. "It's not a zero sum game", but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service. It's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so, what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you-go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is specify their base capacity. They specify their performance tier. They tell us do they want a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX Console. >> Okay, so it's, you're keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small. You know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this. Jeff, maybe you can start. >> Sure, I'll start and then- >> Pitch me. >> You know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here. >> Awesome. >> So, first I'd say we offer innovative multicloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis said, all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> Dave: 80%? >> 80% >> Hey, that's a big number. All right, Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We are that one stop shop that I talked about, whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the Edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software. We have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX Solution as well. So really, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives. Edge, Core to Cloud. The other thing that we hear as a big differentiator for Dell, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our Intelligent Cyber Resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks. It can help customers speed time to recovery. And really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And if you look at customer adoption of that solution, specifically in the cloud, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So, I think it's fair to say that your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator. Whenever I talk to your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end-to-end capability, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting the client's burden to your R&D. now they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax. But that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So, we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio. We're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale. We have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we are the trusted market leader. No if, ands or buts. We're number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC and we were just named for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So, bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years. It's really becoming an adjacency and really, a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you, sir. >> Dave. >> Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Right back. >> Advertiser: In our data-driven world, protecting data has never been more critical. To guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages, you need a cyber resilient multicloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >> Advertiser: PowerProtect Data Manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >> We chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> I'd installed it by myself, learn it by myself. It was very intuitive. >> While restoring your machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast, we can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Instructor: Data Manager offers innovation such as transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups, and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights into protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now, we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Advertiser: Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect's Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now, in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. And there were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall, earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX Backup Services and then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now, I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance and I asked Dell off camera, "Really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition?" Because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So, I heard a number of items. Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So, I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So, we're talking minutes to deploy, and of course that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now, this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the Data Protection Page at dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multicloud Protection" made possible by Dell, in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE Live in Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22. John, this is day two of our coverage wall-to-wall three days of coverage on theCUBE. We've been talking a lot about the developer and how the world is starting to really revolve around developer and DevOps portfolios. >> Yes, developers, startups, big companies, all transforming. This next segment, we want to hear from how Dell Technologies cloud natives, big time strategy there and looking forward to it. It's good. It's going to be a great segment. >> Yes, please welcome back one of our alumni to theCUBE. Brad Maltz is here, Senior Director of DevOps Portfolio and DevRel for Dell Technologies. Good to see you. >> Thank you guys for having me. >> So, Dell at KubeCon, what's going on? >> Yeah, that's literally the most common question I'm getting. So for us, it's a lot about our customer base is making that transformation into a DevOps world. And they have a ton of Dell and they're like, Hey, from a Dell perspective, how do you help us make that transformation into a DevOps operating model? So we're here to explain that. We're here to talk about infrastructure as code, our container Kubernetes story, our multi-cloud story. We're talking about all of it. >> Tell us about those stories and what the value is in it for companies to work with Dell as they transition. >> So when we look at it from a DevOps perspective for us, it's all about the culture, the operating model shift they're trying to make. And what that means to them is they have to figure out how do they automate all of the stacks they have to deal with. Whether it's going to be server, storage, data protection, network, and all the way up through the hypervisor and Kubernetes. That means they need to work with an ecosystem of tools. Things like Ansible, things like Terraform, all that stuff. Our job is to make our portfolio more consumable in the infrastructure as code space. That's one part of the discussion. The second part of the conversation is Kubernetes won. Kubernetes won the abstraction in this multi-cloud world and we as Dell are helping our customers consume Kubernetes. Whether it's by bringing solutions and more appliance oriented mentality to the market or whether it's actually enabling them with our container storage modules and CSI drivers. >> So it as supercloud as we call or multi-cloud as some people call it, you're starting to see the abstraction for interoperability, but essentially just distributed hybrid cloud. Edge as you guys have a big presence. So Dell's supplying not just the data center anymore. Cloud models are moving to hybrid on-premises, edge is growing. We saw some great use cases where military applications are using Kubernetes and all kinds of new things. So this real examples happening right now. This is going to impact Dell's customers and Dell as a supplier of compute and servers. And the gear that runs everything. Like at a telco, you can have a data center at an edge spot, like a box could be a data center. >> Telco is a great example cause we created the business, the Telco business unit. And in the Telco business unit, our goal was, hey, telco is a little different than enterprise edge. Enterprise edge, retail, manufacturing, healthcare. They have certain needs. Telco, much smaller group of customers that have a much different set of needs. And that's very similar is how do we scale at the edge? How do we control things programmatically? How do we do it in a secure way? And how do we do it so that our people internally don't have to deal with the underpinnings of all that infrastructure. Just make it easier for them. That's our goal through the edge discussions, through telco and all that. >> Yeah. We've been doing a big thing on why hardware matters. Hardware's back. We look at all the hyperscalers, the big competition is faster, faster, faster chips, faster the physics. This is part of the supply chain both hardware and software. Okay. So developers want more power. At the end of the day, this community here wants invisible infrastructure and they want it fast. >> Brad: Yes, that's exactly right. >> There's a lot under the hub. It's still servers. >> You still got firmware, you still got bio, you still got to management operating system, You still got to patch things, kernels, security issues, all of that from a server perspective. We haven't even talked about storage or networking or any of the other stuff. So there's a ton of buttons and dials under the covers. >> And that's totally going to be awesome. And the question comes in, okay, now take me to the cloud native because automation, infrastructures code, these are now the hotspots. Software supply chain, not hardware, software supply chain. So these are all things that are going to be intersecting. What's your view? >> In the multi-cloud view of the world, what we really have are our customers are saying, okay, we started on one cloud, Amazon or Azure or Google. And they're like, you know what? We had to go to a second cloud for whatever reason, many reasons. Now we have to manage two clouds. And by the way, we never got fully off-prem. So now we have all of our on-premises stuff plus multiple clouds. How do we deal with the complexity there? And the complexity there is everything from data problems of data mobility, data protection, replication, all that stuff. How do we deal with the actual application life cycle management across that? And that's where a lot of the tooling we're discussing comes in. That's where Kubernetes comes in and they want to do it in an agnostic way. 'Cause if they can't begin to transition to do it in a standardized layer, then the end of the day they're still going to be managing three totally different environments with three separate engineering teams. >> So is your target audience primarily existing Dell customers, legacy customers, or is it really wide open? >> It's actually been opening up. So we have kind of, the way I view it is we have three different segments that we're going to be going after. We have what I would say is the top 10% of the industry that's really able to skill up into this DevOps world very quickly. They're going to go after the GitOps, they're going to go after all those things. That's a combination of existing customers, but also the really, really large customers that can build their own clouds on-premises. We then have the other end of the spectrum. People that aren't making the shift. People that are like, you know what this DevOps transformation it's not going to help us there, but we still need server and storage and whatnot. And then I like to call it the squishy middle. 60, 70% of the market that's like, we can't scale up in time, we can't hire the people, they're not available 'cause that 10% just got them all, but we still have the same problems. And how do we operate in a world where we have that multi-cloud type of a problem, but we can't find the people. Now you got to figure out more of the no-code, low-code packaged solutions, packaged automation coming from companies like Dell and others. >> So there's customers that are either at the beginning of their journey are not convinced yet. What are some of the barriers that they're seeing that Dell can help them overcome? >> Number one thing, education. >> Lisa: Really? >> We're hearing that consistently here at KubeCon and just customer meetings all over the place. There is a segment of the industry that they're empowered to move into a DevOps model. They don't have the ability or resources. They're not able to say, I've been doing this forever in this way in storage. How do I do that in another thing? And they're scared. They want somebody to come in and kind of handhold them a little bit, but somebody they trust. Somebody they've been working with for a very long time. That's Dell's role. Hands-on labs, training materials, how-to videos, but do it in the comfortable way that they feel like, okay we got this. >> And the success with the customers has been that well-documented. The success with the company, again, continues to survive and thrive in all conditions. So Michael Dell knows what he's doing. Love following his strategy. Michael, if you're watching, I know he watches theCUBE video, congratulations. But now the hard question for Dell is this, the applications used to run on PCs, now they're running PCs under the covers and servers. The application space here at this community is enabled by Kubernetes, is creating a new application runtime like environment. I like, compared to the old app server days when things were like just application specific, development got easier. We're in that renaissance now where the app runtime is being enabled by Kubernetes. You guys been there, done that in the old school, now the new school. What's your view on this Kubernetes? What's Dell's view on? >> Yeah, so back to Kubernetes won in my head. It's just flat out won and part of the reason, and it beat out a lot of things. You remember Cloud Foundry, which there's still a thing, but Cloud Foundry went a little too far up into the application stack and constrained the application developers a bit too much. Kubernetes success is two things. It's because they're not constraining the developer, but they're also figuring out how to enable that IT operations mindset. And they become that happy medium that's out there. So now all of a sudden, application modernization conversations and cloud-native app development, there is a standard package. There's standard load balancing and security paradigm, standard registration mechanisms, all built into the Kubernetes layer, by the way, enabled by an ecosystem. And because they're actually going through that, what's happening now is we can finally move forward. We can take that next step and we can build around that ecosystem of Kubernetes. >> That is thematically something that we've been hearing, John, for the last day and a half is the maturation of Kubernetes People, what's next? We are ready for the next step. Talk about Dell as an enabler of that. >> Yeah, so a funny, another part of that paradigm is Kubernetes does not equal virtualization. And this is a hard one in this industry right now. A lot of people say, well, yeah, we did the VMware pivot and then the KVM and everything else and they're like, this is just another one of those pivots. I'm like, no it's not. Virtualization was the pivot of physical hardware became virtual hardware, but you still thought of it in CPU memory disc and you managed it in the same way. Kubernetes, it's a such a different way of thinking about operationalization and all that abstraction that what we're realizing is people need to take baby steps into Kubernetes right now. The maturity of it is great because there is an ecosystem around it, but the majority of the industry isn't even aware of the basics of Kubernetes right now. So our job, we look at it as the education part, but also can we deliver the solutions together with the OpenShift's of the world and the Tanzu's of the world and the Rancher's of the world. Can we deliver more of that full stack experience going into the next few years? That's where we believe we can help accelerate them. Education and that delivery mechanism. >> And the community support is going to be there too. You got to have the. >> 100%. >> The community, not just education, which you guys done before, but doing it with open source vibe. >> That's where DevRel comes in. So the DevRel half of my world now is all about Dell in the community. And to be part of community isn't just to say, Hey, I'm going to go sponsor something. That's not community to me. >> It doesn't hurt. >> It doesn't hurt, but we're going to do that. We're definitely going to help with that. What our notion is you got to participate, you got to contribute, you got to be there, you got to be part of the community. That's part of my developer relations team is to become part of it. >> You got to be part of it and belong. Belonging is earning. >> Brad: Yes. >> And that's the key. And the other thing we were talking about standards and Dell has won a lot of business 'cause the PC and the servers all had standards, standard components. Standards now in the community are being driven by developer consensus. >> Brad: Yes. >> So that is an interesting new paradigm. So if you make cloud native work where all the hardware and software that's powering the builders is invisible. The developers will tell you what they want. >> 100%. >> And that's why your Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry example is so on point. It's a little bit nuanced, but what happened there is, let's explain Kubernetes was loosely de facto enabling. They didn't try to take too much territory. They didn't over push. >> Brad: Exactly. >> They were very flexible, lightweight at first, but it was enabling. >> It was organic. >> And we called it on theCUBE, I'm not going to lie, we called that early on. So props to us. >> Brad: Good job. >> Pat on the back. >> Lisa: Pat your own back. >> We get it right a lot. But now there's impact though. But the Dell I think speaks to the theme here, which just we talked is that you got startups here. We had from Envoy, we saw the donator there. He started his own company. You got Dell, which has large enterprises running massive workloads with a lot of legacy and modernization. So you got a combination of both coming together. This is going to be a collision of innovation. >> Oh I look, that's exactly right. Part of what I've been getting is not just the end users, the infrastructure developers, and whatnot around here. Startups look, come to Dell, and they're like, why are you here? Like we build this and we don't talk to you. And we're like, why not? If we come to market and start delivering more of those Kubernetes oriented solutions and the Kubernetes stack experience, that's where you guys should be working with us. You're part of the ecosystem. >> Well, your job is to say to them, look it when you want to write your software for the edge and we have market share of the most hardware at the edge, 'cause we perform better on the edge. No one wants to write software on the slower platform. >> No. >> Name me one I want to write software that's just, this is something, but people don't understand that's why you're here. >> Brad: That's exactly right. >> The game is about performance. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Cloud can do it, you can do it with a machine. So it depends where in the distributed computing chain you're at. >> You bring up one topic that actually isn't a core discussion topic around DevOps, but I am seeing more HPC and a AI/ML conversations popping up in this DevOps cloud native space. 'Cause even the market of HPC, which is a very traditional market, commodity server driven in the past, they're starting to say, how do I take advantage of Kubernetes and all of the benefits that we've been talking about. >> What are some of the things that you've heard like in your sense is the key theme or the talk track of Kubernetes, its evolution? What's on the developer's minds the last day and a half at this conference? >> Oh, okay. That's a hard question, but a good one. So the way I look at it is probably it's the robustness of the features within Kubernetes, not the native features, but even partner included features. They just want to be able to handle security in a much more, I hate to say zero trust, but secure cloud native way. There's tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem that are so integrated into Kubernetes. They don't have to think sometimes as much about how do they do it themselves. They can go find through open source or off-the-shelf startup and say, I need that and I can spin it up in about five minutes and now I'm doing that without having to spend weeks or months and having to build that. And that's security is one example. You can go through the networking discussion, you can go through so many different areas. The fact is because of community and the ecosystem, that is the winning formula for Kubernetes to enable the development. That's all I'm hearing here is they're like, give me more, give me more startups, give me more of these technologies. >> And ease of use has been a big topic here. We've been talking before we came on camera about VMware has done great since it used the virtual machine example versus Kubernetes. That is millions of developers and operators on VMware. They have about 200,000 plus just in VMUG alone. So they are going to transform their careers. They're looking for a home. They're looking for a community for the next 10 years. I mean, VMware will still be around with Broadcom, but I'm speculating that it will be much more in maintenance mode. But to get someone's career in fourth gear, fifth gear, you got to go and get that next skill set, and that's the question. Where do all these operators, IT operators go to become enterprise operators? >> Brad: That's exactly right. >> That is a big topic. What's your reaction? >> Sp I'm actually a living proof of that. I grew up in the VMware ecosystem. And for me making that pivot, it took me many years. One of the ways I did that was I actually have run in Dell, our advanced development pivotal Dojos, if you remember Pivotal. >> Yes. >> And doing the Pair Programming in Agile. It took me that mental shift to say, okay, we were doing it that way and now there's a new way to do it through code with developers and using all the new buzzwords. And that pivot is different for somebody that's just starting now, and they don't have access to a Dojo that they can go handle like a whole bunch of pair programmers. How do they make that pivot? That's 100% what we have to do. >> Okay, so my question is this, this is a hard question for you, maybe you can answer or not or maybe you can. What's different now than the attempt in the past from Dell EMC to do work or align with the developers? I think, was it five, six years ago, it was an effort. Was it timing? What's different now from then? >> So that attempt was awesome. That team was great. I was very close to that team and that was from the EMC side originally is where they have built that out. And the notion of that was that we just have to go start contributing knowledge and technology into the community and start really taking the brand and trying to expand the brand to be relevant in that community. Nothing wrong. That was actually an amazing way they did it. I think through the merger there was definitely a little bit of, okay, well, maybe this isn't one of our top priorities right now and that's probably what happened through the actual merger. >> John: It's a little bit distraction. >> It was distraction. >> Timings wasn't as good now. >> You try merging a 67 billion merger. I mean it's just really hard to do. What happened here is I think we finally got past a lot of that with the merger and now we're in steady stage/growth mode, which is a notion that now we can go and do this again in the new world, taking our lessons learned from what we did before, and try to actually go and update that in these new power apps. >> And you could point to some specific timing issues. Like at that time this community wasn't as advanced along. Kubernetes wasn't as clear. Visibility to that value proposition. Although a lot of people were speculating what happened that way. >> Exactly. >> But now with multi-cloud, I think developers starting to see the reality that it ain't going to be one cloud. >> Well, multi-cloud is not one cloud, so 100%. >> Well, I mean there's multi-cloud today, but it's really not multi-cloud by the way it could be. The people have multiple clouds. I think that gives developers comfort that existing enterprise players. Remember Microsoft wasn't really in the cloud game six, seven years ago. Look where they are now. Significant progress, nipping at the heels of AWS. So all the enterprise players are back at the table. >> Brad: Yeah, definitely. We're here. >> And that's timing issue. >> We're here. >> Talk about, you're here, you are helping customers get to the basics of Kubernetes. You talked a lot about the importance of the education. >> Brad: Yes. >> That screams to me that Dell can be a facilitator of cultural change within organizations, whether it's a bank or a hospital or a retailer or whatnot. Another thing that I'm curious about, what you guys are doing, how you've evolved, Dell is a massive partner ecosystem. How is the partner ecosystem involved in helping customers build their DevOps portfolios and really start embracing, understanding, and learning about Kubernetes? >> So that's an ever changing world right now. And that's part of why we're here at KubeCon is to help expand that. We have a very, very strong partner community. Not even just channel, but like technology partner community. And our goal is to understand with our DevOps portfolio what needs to be the next step of that partner community. Do we have to go partner up with like the, I'll use examples, the Solo.io. Do we have to partner up with all the mesh companies, the HashiCorp, which we are, We have to understand where the layers that make sense and where don't. There are some that don't make sense because they're so often to an app developer land or they're so far above even Kubernetes sometimes that maybe they don't make sense in our partner community. >> How influential are, I know we got to go soon, but how influential are your customers in helping to make some of those decisions? It's all about the customer at the end of the day. >> They're the only one that's deciding for us. They have to come to us. We have to see the need. We have to understand the discussions through our sales mechanisms, our other mechanisms. We're using that data every single day, every hour to make those decisions. >> Awesome. Brad, it's been great to have you. Sorry we took more of your time than we planned, but it was so interesting. >> No, this is awesome. >> Dell at KubeCon, you've done a great job of explaining why that absolutely resonates, the relevance, and why customers should be looking at Dell as their partner for this. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. >> Thank you guys. >> All right. For John Furrier and our guest, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22 from Detroit, Michigan. Stick around, our next guest will be here in just a minute. (gentle music)

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change, just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I'll bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment and how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, We'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role work, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I, >>You were, were talking, that's >>What we, you were talking before about myths and you know, the, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance. We looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where >>You work. And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders, we've probably been thinking about a decision or a transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, We're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we sent out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. Culture. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model and doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one of the lists is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool. Top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it and how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important and then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power a positive thinking, do want to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the see you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>That you might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and you know, paying it forward. But, but so it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our CEOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. It's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>The transformation of Dell into Dell emc. And now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company to a Midling enterprise player, forced to go private to a debt laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i e VMware, and now is a hundred billion dollar giant with a low margin business. A strong balance sheet in the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry and financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book Play Nice But Win in a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. >>If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program. Now today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're gonna hear from four of Dell's senior executives, Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's gonna answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business. >>That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Groot, who is the senior vice president of marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering, and then the new Edge platform called Project Frontier. Now it's also cyber security Awareness month that we're gonna see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Vera, who's Dell's chief Human Resource Resource Officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I wanna share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. >>Now, as you know, we love data here at the cube and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ET R'S proprietary net score methodology in the vertical access. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the X axis, his overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample, this is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot, that represents Dell's ISG business that we're gonna talk to Jeff Boudro about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is, it's, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. >>It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut had we done. So Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis that represents a highly elevated net score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. >>The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software defined high margin offerings in this, in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spinout did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials. To give you a sense of where the company stands today, Dell is a company with over a hundred billion in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. >>But because it's a hardware company, primarily its margins are low with operating income, 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin with VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins. Were in the low thirties. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on r and d because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12 month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12 month revenue. Dell's Apex, and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of service now's total revenue. Of course, service now is 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than 5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion market cap. >>That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing. Thanks to VMware's cash flow, Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake at all, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of 46 billion. It added to the, to the balance sheet debt. Now Dell's debt, the core debt net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. >>But Dell a hundred billion company is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar H HP's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc. Dell's, you know, laptop and PC competitor is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than 50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over three x, about 3.3 x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine, but it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads. One to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. >>So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market and it can provide infrastructure for pr pretty much any application in any use case and pretty much any industry and pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely hp, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. And hp E and ibm, which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? >>Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder led company, which makes a cultural difference in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software, light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, is a much better chance of doing well at a hundred billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're gonna try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as a service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. >>And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as a service and reduce risk for for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board as Matt Baker Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say it's not a zero sum game. What it means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge that's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and Coco, Jeff Clark, explain this vision, please play the clip. >>You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. That's if, if you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want, They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day there's, they have to differentiate what they do. Well that, that's >>Exactly right. If I take that and what, what Dave was saying and and I, and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to delivery a distributed platform, game over, >>Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over? As Jeff Clark said, if Dell can do that, I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course it's gotta be funded and now it's gonna take time. And in this industry it tends to move. Companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's gonna come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and of course edge at telco slash 5G opportunities. >>All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through Tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges. At the same time, in my view, it's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but in a, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. >>The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, like to see that inside of Apex, like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is with Dell's go to market advantage, which which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem hybrid edge super cloud player that I wanna partner with to drive more business. You'd be crazy not to, but Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable infrastructure as a service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And of course we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vte. We hope you enjoy the rest of the program.

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC, and now Dell Technologies, has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocketship PC company, to a middling enterprise player, forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech, i.e., VMware. And now is a $100 billion dollar giant with a low-margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. The financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book "Play Nice But Win," in a captivating chapter called "Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue." Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number-one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin-out of VMware from Dell, and a massive wealth-creation milestone, pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell, and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the President of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle, and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott, who's the Senior Vice President of Marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on APEX, which is Dell's as-a-Service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, that we're going to see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jenn Saavedra, who's Dell's Chief Human Resource Officer, about hybrid work, and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company, and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE, and one of our partners, ETR, has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary Net Score methodology on the vertical axis, that's a measure of spending velocity, and on the x-axis is overlap or pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell's CSG products, laptops in particular, are dominant on both the x and the y dimensions. CSG is the Client Solutions Group, and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue, and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business, that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the Infrastructure Solutions Group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is its, as I said, its most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business, as well as the Dell server business, and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server, and its storage sectors. But the nuance is, look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated Net Score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business, in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is, we put a box around VMware, and it's prominently present on both the x and y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high-margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been, had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives for Michael Dell were just too attractive, and it's unlikely that a spin-in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials, to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over $100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue, and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate, for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company, primarily, its margins are low, with operating income 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D, but because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash-flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's APEX, and of course its hardware maintenance business, is recurring revenue, and that is only about 5 billion in revenue, and it's growing at 8% annually. Now, having said that, it's the equivalent of ServiceNow's total revenue. Of course, ServiceNow has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash-flow margin, and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and an $85 billion market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment, with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story. And hence it's conservative, and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing, thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al., they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction, to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation, is now down to 16 billion, and it has $7 billion in cash on the balance sheet. So a dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So, pretty good picture. But Dell, a $100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion, or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc., Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple that's over 3x, about 3.3x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes, and no. Dell's performance, relative to its peers in the market, is very strong. It's winning, and has an extremely adept go-to-market machine, but its lack of software content and its margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers, and what might that look like, going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world. And it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely HP, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. and HPE, and IBM, which has had an abysmal decade from a performance standpoint, and has had to shrink to grow again, and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company, which makes a cultural difference, in our view. And it's actually comfortable with a low-margin software-light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that, and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, has a much better chance of doing well at 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. APEX is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now, remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-Service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers, and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing, because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-Service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead. Specifically, Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, likes to say, it's not a zero-sum game. What he means by that is, just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds. What we call supercloud. And that's Dell's strategy, to take advantage of public cloud capex, and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds, and out to the edge. That's ambitious, and technically it's nontrivial. But listen to Dell's Vice Chairman and Co-COO, Jeff Clarke, explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also, technology and business models are tied together, and an enabler. >> That's right. >> If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying, and I summarize it the following way: if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Furrier called it a "business operating system." Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system, or cloud operating environment, to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale capex. Now, is it really game over, as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? Uh, (sucks in breath) I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course, it's got to be funded. And that's going to take time, and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So, as often is the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cybersecurity as an adjacency, and of course, edge and telco/5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher-margin software content, it can thrive with a lower-margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers, and maybe through tuck-in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here, "Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem," because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if APEX is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And its ecosystem today is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The Snowflake deal is an example of up-the-stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship, and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live in a data-heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of APEX. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today, in its early days. The point is, with Dell's go-to-market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, supercloud player that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate, and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable Infrastructure-as-a-Service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly evolve. And of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change and just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, so, so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kinda strange new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>Mean, you talking, So that's >>What we do. You were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture, We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cuz the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is honest change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you know, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who worked for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists like go, yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really b been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make this, you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a, values >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but, so I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You'd always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with Jenn Saavedra, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell and we're going to discuss people culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jenn, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time. So I'm excited to share some of our learnings with you. >> I mean, I bet there has, I mean post pandemic companies, they're trying everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and what it looks like. Last May there was really a theme of flexibility but depending, and we talked about, well, millennial or not, young, old, and it's just really was mixed. So how have you approached the topic? What are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? What's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to... Over to you. >> Yeah, well, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. In March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is we're such a data-driven company. There's so many headlines out there, about all these things that people think could happen will happen but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, how do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while, we asked them, do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were which is great, but we always know there's nuance behind that macro level. So we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things we're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive, and to have a really healthy business. >> Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. But there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get promoted. And so I'm curious, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you want to work. But then I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office week so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange new ever changing world? >> Yeah, well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. They tell us time and time again one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really want to meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. So, for us it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid. But just like if you, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, work out with your leader what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >> I mean, you talk- >> So that's what we do. >> You were talking before about myths and I want talk about team member performance 'cause there's, a lot of people believe that if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage 'cause they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? Is there some truth to that? What do you think about that? >> Well, for us, we look, again we just looked at the data. So we said we don't want to create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really want to have an inclusive culture, we want to be outcome-driven. We're a meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment. Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >> And it's personal too, I think I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office 'cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to you Jenn and folks at Dell is, whatever works for you we're going to support. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and very specifically, empathic leadership has been said to have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study, it was like two thirds of the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing with our folks? So especially as it relates to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >> I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the value that you bring to the company then you're not going to get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward. Empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible and confident that you can take us forward, but also that you know and understand me as a human being. And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders we've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point because we've been talking about it for so long we send out the email, we have the all hands, and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am, let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >> Jenn, in the spirit of myth busting I mean, I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is going to have a harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they could pre-COVID. But I notice there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation, satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top 100. But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model, and in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. Number one on the list is Dell, SAP. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, I go, Yeah, okay that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in an industry where there's only two in the top is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations. How'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in this new world? >> Well, thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a culture, and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices that whole ecosystem, from recognition rewards, to performance evaluation, to interviewee, to development. We build it into everything so it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, "The most special thing about Dell "is our culture and our people." And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >> I don't you think too that repetition and, well, first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah it's not just a poster on the wall. But I remember like, when we're kids your parents tell you, okay, power of positive thinking, do unto others as you have others do it to you. You're going to do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were- >> They might have had a point, right? >> Values were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and paying it forward. But I guess my point is, and it's kind of a point observation but I'll turn it into a question. Isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >> I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time. And as an HR professional, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture. It's our business leaders, it's our CEO, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're going to get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed into everything that we do. And I think it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done 'cause that's not how things really work. >> Well, and it's a culture of respect, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time, Jenn. Again, congratulations on being number one. >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of theCUBE inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand at thecube.net and you can check out siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of Breaking Analysis. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company, to a middling enterprise player forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i.e VMware. And now is a 100 billion dollar giant with a low margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. Financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC, of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book, "Play Nice But Win." In a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue, Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And, of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell in a massive wealth creation milestone. Pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau who's the president of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott who is the senior vice president of marketing will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as-a-service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cyber Security Awareness month that we're going to see if Sam has anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jennifer Saavedra who's Dell's chief human resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that will introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary net score methodology in the vertical axis. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the x-axis is overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business and it is, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, SISCO would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business is an industry-leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated net score and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a 100 mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over a 100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company primarily, its margins are low with operating income 10% of revenue and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement, before the spin its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive, Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's Apex and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of Service now's total revenue. Of course, Service now has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion dollar market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now, Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story, and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for $67 billion and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. But Dell, a 100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc, Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over 3X, about 3.3X currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine. But it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component, since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application, in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures. Namely HP which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc and HPE, and IBM which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company which makes a cultural difference, in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion is a much better chance of doing well at a 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake. But Dell has a larger portfolio so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say, it's not a zero sum game. What he means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge. That's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and co-COO Jeff Clarke explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> No, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way. If we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Yeah, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition but this vision will take years to play out, and of course it's got to be funded. And now it's going to take time and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and, of course, edge at Telco slash 5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution. But I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of Apex. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is, with Dell's go to market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, super cloud player, that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform. Its programmable infrastructure as-a-service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And, of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.