(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to talk about data protection in the age of ransomware. It's a top of mind topic. And with me are two great guests and CUBE alumnus, David Noy, Vice Presidents of Product Management at Dell Technologies and Rob Emsley, Director of Data Protection Product Marketing at Dell. Guys, welcome back to the CUBE, it's good to see you both. >> Oh, thanks so much, I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks a lot Dave. >> Hey David, let me start with you. Maybe we could look at the macro, the big picture at Dell for cyber security. What are you seeing out there? >> You know, I'm seeing an enormous amount of interest in cybersecurity obviously driven by a string of recent events and the presidential executive order around cybersecurity. Look, we're in unprecedented times where, you know, disaster readiness is not just about being prepared for a wildfire or a sprinkler going off in your data center. It's around a new class of malicious attacks that people just have to be ready for. And it's not even a question of if it's going to happen, it's a question of when it's going to happen. We know it's going to happen, you're going to get hit by them. And so we go beyond just thinking about, hey, how do you build in technical capabilities into the product to make it difficult for attackers? We actually want to get predictive. We want to use advanced technologies and capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning to go out and scan users environments and look at their data which is really the lifeblood of a business and say, hey, we can see that there is potentially an attack looming. We can start to look for dormant attack vectors. And as soon as something bad is happening because we know something bad is going to happen, we can help you quickly recover the restore or figure out which restore point to recover from so you can get your business back and operational as soon as possible. >> Great, thank you for that, David. Hey Rob, good to see you. You know, we've seen a lot of changes recently kind of as David was referencing, it used to be okay, cybersecurity, that's the domain of the SecOps team and, you know, the rest of the company said, okay, it's their problem. You know, data protection or backup, that was the backup admin. Those two worlds are kind of colliding together. We use terms like cyber resiliency now. It's a sort of super set of, if you will, of the traditional cybersecurity. So how can organizations get ahead of these cyber threats when you engage with customers? Do you have any sort of specific angles or tooling that you use to help? >> Yeah, Dave, there's a couple of things to unpack there. You know, I think one of the things that you call out is cyber resiliency. You know, I think there's a balancing act that customers are all working through between cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. On the left-hand side of the balancing act, it's, you know, how can I keep bad things out of my network? And the reality is that it's very difficult, you know, to do that. You know, there's many applications that customers have deployed to protect the perimeter. But as you know, many cyber threats, you know, are manifested from inside of the perimeter. So what we're seeing is customers starting to invest more in making themselves cyber resilient organizations, you know, and as David mentioned, it's not the if, it's the when. The question is, how do you respond to when a cyber attack hits you? So one of the things that we introduced pointing back six months ago is a globally available cyber resiliency assessment. And we worked in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group and we put out a free online assessment tool to allow customers to really answer questions around, you know, a big part of the NIST framework, around detection, protection and recovery. And we give customers the opportunity to get themselves evaluated on, are they prepared? Are they vulnerable? Or are they just, you know, black and white exposed? You know, what we found over the last six months is that over 70% of the people that have taken this cyber resiliency assessment fall into that category of they're vulnerable or they're exposed. >> Right, thank you for that. Yeah, the guys at ESG do a good job in that they have deep expertise in that space. And David, Rob just talked about sort of the threats from inside the perimeter and, you know, any person, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist, you can go on the dark web. You can acquire ransomware as a service. If you have access to a server and are willing to put a stick in there and do some bad things or give credentials out, hopefully you'll end up in handcuffs. You know, but more often than not, people are getting away with really, you know, insidious crime. So how is Dell, David helping customers respond to the threat of ransomware? >> So, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the product approach is pretty sophisticated. You know, you're right, somebody can come and just put a USB stick into a machine or if they have administrative access, they can figure out a code that they've either been given because, you know, the trust has been placed in the wrong place or they've somehow socially engineered out of someone. Look, it's not enough to just say, I'm going to go lock down my system. Someone who's gained access can potentially gain access to other systems by hopping through them. We take a more of a vault based approach which means that when you create a cyber vault, it's essentially locked down from the rest of your environment. Your cyber criminal is not able to get to that solution because it's been air gapped. It's kept somewhere else completely separate from other network but it also has keys and to the keys to the kingdom or that it opens up only at a certain time of day so it's not vulnerable to coming in at any time. It goes and requests data, it pulls the data and then it keeps that immutable copy in the vault itself. So the vault is essentially like a gated off, modded off environment that an attacker cannot get into. If you find that there was an attack or if an attack has occurred in which an attack will occur sooner or later, you then can basically prevent that attacker from getting access into that vaulted environment before that next opening event occurs. We also have to go back and look at time because sometimes these attackers don't instantiate all at once, I'm going to basically go and encrypt all your data. They take a more of a graduated approach. And so you have to go and look at patterns, access patterns of how data has actually changed and not just look at the metadata, say, okay, well, it looks like the data changed at a certain time. You have to look at the data contents. You have to look at the, if there's a file type. Often times, you can actually analyze that as well and say, hey, this given file whether it's a PowerPoint file or an Excel file or one of the a hundred or a thousand different file types should look like this, it doesn't look like that inside. What are many of the solutions that look for these attackers do is they're just looking at metadata access and then potentially just entropies or how fast things are changing. Well, it's changing faster than it normally would. That's not enough. And the attackers are just going to get smarter about how they go and change things. They're going to change it so that they don't change file suffixes or they don't change them with a very high entropy rate. And without using some kind of a system that's actually constantly tuning itself to say, hey, this is how these attack vectors are evolving over time, you're going to miss out on these opportunities to go and protect yourself. So we have also a constantly evolving and learning capability to go in and say, okay, as we see how these attack vectors are evolving to adapt to the way that we defend against them, we're going to also (audio glitches) other practices to make sure that we account for the new models. So it's a very adaptable kind of, it really is artificial intelligence form of protecting yourself. >> Can I ask you a question, David, just a follow-up on the immutable copy? Where does that live? Is it kind of live on prem? Is it in the cloud, either? >> Both, so we have the ability to put that on prem. We have the ability to put that in a second data center. We have the ability to keep that actually in a colo site so basically, completely out of your data center. And we've got the ability to keep that in the cloud as well. >> The reason I ask is because I just, you know, putting my paranoid SecOps hat on and I'm no expert here but I've talked to organizations that say, oh yeah, it's in the cloud, it's a service. Say, okay, but it's immutable? Yeah, it's write once, read many. You can't erase it. I go, okay, can I turn it off? Well, no, not really. Well, what if I stopped paying for the service? Well, we'd send a notice out. I said, okay, wait a minute. So am I just being too paranoid here? How do you handle that objection? >> Of turning it off? >> Yeah, can I turn it off or can you make it so that nobody can turn it off? >> Oh yeah, that's a good question. So actually what we're building into the product roadmap is the ability to that product actually self inspect and to look at. Whether or not even the underlying, so for example, if the service is running in a virtual machine. Well, the attacker could say, let me just go attack the virtual machine and it infect it and basically turn itself off even in an on-prem, nevermind in the cloud. And so we're looking at building or we're building into the roadmap, a lot more self inspection capabilities to make sure that somebody isn't going to just shut down the service. And so that kind of self resiliency is critical even to a vaulted solution which is air gapped, right? To your point. You don't want someone going, well, I can just get around your solution. I'm just going to go shut it down. That's something that we're getting at. >> So this talks, I think for the audience, this talks it's like an ongoing game of escalation and you want to have a partner who has the resources to keep up with the bad guys cause it's just the constantly, you know, upping the ante, Rob, you guys do a survey every year, the Global Data Protection Index. Tell us about that. What are the latest results? You survey a lot of people. I'm interested in, you know, the context of things like remote work and hybrid work, it's escalated the threat. What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, so as you mentioned, the Global Data Protection Index, we survey over a thousand IT executives, you know, around the globe. And in the most recent study, we absolutely started to ask questions specifically around, you know, customer's concerns with regards to cybersecurity. And we found that over 60% of the customer surveyed, you know, really are concerned that they don't feel that they are adequately prepared to respond to cyber threats that they see, unfortunately on a day-to-day basis. You know, certainly, you know, as you mentioned, the work from anywhere, learn from anywhere reality that many customers are dealing with, you know, one of the concerns that they have is the increased attack surface that they now have to deal with. I mean, the perimeter of the network is now, you know, much broader than it ever has been in the past. You know, so I think all of this leads, Dave, to cybersecurity discussions and cyber resiliency discussions being top of mind for really any CIO, their CSO in any industry. You know, in the days of old, you know, we used to focus at the financial services industry, you know, as, you know, a bunch of customers that we, you know, could have very relevant conversations with but now, you know, that is now cross industry-wide. There isn't a vertical that isn't concerned about the threats of cyber security and cyber attacks. So, you know, when we think about our business especially around data vaulting with our PowerProtect portfolio but also with our PowerScale portfolio, with our unstructured data storage solutions. You know, when we're really having constant conversations of brand, how do you make your environment more cyber resilient? And, you know, we've been seeing, you know, rapid growth in both of those solution areas, both implementing extensions of customers, backup and recovery solutions, you know, but also, you know, in the environments where, you know, we're deploying, you know, large scale unstructured storage infrastructure, you know, the ability to have real-time monitoring of those environments and also to extend that to delivering a vaulted solution for your unstructured storage are all things that are leading us to, you know, work with customers to actually help them become more cyber resilient. >> Great, thanks. The last question and maybe for both of you. Maybe Rob you start and David you can chime in. I'm interested in what's exciting you guys, what's new in the portfolio, are there new features that you're delivering that map to the current market conditions? I mean, your unique value proposition and your capabilities have shifted. You have to respond to the market changes over the left last 18 to 24 months whether it's cyber, ransomware, the digital transformation, what's new in the portfolio and what's exciting you guys. >> So Dave, yes, so quite recently we, you know, as well as, you know, running an event specifically to talk about protection and the age of ransomware and to discuss many of the things that we've covered on this call. You know, data protection is still a foundational technology to help customers become, you know, more secure and, you know, reduce their risk profiles. So innovation that we delivered very recently, you know, it's really in three specific areas, you know, VMware Data Protection, NAS Data Protection and then, you know, also, you know, we introduced a tech preview of a direction that we're taking to expand the scalability and manageability of our PowerProtect appliances. So transparent snapshots delivers capabilities to help customers better protect their VMware environment without the concern of disrupting their production applications when they're doing backup and recovery of virtual machines. Dynamic NAS protection moves away from the age old mechanism of NDMP and provides a much more performance and scalable solution for protecting all of that unstructured data running on NAS infrastructure. And then last but not least to say the tech preview of Smart Scale which is our new solution and architecture to allow customers to pull together multiple power of attack appliances within their data sensors and give them a much easier way of managing the PowerProtect appliances that they have and scaling them environment by implementing a federated namespace to align on them to get support in that environment. >> Nice, some great innovations there. All right, David bring us home. What's exciting you? You shared a little bit with the roadmap of... >> Yeah, look, I think all of this is about operations today. Every enterprise is 24/7. It doesn't matter what vertical you're in, right? Downtime is unacceptable. And whether that means whether it's downtime because you got hit by a malicious attacker, it means downtime because you were caused by disruption of virtual machine instances to Rob's point during the backup process. And we can't interrupt those processes, we can't impact their performance. It means, you know, making sure that your largest unstructured repositories in NAS deployments can be backed up in a time that makes sense so that you can meet your own SLAs. And it means that with a smart scale product there are ability to go and say, okay, as you're expanding your backup target environment, we can do that in a seamless fashion without disrupting your backup operations and your day-to-day operations. All of this is around making sure that we minimize the amount of disruption that our end users experience either because of malicious attacks or because of day-to-day operations and making, you know, making sure that those businesses really can operate 24/7. And that is the crux of a really true enterprise solution for data protection >> Guys, very important topic, really appreciate you coming on the CUBE. Great conversation and keep up the good work of protecting our data. >> Well, Dave, thanks. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thanks everybody for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Today, we're going to be talking about the cyber protection and recovery solutions for unstructured data. I have two guests joining me, Andrew Mackay is here, The President of Superna, and Parasar Kodati, Senior Consultant, ISG Product Marketing at Dell technologies. Guys, great to have you on the program talking about cybersecurity, cyber resiliency. Something that we've heard a lot in the news in the last 18 months or so. Parasar, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what you're seeing from a cybersecurity perspective, some of the challenges the last 18 months or so, and then tell us what Dell is doing specifically to really infuse its storage solutions to enable customers to have that cyber resiliency that they need. >> Sure, Lisa. So today, there's no question that cyberattacks have become a serious threat for business operations, for organizations of all sizes across all industries. And if you look at the consequences, there is a huge financial impact of course, through the, like 70% of the cyberattacks when they're financially motivated. Look at the ransom part, which is a big financial impact in itself, but look at the lost revenue from disrupted operations, legal expenses, and sometimes regulatory fines, and so on, add up to the financial impact. And if you look at the data after data loss that is involved, data being such a critical asset for organizations, think about losing customer data, losing access to customer data or critical applications that depend on customer data. Similarly, data related to your business operations data that is source of your competitive advantage data that could be very confidential information as well. And when it comes to government organization, institutions, there is also the issue of national security and the need to protect critical infrastructure that depend on these IT systems as well. So absolutely it is becoming an imperative for IT organizations to improve the cyber resiliency, to boost the cyber resiliency of their organization. At Dell technologies, for the storage products that we offer, we have integrated solutions to protect the data in terms of detecting patterns of data access, to detect the cyber attacks in advance, to kind of put IT a step ahead of these attackers and also have the tools and technologies to recover from a cyberattack rapidly so that the business can continue to run. >> That recovery is absolutely critical. It's one thing to have all this data, customer data, PII, competitive advantage data, but you have to be able to recover it because as you said, we've seen this now become a matter of national security, infrastructure being threatened. The ransomware rise we have seen in the last 18 months has been unprecedented. I want to talk now, Andrew, about Superna. Talk to us about what you guys do and how you're a partner with Dell technologies and helping customers recover and really be cyber resilient. >> Yeah, we've been working with Dell for years. In fact, our products are built in targeting the Isilon PowerScale platform. So we're at very closely tightly integrated solution that focuses on solving one problem, solving it really well. >> Talk to me a little bit about what you guys are doing specifically with the Dell technology storage solutions to help customers in any industry be able to recover. As we know now, ransomware is not, if it happens to us, it's a wand. Give us a little bit more of a dissection of those solutions. >> So when we looked at this problem, it's associated with files, right? But today, there's files and objects, objects and other types of unstructured data. So we've built a solution that addresses both file and object. But one of the areas that we think is important for customers to consider is the framework that they choose. They shouldn't just jump in and start looking for products. They should step back and take a look at what frameworks exist. For instance, the NIST framework, that guides them in how they build and tick off all the key boxes and how to build a cyber resilient solution. >> So for companies that are using traditional legacy tools, backup and restore it, how was what Superna enables, how is it different? >> So the buzzword these days is zero trust. So I'm going to use the buzzword. So we use a zero trust model, but really that comes down to being proactive. And I consider a backup/restore, a bit of a legacy approach. That's just restore the data after you've been attacked. So we think you should get in front of the problem and don't trust any of the access to the storage and try to take care of the problem at the source, which means detection patterns, locking usually out of the file system, reacting in real time to real-time IO that's being processed by a storage device. >> Got it. Parasar, let's talk now about unstructured data specifically and why does it need protection against the attacks? >> Traditionally, structured data or the enterprise databases have been the more critical data to protect, but more and more unstructured data is also becoming a source of competitive differentiation for customers. Think about artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, a lot of edge computing. And a lot of this data is actually being stored on highly scalable NAS platforms like Dell EMC PowerScale. And this is where, given the volume of the data involved, we actually have a unique solution for unstructured data to protect it from cyberattacks and also having the recovery mechanisms in place. So most of the audience might have already heard about the PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, but for unstructured data, we have something unique in the industry in terms of rapid recovery of large amount of data within a few hours for a business to be up and running in the event of a cyberattack. So when it comes to the data protection technologies on the PowerScale platform, we have, starting from the operating system, the OneFS, already has a great foundation in terms of access control, separate access zones that can be protected. And these things work across multiple protocols, which is a really key thing about how this technology works in terms of access control. But thanks to the great technology that Andrew and his team is building, the Ransomware Defender, real-time access auditing. These products from the core, kind of cyber resiliency framework when it comes to unstructured data on power skill platforms. >> Got it. Andrew, let's talk about the NIST framework. As we've talked about in the last few minutes, cybersecurity has really become quite a business. Unfortunately, in the last 18 months, we've seen huge x-fold increases in ransomware attacks of any type of company. Talk to me about how, where are those conversations? Are you having conversations at the board level, at the C-level, in terms of the right cyber resiliency framework that organizations need to put in place? >> Yeah, we talk with customers almost daily. That's a daily conversation we have with customers about the requirements and the frameworks offer. And then this one, especially offers all of the key requirements from detection to prevention to recovery. And if you look at all of those requirements, you may end up with multiple products. And so we've built a solution that can address all of the key requirements in a single product. So for example, I mentioned detection and mitigation and recovery. Well, that's our protect the data at the source strategy, but the number one recommendation these days is to have an offline copy of your data. And that requires a cyber vault solution where you're going to take a copy of your data, place it in an offline storage device and you're going to manage that through some sort of automation. We've married those two requirements into a single product. So we actually look at the whole framework and can comply with all aspects of that, including the offline component. And that's one of the sort of secret sauce, part of our solution is that we can both protect at the source and maintain and monitor the offline copy of the data as well at the same time. >> So, the offline copy, interesting. Talk to me about how frequently is that updated so that if a business has to go back and restore and recover, they can. What's that timeframe of how frequently that's updated? >> So generally, we recommend about 24 hours. Because in reality, it's going to take time to uncover that there's something seriously wrong with your production data. In the case of our solution, the hope and intent is that really the problem is addressed right at the source, meaning we've detected ransomware on the source data and we can protect it and stop it before it actually ends up in your cyber vault. That's really the key to our solution. But if you have that day, recovery with the Isilon PowerScale snapshotting features, you can revert petabytes of data and bring it online in a worst-case scenario. And we tell customers, you need to work backwards from what is the worst case. And if you do that, you're going to realize that what you need is petabyte scale data recovery with your offline data. And that's a very hard problem to solve that we think we've solved really well with the PowerScale. >> And just sticking with you for a second. In the last year and a half, since things have been so turbulent, have you seen any industries in particular that have come to you saying, we really need to get ahead of this challenging situation as we've seen attacks across infrastructure? I mean, you name it, we've seen it. >> Yeah, the number one vertical for sure is healthcare. Healthcare has been the target. In fact, it was last October. I think the FBI made an announcement to all healthcare organizations to improve their cybersecurity. That's probably our largest vertical, but there really isn't a vertical that doesn't feel the need to do something more than they are today. Finance of course, manufacturing, retail. Basically, there's no target that isn't the target these days. But I would say for sure, it's going to be healthcare because they have a willingness and a need to have their data online all the time. >> Right, and it's absolutely a such critical information. Parasar, back to you. I'm curious to understand maybe any joint customers that you guys are working together with and how they have, what are some of the recovery time and the recovery point objectives that you're able to help them achieve? >> Sure, Lisa. So with Ransomware Defender, for example, there are more than thousand customers, almost thousand, we are very close, I think the exact number is around 970 or something, but have adopted this set of tools to boost their cyber resiliency in terms of being able to detect these attack patterns or any indications of a compromised through the way data is being accessed or the kinds of users that are accessing the data and so on. But also when it comes to isolation of the data, that has also been a lot of interest for customers to be able to have this cyber ward, which is air gap from your primary infrastructure. And of course, which is regulated with a lot of intelligence in terms of looking for any flags to close the connection and continue to replicate data or to terminate the connection and keep the cyber ward secure. So, absolutely. >> Andrew, how do you guys help? First of all, is it possible for companies to be able to stay ahead of the attackers? The attackers are also taking advantage of the emerging technologies that businesses are, but how do you, if the answer is yes, how do you help companies stay ahead of those attackers? >> I think a prime example of that is if you look at ransomware today and there's publicized versions or variants or names of it, they all attack files. But the bad actors are looking for the weak link. They're always looking for the weak link to go after the corporate data. And so the new frontier is object storage because these types of systems are compliance data. It's frequently used to store backup data, and that is a prime target for attackers. And so the security tools and the maturity of the technology to protect object data is nowhere near what's in place for file data. So we've announced and released the ability to protect object data in real-time, the same way we've already done it for years for file data, because we understand that that's just the next target. And so we were offering that type of solution in a unified single product. >> And the last question, Parasar for you. Where can folks go to learn more about this joint solution and how can they get started with it? >> Sure, Lisa. delltechnologies.com/powerscale, that's the unstructured data platform or the scale of NAS platform from Dell technologies. And we have great content there to educate customers about the nature of this cyberattacks and what kind of data is at risk and what is the kind of steps that can take to the point that Andrew mentioned, to build a cyber resiliency strategy as well as how to use these tools effectively to protect against attacks and also be very agile when it comes to recovery. >> Right, that agility with respect to recovery is critical because as we know, the trends are that we're only going to see cybersecurity and risks and attacks increase in some businesses and every industry are vulnerable and really need to put in place the right types of strategies and solutions to be able to recover when something happens. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. This is such an interesting topic. Great to hear about the partnership with Superna and Dell Technologies. And I'm sure your joint customers are very appreciative of the work that you're doing together. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Great, thank you. >> From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching a CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience this year. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined by two CUBE alumni from Dell EMC. Please welcome Joe Caradonna, the VP of Cloud Storage CTO. Joe, good to see you again, even though quite socially distant. >> Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. >> And Devon Reed is also joining us, the Senior Director of Product Management. Devon, how are you? >> I'm good, how are you doing? >> Good. >> Nice to be here, thank you. >> Nice to be chatting with you guys, although very, very socially distant, following rules. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World without having you guys on theCUBE, so we appreciate you joining us. So let's dig in. So much has happened in the world since we last spoke with you. But one of the things that happened last year, around a year ago, was the Dell On Demand program was launched. And now here we are nearly a year later when Michael Dell was just talking about, "Hey, Dell's plan is to go "and deliver everything as a service." We've heard some of your competitors kind of going the same route, some kind of spurned by COVID. Talk to us, Devon, we'll start with you, about what this direction is shift to as-a-service means and what it means specifically for storage. >> Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, what we talked about last year with respect to On Demand, Dell Technologies On Demand, we've had great success with that program. But before I get into what we're doing with as-a-service, I really want to talk about why we're doing the as-a-service. And when we talk to customers and partners, and when we look at the trends in the market, what we're seeing is that customers are more and more wanting to consume technology infrastructure as a service in an OPEX manner. And analysts are revising those estimates up almost daily. And what we're seeing is one of the things that's driving that is actually why we're here in this remote session as opposed to being in Vegas, doing this. And it's really the global uncertainty around the pandemic. So it's driving the need to free up cash and consume these infrastructure more as a service. Now, as Michael said... Yeah, as Michael said, we have the broadest set of infrastructure offerings in the market and we are number one in most categories. And we're in the process of building out an offer structure that cuts across all the different infrastructure components. But to get real specific on what we're doing with a storage as a service, we are in the process of building out the first true storage or as a service offering for our infrastructure starting with storage. It'll be a private preview as of Q4, by the end of this fiscal year and generally available in the first half of next year. And what we're doing is taking the infrastructure, the Dell Technology's storage and where we're flipping the business model as opposed to buying it outright, the customers actually just consume it as a service. So they have a very simple consumption model where they just pick their outcome, they pick their restored service, they pick their performance, they pick their capacity, and we deliver that service to their on-premise site. >> Let me unpack outcomes of it, 'cause I saw that in some of the information online, outcome driven. What do you mean by that, and can you give us some examples of those outcomes that customers are looking to achieve? >> Yeah, so in today's world, the way people mostly consume infrastructure is, or at least storage, is that they say, "I need a storage product." And what the customers do is they work with our sales representatives and say, "I need a XYZ product. "Maybe it's a PowerStore and I need this much capacity. "I can pick all of the components, "I can pick the number of drives, "the type of drives there are." And that's really from a product perspective. And what we're doing with the, as-a-service, is we're trying to flip the model and really drive to what the business outcome is. So the business outcome here is really, I need block storage, I need this performance level, I need this much capacity. And then we basically ship the infrastructure, we think, that better suits those outcomes. And we're making changes across our entire infrastructure value chain to really deliver these service. So we try to deliver these much quicker for the customer. We actually manage the infrastructure. So it enables customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time actually operating the service, paying attention to their business outcomes. >> Got it, and that's what every customer wants more of is more time to actually deliver this business outcomes and make those course corrections as they need to. Joe, let's talk to you for a bit. Let's talk, what's going on with cloud? The last time we saw you, a lot of change as we talked about, but give us a picture of Dell's cloud strategy. From what you guys are doing on-prem to what you are doing with cloud partners. What is this multi-pronged cloud strategy actually mean? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, our customers want hybrid cloud solutions and we believe that to be the model going forward. And so actually what we're doing is, if you think about it, we're taking the best of public cloud and bringing it on-prem, and we're also taking the best of on-prem and bringing it to the public cloud. So, you know, Devon just talked to you about how we're bringing that public cloud operation model to the data center. But what we've also done is bring our storage arrays to the cloud as a service. And we've done that with PowerStore, we've done that with PowerMax, and we've done that with PowerScale. And in the case of PowerScale for Google cloud, I mean, you get the same performance and capacity scale out in the cloud as you do on-prem. And the systems inter-operate between on-prem and cloud so it makes it easy for fluid data mobility across these environments. And for the first time it enables our customers to get their data to the cloud in a way that they can bring their high performance file workloads to the cloud. >> So talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned PowerScale for Google cloud service, is that a Dell hardware based solution? How does that work? >> Yeah, the adoptions have been great. I mean, we launched back in May and since then we brought on customers in oil and gas and eCommerce and in health as well. And we're growing out the regions, we're going to be announcing a new region in North America soon and we're going to be building out in APJ and EMEA as well. So, customer response has been fantastic, looking forward to growing up. >> Excellent, Devon back to you, let's talk about some of the things that are going on with PowerProtect DD, some new cloud services there too. Can you unpack that for us? >> So Joe, was talking about how we were taking our storage systems and putting them in the cloud. So I just back up in, and kind of introduce real quickly or reintroduce our Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. And that's really, we have our primary storage systems from Unity XT, the PowerStore, to PowerScale, to ECS, and that's housed in a co-locations facility right next to hyperscalers. And then that enables us to provide a fully managed service offering to our customers to a multi-cloud. So what we're doing is we're extending the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services to include PowerProtect DD. So we're bringing PowerProtect DD into this managed services offering so customers can use it for cloud, longterm retention, backup, archiving, and direct backup from a multicloud environment. So extending what we've already done with the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. >> So is that almost kind of like a cloud based data protection solution for those workloads that are running in the cloud VMs, SaaS applications, physical servers, spiral data, things like that? >> Yeah, there's several use cases. So you could have a primary block storage system on your premises and you could actually be providing direct backup into the cloud. You could have backups that you have on-premise that you could be then replicating with PowerProtect data, data domain replication to cloud. And you could also have data in AWS, or Azure, or Google that you could be backing up directly to the PowerProtect domain into this service. So there's multiple use cases. >> Got it, all right. Joe, let's talk about some of the extensions of cloud you guys have both been talking about the last few minutes. One of the recent announcements was about PowerMax being cloud enabled and that's a big deal to cloudify something like that. Help us understand the nature of that, the impetus, and what that means now and what customers are able to actually use today. >> Yeah sure, I mean, we've launched the PowerMax as a cloud service about a year and a half ago with our partner, Faction. And that's for those customers that want that tier zero enterprise grade data capabilities in the cloud. And not just a cloud, it also offers multicloud capabilities for both file and block. Now, in addition, the Dell Tech World, we're launching additional cloud mobility capabilities for PowerMax, where let's say you have a PowerMax on-prem, you could actually do snapshot shipping to an object repository. And that could be in AWS, that can be in Azure, or it could be locally to our local ECS object store. In addition, in the case of Amazon we go a step further where if you do snapshot shipping into Amazon S3, you can then rehydrate those snapshots directly into EBS. And that way you can do processing on that data in the cloud as well. >> Give us an idea, Joe, the last few months or so what some of your customer conversations have been like? I know you're normally in front of customers all the time. Dell Tech World is a great example. I think last year there was about 14,000 folks there, was huge. And we're all so used to that three dimensional engagement, more challenging to do remotely, but talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you've had, and how they've helped influence some of the recent announcements. >> Yeah sure, customers... It might sound a little cliche, but cloud is a journey. It's a journey for our customers. It's a journey for us too, as we build out our capabilities to best serve them. But their questions are, "I want to take advantage "of that elastic compute in the cloud." But maybe the data storage doesn't keep up with it. In the case of when we go to PowerScale for Google, the reason why we brought that platform to the cloud is 'cause you can get hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput through that. And for our customers that are doing things like processing genomic sequencing data, they need that level of throughput, and they want to move those workloads into the cloud. The computer's there but the storage systems to keep up with it, were not. So by us bringing a solution like this to the cloud, now they can do that. So we see that with PowerScale, we see a lot of that with file in the cloud because the file services in the cloud aren't as mature as some of the other ones like with block and object. So we're helping filling some of those gaps and getting them to those higher performance tiers. And as I was mentioning, with things like PowerMax and PowerStore, it's extending their on-prem presence into the public cloud. So they can start to make decisions not based on a capability, but more based on the requirements for where they want to run their workloads. >> And let's switch gears to talking about partners now. Dell has a huge partner ecosystem. We always talk with those folks on theCUBE as well, every year. Devon, from a product management perspective, tell me about some of the things that are interesting to partners and what the advantages are for partners with this shift in what, how Dell is going to be delivering, from PCs, to storage, to HCI, for example. >> Yeah exactly, so, Joe mentioned that it's really a journey and Joe talked a lot about how customers aren't maybe not (indistinct) completely going to a hyperscale or to a complete public cloud. And what we're hearing is there's a lot of customers that are actually wanting the cloud-like experience, but wanting it on-prem. And we're hearing from our partners almost on a daily basis. I have a lot of partner customer conversations where they want to be involved in delivering this as a service. Through their customers, they want to maintain that relationship, derive that value, and in some cases even provide the services for them. And that's what we're looking do as the largest infrastructure provider with the broadest base of partnership we have an advantage there. >> Is there any specific partner certification programs that partners can get into to help start rolling this out? >> At this point, we are trying to build it, but at this point we had nothing to announce here but that's something that we're actively working on and stay tuned for that. >> I imagine there will be a lot of virtual conversations at the digital tech world this year, between the partner community when all of these things are announced. And you get those brains collectively together although obviously virtually, to start iterating on ideas and developing things that might be great to programmatize down the road. And, Joe, last question for you, second to last question actually, is this, this year as we talked about a number of times, everyone's remote, everyone's virtual. It's challenging to get that level of engagement. We're all so used to being in-person and all of the hallway conversations even that you have when you're walking around the massive show floor for example, what can participants and attendees expect from your perspective this year at Dell Technologies World? Will they be able to get the education and that engagement that Dell really wants to deliver? >> Yeah, well, clearly we had to scale things back quite, there's no way around that. But we have a lot of sessions that were designed to inform them with a new capabilities we've been building out. And not just for cloud, but across the portfolio. So I hope they get a lot out of that. We have some interactive sessions in there as well, for some interactive Q and A. And you're right, I mean, a challenge for us is connecting with the customer in this virtual reality. We're all at home, right? The customers are at home. So we've been on Zoom, like never before, reaching out to customers to better understand where they want to go, what their challenges are and how we can help them. So I would say we are connecting, it's a little different and requires a little more effort on everyone's part. We just can't all do it in the same day anymore. It is just a little more spread out. >> Well, then it kind of shows the opportunity to consume things on demand. And as consumers, we sort of have this expectation that we can get anything we want on demand. But you mentioned, Joe, in the second to last question, this is the last one. But you mentioned, everybody's at home. You have to tell us about that fantastic guitar behind you. What's the story? >> Every guitar has a story. I'll just say for today, look, this is my tribute to Eddie Van Halen. We're going to miss him for sure. >> And I'll have the audience know, I did ask Joe to play us out. He declined, but I'm going to hold them to that for next time, 'cause we're not sure when we're going to get to see you guys in person again. Joe and Devon, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. It's been great talking to you. Lots of things coming, lots of iterations, lots of influence from the customers, influence from COVID and we're excited to see what is to come. Thanks for your time. >> Both: Thank you so much. >> From my guests, Joe Caradonna and Devon Reed, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm excited to be talking with one of Dell Technologies' customers EarthCam. Joining me is Bill Sharp, the senior VP of product development and strategy from EarthCam. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> So talk to me a little bit about what EarthCam does. This is very interesting webcam technology. You guys have tens of thousands of cameras and sensors all over the globe. Give our audience an understanding of what you guys are all about. >> Sure thing. The world's leading provider of webcam technologies, you mentioned content and services, we're leaders in live streaming, time-lapse imaging, primary focus in the vertical construction. So with a lot of these, the most ambitious, largest construction projects around the world that you see these amazing time-lapse movies, we're capturing all of that imagery basically around the clock, these cameras are sending all of that image content to us and we're generating these time-lapse movies from it. >> You guys are headquartered in New Jersey. I was commenting before we went live about your great background. So you're actually getting to be onsite today? >> Yes, yes. We're live from our headquarters in upper Saddle River, New Jersey. >> Excellent, so in terms of the types of information that you're capturing, so I was looking at the website, and see from a construction perspective, some of the big projects you guys have done, the Hudson Yards, the Panama Canal expansion, the 9/11 museum. But you talked about one of the biggest focuses that you have is in the construction industry. In terms of what type of data you're capturing from all of these thousands of edge devices, give us a little bit of an insight into how much data you're capturing per day, how it gets from the edge, presumably, back to your core data center for editing. >> Sure, and it's not just construction. We're also in travel, hospitality, tourism, security, architecture, engineering, basically any industry that need high resolution visualization of their projects or their performance or their product flow. So it's high resolution documentation is basically our business. There are billions of files in the Isilon system right now. We are ingesting millions of images a month. We are also creating very high resolution panoramic imagery where we're taking hundreds and sometimes multiple hundreds of images, very high resolution images and stitching these together to make panoramas that are up to 30 gigapixel sometimes. Typically around one to two gigapixel but that composite imagery represents millions of images per month coming into the storage system and then being stitched together to those composites. >> So millions of images coming in every month, you mentioned Isilon. Talk to me a little bit about before you were working with Dell EMC and PowerScale, how were you managing this massive volume of data? >> Sure, we've used a number of other enterprise storage systems. It was really nothing was as easy to manage as Isilon really is. There was a lot of problems with overhead, the amount of time necessary from a systems administrator resource standpoint, to manage that. And it's interesting with the amount of data that we handle, being billions of relatively small files. They're, you know, a half a megabyte to a couple of megabytes each. It's an interesting data profile which Isilon really is well suited for. >> So if we think about some of the massive changes that we've all been through in the last, in 2020, what are some of the changes that EarthCam hasn't seen with respect to the needs for organizations, or you mentioned other industries like travel, hospitality, since none of us can get to these great travel destinations, have you seen a big drive up in the demand and the need to process more data faster? >> Yeah, that's an interesting point with the pandemic. I mean, obviously we had to pivot and move a lot of people to working from home, which we were able to do pretty quickly, but there's also an interesting opportunity that arose from this where so many of our customers and other people also have to do the same. And there is an increased demand for our technology. So people can remotely collaborate. They can work at a distance, they can stay at home and see what's going on in these project sites. So we really saw kind of an uptick in the need for our products and services. And we've also created some basically virtual travel applications. We have an application on the Amazon Fire TV which is the number one app in the travel platform, and people can kind of virtually travel when they can't really get out there. So it's, we've been doing kind of giving back to people that are having some issues with being able to travel around. We've done the fireworks at the Washington Mall around the Statue of Liberty for July 4th. And this year we'll be webcasting New Years in Times Square for our 25th year, actually. So again, helping people travel virtually and maintain connectivity with each other, and with their projects. >> Which is so essential during these times where for the last six, seven months, everyone is trying to get a sense of community and most of us just have the internet. So I also heard you guys were available on the Apple TV, someone should fire that up later and maybe virtually travel. But tell me a little bit about how working in conjunction with Dell Technologies and PowerScale. How has that enabled you to manage this massive volume change that you've experienced this year? Because as you said, it's also about facilitating collaboration which is largely online these days. >> Yeah, and I mean, the great things of working with Dell has been just our confidence in this infrastructure. Like I said, the other systems we've worked with in the past we've always found ourselves kind of second guessing. We're constantly innovating. Obviously resolutions are increasing. The camera performance is increasing, streaming video is, everything is constantly getting bigger and better, faster, more, and we're always innovating. We found ourselves on previous storage platforms having to really kind of go back and look at them, second guess where we're at with it. With the Dell infrastructure it's been fantastic. We don't really have to think about that as much. We just continue innovating, everything scales as we need it to do. It's much easier to work with. >> So you've got PowerScale at your core data center in New Jersey. Tell me a little bit about how data gets from these tens of thousands of devices at the edge, back to your editors for editing, and how PowerScale facilitates faster editing, for example. >> Well, basically you can imagine every one of these cameras, and it's not just cameras. It's also, you know, we have 360 virtual reality kind of bubble cameras. We have mobile applications, we have fixed position and robotic cameras. There's all these different data acquisition systems we're integrating with weather sensors and different types of telemetry. All of that data is coming back to us over the internet. So these are all endpoints in our network. So that's constantly being ingested into our network and saved to Isilon. The big thing that's really been a time saver working with the video editors is instead of having to take that content, move it into an editing environment where we have a whole team of award-winning video editors creating these time lapses. We don't need to keep moving that around. We're working natively on Isilon clusters. They're doing their editing there, and subsequent edits. Anytime we have to update or change these movies as a project evolves, that's all, can happen right there on that live environment. And the retention is there. If we have to go back later on, all of our customers' data is really kept within that one area, it's consolidated and it's secure. >> I was looking at the Dell Tech website, and there's a case study that you guys did, EarthCam did with Dell Tech saying that the video processing time has been reduced 20%. So that's a pretty significant increase. I can imagine with the volumes changing so much now, not only is huge to your business but to the demands that your customers have as well, depending on where those demands are coming from. >> Absolutely. And just being able to do that a lot faster and be more nimble allows us to scale. We've added actually, again, speaking of during this pandemic, we've actually added personnel, we've been hiring people. A lot of those people are working remotely as we've stated before. And it's just with the increase in business, we have to continue to keep building on that, and this storage environment's been great. >> Tell me about what you guys really kind of think about with respect to PowerScale in terms of data management, not storage management, and what that difference means to your business. >> Well, again, I mean, number one was really eliminating the amount of resources. The amount of time we have to spend managing it. We've almost eliminated any downtime of any kind. We have greater storage density, we're able to have better visualization on how our data is being used, how it's being accessed. So as these things are evolving, we really have good visibility on how the storage system is being used in both our production and also in our backup environments. It's really, really easy for us to make our business decisions as we innovate and change processes, having that continual visibility and really knowing where we stand. >> And you mentioned hiring folks during the pandemic, which is fantastic, but also being able to do things in a much more streamlined way with respect to managing all of this data. But I am curious in terms of innovation and new product development, what have you been able to achieve? Because you've got more resources presumably to focus on being more innovative rather than managing storage. >> Well, again, it's, we're always really pushing the envelope of what the technology can do. As I mentioned before, we're getting things into, you know, 20 and 30 gigapixels, people are talking about megapixel images, we're stitching hundreds of these together. We're just really changing the way imagery is used both in the time lapse and also just in archival process. A lot of these things we've done with the interior, we have this virtual reality product where you can walk through and see in a 360 bubble, we're taking that imagery and we're combining it with these BIM models. So we're actually taking the 3D models of the construction site and combining it with the imagery. And we can start doing things to visualize progress, and different things that are happening on the site, look for clashes or things that aren't built like they're supposed to be built, things that maybe aren't done on the proper schedule or things that are maybe ahead of schedule, doing a lot of things to save people time and money on these construction sites. We've also introduced AI and machine learning applications directly into the workflow in the storage environment. So we're detecting equipment and people and activities in the site where a lot of that would have been difficult with our previous infrastructure. It really is seamless and working with Isilon now. >> I imagine by being able to infuse AI and machine learning, you're able to get insights faster, to be able to either respond faster to those construction customers, for example, or alert them if perhaps something isn't going according to plan. >> Yeah, a lot of it's about schedule, it's about saving money, about saving time. And again, with not as many people traveling to these sites, they really just have to have constant visualization of what's going on day to day. We're detecting things like different types of construction equipment and things that are happening on the site. We're partnering with people that are doing safety analytics and things of that nature. So these are all things that are very important to construction sites. >> What are some of the things as we are rounding out the calendar year 2020, what are some of the things that you're excited about going forward in 2021, that EarthCam is going to be able to get into and to deliver? >> Just more and more people really finally seeing the value. I mean I've been doing this for 20 years and it's just, it's amazing how we're constantly seeing new applications and more people understanding how valuable these visual tools are. That's just a fantastic thing for us because we're really trying to create better lives through visual information. We're really helping people with the things they can do with this imagery. That's what we're all about. And that's really exciting to us in a very challenging environment right now is that people are recognizing the need for this technology and really starting to put it on a lot more projects. >> Well, you can kind of consider it an essential service whether or not it's a construction company that needs to manage and oversee their projects, making sure they're on budget, on schedule, as you said, or maybe even just the essentialness of helping folks from any country in the world connect with a favorite travel location, or (indistinct) to help from an emotional perspective. I think the essentialness of what you guys are delivering is probably even more impactful now, don't you think? >> Absolutely. And again about connecting people when they're at home, and recently we webcast the president's speech from the Flight 93 9/11 observation from the memorial, there was something where only the immediate families were allowed to travel there. We webcast that so people could see that around the world. We've documented, again, some of the biggest construction projects out there, the new Raiders stadium was one of the recent ones, just delivering this kind of flagship content. Wall Street Journal has used some of our content recently to really show the things that have happened during the pandemic in Times Square. We have these cameras around the world. So again, it's really bringing awareness. So letting people virtually travel and share and really remain connected during this challenging time. And again, we're seeing a real increased demand in the traffic in those areas as well. >> I can imagine some of these things that you're doing that you're achieving now are going to become permanent not necessarily artifacts of COVID-19, as you now have the opportunity to reach so many more people and probably the opportunity to help industries that might not have seen the value of this type of video to be able to reach consumers that they probably could never reach before. >> Yeah, I think the whole nature of business and communication and travel and everything is really going to be changed from this point forward. It's really, people are looking at things very, very differently. And again, seeing that the technology really can help with so many different areas that it's just, it's going to be a different kind of landscape out there we feel. And that's really continuing to be seen as on the uptick in our business and how many people are adopting this technology. We're developing a lot more partnerships with other companies, we're expanding into new industries. And again, you know, we're confident that the current platform is going to keep up with us and help us really scale and evolve as these needs are growing. >> It sounds to me like you have the foundation with Dell Technologies, with PowerScale, to be able to facilitate the massive growth that you were saying and the scale in the future, you've got that foundation, you're ready to go. >> Yeah, we've been using the system for five years already. We've already added capacity. We can add capacity on the fly, really haven't hit any limits in what we can do. It's almost infinitely scalable, highly redundant. It gives everyone a real sense of security on our side. And you know, we can just keep innovating, which is what we do, without hitting any technological limits with our partnership. >> Excellent, well, Bill, I'm going to let you get back to innovating for EarthCam. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time today. >> Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> For Bill Sharp, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's digital coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)