(upbeat music) >> With cloud computing, programmable infrastructure, open source momentum with things like Terraform and software defined everything, people have been asking, "Does hardware still matter?" The obvious answer is software has to run on something but why does hardware still matter specifically? What customer value is there in advanced hardware architectures and what are some of the less frequently discussed nuances of hardware that make software run better and businesses run more efficiently and securely at scale. Welcome to the Cube's ongoing series where we explore the importance of hardware its evolution over the decades and its future outlook with me is longtime cubilam, Shannon Champion. Who's the vice president of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Welcome Shannon. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Yeah, it's always great to collaborate with you. Shannon, you've had a pretty impressive career. You've got this killer combination of you have an engineering degree, multiple engineering degrees actually combined with business education. You've worked as a semiconductor engineer, a quality engineer, product manager, product marketing exec, et cetera. And you now have responsibility for a variety of hardware and software led infrastructure at Dell. How have you seen hardware evolve over the years? >> Well, first of all, thank you. I appreciate that intro Dave. Yeah, it's been a fun journey. I think there's two things. I think there's a product led evolution and then there's customer evolution. And obviously those go hand in hand. If you think about the technology from a hardware perspective, it's become more advanced, more specialized and the diversification of chip architectures is really what's driving that. It's gone from general purpose CPUs to GPUs, to specialty processors like, DPUs and purpose-built accelerators. And with all that specialization, obviously more and more software is required to really knit it together. We believe Dell is uniquely positioned to do that. >> Awesome. So I want to just come right out and ask you, you know, with cloud and software defined and hyper-converged why specifically does hardware still matter? >> Well, if you know anything about Dell, you know we are driven by customer first mindset. So I'm going to go back to that customer evolution I talked about and from a customer perspective, purchase decisions used to be more about feature function, Like how much compute memory storage can you pack in and get the best performance characteristics. Of course, people still care about this and almost every customer, if you look at the widespread surveys that have been done in the industry projections are still going to be making data center infrastructure purchases for the foreseeable future, but more and more, these sort of like traditional hardware capabilities are table stakes. And what customers are making purchase decisions on are the software driven capabilities that provide the differentiating capabilities to allow them to do more with less. So with that sort of comes a refocusing of where IT adds value for their organizations. We know maintaining and managing the infrastructure is not what differentiates companies and makes them stand out from the crowd. So that's what this whole notion of IT Transformation is all about. Our customers are pulling us into a broader set of problems and their purchase criteria is moving away from hardware feature function to differentiated solution and software value decision making with more focus on how they can drive business value beyond the infrastructure. So it's really the combination of hardware with software that optimizes and delivers the best outcomes and the tighter the link we can create between them the more seamless the experience for customers. >> Gotcha and I mean, this is more important than ever with the push toward digital transformation. And everybody's trying to get digital right. Now thinking about Dell as a company and its broader strategy, the majority of revenue comes from what most people would think of as hardware but as Jeff Clark often points out, the vast majority of engineers are software engineers. Can you explain how that dynamic works and what role hardware plays in that equation? >> Yeah, totally. So if you think about IT transformation infrastructure is the enabler of that transformation, but infrastructure needs to be smarter, easier, more automated, more secure. And that's done with software and our software engineering focus is nothing new. I think Dave, we were together five years ago talking about the latest version of HCI on the 14th generation of power edge servers. And at that time we were talking about how our hardware platform engineers were working with the software engineers to design in software defined storage capabilities within the power edge platform. So, you know, we, that we are not new to this. We've been looking at ways we can use software to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities and do that in a differentiated way because it delivers value for customers. And honestly, they're willing to pay a premium for that. >> Yeah. I remember that well, 14G now 15G, soon we're going to be talking about 16G. Can you give me an example of where hardware differentiation has created value for your customers beyond, you know what a straight software only solution running on generic white boxes might bring? >> Yeah, I have a couple of examples. The first is easily VxRail, right? VxRail, our jointly engineered HCI system with VMware. It provides full stack integration of hardware and software for that consistent operations in VMware environments. And when you think about evolution of infrastructure VxRail is actually a cool story. When it was introduced six years ago its scalability and performance, you know had it be rapidly adopted mainly in the data center but customer demands have evolved and they wanted to extend that operational efficiency to a broader and broader set of workloads. Not only in the data center, but in the cloud at the edge. So VxRail grew and its portfolio today has maximum flexibility. You can choose the best platform to meet performance, storage, graphics, IO, cost requirements a range of processor types and NVMe drives and graphics cards. So it really is the most configurable HCI system to meet any workload demand. And we recently introduced some new node types. That's hardware based, right? VxRail dynamic nodes and satellite nodes and our customers and partners are really excited about these, the dynamic nodes, as you know add the capability to scale compute and storage independently and extend to primary storage like power store and the satellite nodes are single nodes for the edge. So that's all hardware stuff, but the secret to VxRail really is more about the software. So I'm going to go back there. The VxRail HCI system software is what makes VxRail more seamless and simple than any other HCI system. And when managing your environment is easier and more automated and your workloads can stay up and running, leveraging that intelligent life cycle management customers pay attention. So again, it's that combination of hardware and software and for VxRail customers it's how we're delivering that truly curated experience like we like to call it that they can't get anywhere else. >> Awesome. So last question. Anything else you want to bring into the discussion before we close? >> Yeah. Two things, actually I have another good example of hardware differentiation and how it creates value for customers. And this one is based upon PowerStore. So PowerStore inline data reduction uses Intel quick assist technology and it performs hardware accelerated compression. So it's basically handling data reduction in hardware. We offload the compute intensive workloads of compression and conserve the CPU cycles for storage IO tasks that save application and storage processing time, cycles and costs. So it's a more consistent way to do storage efficiency and leverage power storage advance inline compression and it's always on, and it doesn't compromise performance of other services. So, with PowerStore using this hardware differentiated approach to inline data reduction, customers get an average four to one data reduction across all their workloads, don't compromise performance or services. And honestly, a lot of times we see them achieving up to 20 to 1 or more depending on the data type. So yeah, I just wanted to throw out that other example. >> Great. >> The last thing I'll say is we just launched a trifecta storage innovation at Dell Technologies World. We have over 500 new high value software enhancements that bring out the best in our storage hardware platforms and that's across PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex. So I encourage folks to go check that out and you know obviously let us know what you think. >> Yeah. We can put a link to those in the show notes. And I was there at Dell Tech World. It was actually quite amazing. Shannon, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights really appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents "Dell Technologies World," brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of "Dell Technologies World 2022" live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited. I dunno if you heard that, a group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited, if you heard that big applause when we went live. (Jules laughing) So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live "Dell Technologies World" since 2019. A lot of people here, this Expo Hall is packed. A lot of momentum here, but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, so many exciting things for Equinix and this partnership of Dell sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about and we just were named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively. But underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets but then interconnecting them. So they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds. They have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint has set us on the path we're on today, which we're very grateful to be at in. And really, the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about the last two years. The moments of the last two years have been very challenging >> They have. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, we, together, Dell and Equinix, what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation. And digital transformation is hard. It's not a one and done and it's not an overnight solution. And so, what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem. And then pairing that with these interconnected enterprises. So, Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution on-prem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge, together. And that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Equinix is an amazing company. Like you said, it's... I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart, it'll blow your mind. Really incredibly successful. And part of the reason... It's funny, 10, 15 years ago, people thought, well... Or, 10 years ago, anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was the exact opposite. And that's because Charles Phillips used to joke, "Friends don't let friends build data centers." >> Yes. >> And it's not a good use of capital for most companies, unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course, you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because... And we get that. Are you and Dell in fact competitors? No, we see them as wholly complimentary. And in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge, which involves their servers. And PowerStore, which involves their storage, and then VxRail, which is really the hyper-converged infrastructure. And those are just a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell. And if you think about Metal, and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what Metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance, have the equipment placed in our data centers so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves of that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare Metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community, in terms of the partnership with Dell? Partners must be excited, the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, that's what's near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for, Equinix's global partnerships. And they're just very excited about what we're doing with Dell. And to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell. So it makes sense that we bring it together. So, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with, AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kendra, Deloitte, Accenture, WiPro, DXC. All of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call Power of Three, that together we're better. Because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner. So they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own. And so, they're excited about it. You see, it's a big opportunity for them from a... Of revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status. So partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix... 'Cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships. It's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide, wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet of things and content providers, we do see it as our role to the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems. It is our mission to continue to grow that, enrich it, because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider. And it's the combination of the ecosystem that you'd find and the people you can connect to at Equinix. And then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And it's a lot of technology underneath these. It's that first layer one, I guess, if you will, of the data center, right? And so, a lot of your customers or your partner's customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before. I mean, it's just too expensive. The power requirements are going through the roof. So you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact... So first of all, you're right. It's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest. So it's very difficult for people to do it themselves. But even show... Another point you mentioned actually about the power, is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability. And so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy. And it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives. So partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's... How do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air. Is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> On sustainable... I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say... >> This is the high level, yeah. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts people who, all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that. And then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents. It's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey, and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that, >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it. And we do see other people following, which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well, how important is that in your partnership conversations. That partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has. >> Partners care a lot about it, but customers ask us both all the time. We increasingly see a portion of an RFP or scope of work asking, "Before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment. Tell me about your commitment." And so, we are committed to it, but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's... >> Where do you... Go ahead please. >> Oh, I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer, which Equinix is listening to, we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry, one more time. >> That the sustainability, the ESG demand is coming from the customers, as you were saying. >> Both. I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it, but our customers are holding us accountable to it. And sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us. And it is for companies like Dell and it is for partners and customers. >> It really is... It's up there with security in terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next let's call it three to five years. In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, I think that our partners and by that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, We've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell. So our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey. Whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke, do-it-yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well. That's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are, the customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is. And you know, the customers are getting savvier, but we are all still early in this journey as far as the edge. I think we are all still grappling that. Right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now. And then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well, that's the thing about your business? It's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff, but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> Jules: You can, >> And you can put anything in your data center. That's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet. And so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions, architects and our sales to people together, but they'll talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of on-prem and in an Equinix data center, and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than they are even thinking about today. And, they may expand their edge over time, because they may see that as at the customer end point. Today, most businesses are still using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change. And so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah. That's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every co couple of years. If you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah, sure. You might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like Metal where they also do prevent that sort of rip and replace, but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages. And being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this? You mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in a last few years. How much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying, "Help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves." >> We have been fortunate to be... If you're asking me how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh customers it has. Oh, okay I get it. So it is a challenge for them, but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent, but partners are filling that gap. And we with Equinix being forced to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest. And so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. It's pretty cool, isn't it? >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind? >> Well, they come with all the requisite biometrics and man traps and all of the sort of bells and whistles that are actually the first slay of physical security, but then once you get into the data center, then we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. >> Yeah, it's good. And you know, it's not like you drive by the data center, and there's a big sign that says, here's the data center. They're trying to stay a little hidden and then like getting in, it's like getting into Fort Knox. It's probably harder. And then, but then the it's like this giant clean room. It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> And inside the data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside their, the most direct roam reps to the cloud. So you would expect there's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure clean... >> Cooling systems and power systems that are just... >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is really. >> We need a tour. >> Do you let people tour your data center? >> I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Great. >> Sounds fantastic. Would love to. >> We'll bring a camera. (laughing) Oh, no, we're not allowed. >> Not today. >> No phones, no phones sequester. So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> We are excited about the conversations that we're going to have, power of three that I was talking about. So, we really pride ourselves on having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer. And so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts. Equinix and Dell will meet with almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us. So I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently, because that is good choice for the market. That is good choice for the customer set, for the enterprises out there. So that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week. But thank you for coming on Jules, >> Oh my pleasure, thank you. talking about... >> How Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you. Well, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage day one, "Dell Technologies World" live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (slow upbeat music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World 2022 Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited I dunno if you heard that. A group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vallante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited if you heard that. Big applause going went live. So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell Technologies World since 2019, a lot of people here, this expo hall is packed, lot of momentum here but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, you know, so many exciting things for Equinix and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them so they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds, they have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint, has set us on the path we're on today which we're very grateful to be at in and really the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about that. The last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. >> They have been. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and digital transformation is hard, it's not of one and done and it's not an overnight solution and so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center, to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem and then pairing that with, you know these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution OnPrem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge together and that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Eqiuinix's an amazing company, like you said, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart it'll blow your mind, really incredibly successful and part of the reason is funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was exact opposite and that's because, you know Charles Phillips used to joke, friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Yes. >> Right? And it's not a good use of capital for most companies unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because, you know, and we get that are you and Dell in fact competitors? And no we see them as wholly complimentary and in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge which involves their servers and PowerStore which involves their storage and then VxRail which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure and those are a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell and if you think about metal and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance have the equipment placed in our data center so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves to that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community in terms of the partnership with Dell? Are partners must be excited the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, you know, that's what near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for Equinix's global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell and to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell so it makes sense that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with the AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kyndryl, Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro all, DXC, all of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner so they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own and so if they're excited about it, it's a big opportunity for them from a revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status so partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix, you know, 'cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet, things many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider and it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinix and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And there's a lot of technology underneath these, it's that first layer one I guess if you will of the data center, right? And so a lot of your customers or your partners customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before, I mean it's just too expensive, the power requirements are going through the roof so you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest so it's very difficult for people to do it themselves but even show, another point you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability and so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy and it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives or partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's, how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air or is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> It's sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say. >> This is at high level. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts. People who, you know who all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that and then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that. >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it and we do see other people following which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well how important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has? >> Partners care a lot about it but customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking, before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment, tell me about your commitment and so we are committed to it but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's com-- >> Where do you. Go ahead please. >> Oh I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer which EquinIx is listening to we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry one more time? >> That the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers you were saying? >> It both, like I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it but our customers are holding us accountable to it and, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us and it is for companies like Dell and it is for our partners and customers. >> It really is. I mean, it's up there with security. >> It is. >> In terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next, let's call it three to five years? In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, you know, I think that they, our partners, and that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, you know, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell so our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke do it yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well that's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are. The customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is and, you know, the customers are getting savvier but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we're all still grappling that. For right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now and then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well that's the thing about your business, it's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> You can. >> And you can put anything in your data center, that's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet and so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions architects and our sales people together with Dell talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinix data center and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than the year you're even thinking about today and they may expand their edge over time because they may sort of see that at the customer end point. Today most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change and so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah, that's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every couple of years if you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah sure, you might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So you know, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this, you mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in the last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves? >> We have been fortunate to to be... If you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh our customers it has. >> Yes. >> Oh, okay. >> Yes. >> So it is a challenge for them but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent but partners are filling that gap and we've at Equinix have been fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest and so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean-- >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. >> Well I mean, they come with all the requisite, bio metrics and man traps and all of the sort bells and whistles that are actually the first layer of physical security, but then once you get into the data center then we have sort of, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's-- >> Yeah, it's good and you know, it's not like you drive by the data center and there's a big sign that says here's the data center, it is kind of, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then it's, getting in it's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder but then, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> Inside these data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside the most direct RomReps to the cloud so you would expect. There's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, clean-- >> Cooling systems and power systems and it's just. >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is. >> So I need a tour. >> You should. Do you let people tour your data centers? >> Well I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Yeah, great. >> It sounds fantastic. >> We'd love to. >> So last couple-- >> We'll bring a camera. (both laugh) Oh, no, not allowed. >> Not today. No phones, no phones sequester. >> So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> So well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're going to have power of three that I was talking about. So you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer and so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinix and Dell will meet with, you know almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us so I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently because that is good choice for the market, that is good choice for the customer set so for the enterprises out there so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on Jules talking about-- >> Oh, my pleasure >> An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner, your program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's Live Coverage day one Dell Technologies World Live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the evolving capabilities of VCF on VxRail. VCF being VMware Cloud Foundation. as VxRail from Dell Technologies. Samuel Niemi is their Product Manager of VCF on VxRail. He's got the keys to the kingdom. He is going to give us the update on what's going on, obviously with all the major IT operational conversations going on with cloud native, how to get the best excellence out of the organization as we come through the pandemic, big stuff happening. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> In June, you guys announced some major updates that's coming on to VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail that would allow customers to extend their capabilities and their ability to innovate in the landscape and with external storage. Can you take us through what's new what's the situation and tell us what's happening? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off if you're, for those who might be watching who are not familiar with VCF on VxRail, VxRail is our hyperconverged infrastructure system that allows for massive data centers scaling at, from node to node to node. VCF on VxRail specifically is the VMware SDDC software suite that allows us to create a private cloud with VxRail deployments. So instead of saying, I want to manage this cluster and this cluster, and this cluster VCF allows us to manage VxRail clusters and deployments at a big scale. So VCF on VxRail, we've gone from in the last two and a half years or so that we have been available as a product we've gone from nothing to tens of thousands of nodes deployed across the world. And it has been a rollercoaster of a ride. And we're just thrilled with the success that we've had so far. >> And what's been new since the release in June but what's new? >> Absolutely. So, one thing that we've realized from a VxRail perspective is that, as we grow and as our data center and enterprise scale customers continue to grow their VCF on the VxRail environments VCF on VxRail has to evolve as well. And in June we announced an ability for VCF on VxRail to consume external storage. Now, hyper-converged means no storage, networking, network virtualization I should say and your server all in one box. External storage gives us the ability to utilize your existing Dell EMC storage arrays and use that data centric kind of storage deployment with your existing or net new VCF on VxRail deployments. It's really exciting stuff. And we're really looking forward to be able to even better provide solutions for our customers at that big enterprise scale. >> So a lot of change happening scale is a big word here, right? We're seeing scale, modern applications looking for environment. You talk about hybrid private cloud. I mean, essentially cloud operations is private cloud if you will. I got to ask you on this big product that you have VCF on VxRail, what are the drivers behind making this option viable for customers, what are they looking for? Why are they consuming it this way? What are the key aspects of drive in this force? >> Absolutely. So, what we found is that with vSAN which has been wildly successful on the VxRail, it's fantastic for general purpose workloads. And we don't see that changing. What we see is an ability for our customers to leverage the extreme speed of our PowerStore T, our PowerMax and our Unity XT storage arrays so that you can get that sub millisecond latency that you're used to out of those storage arrays and have the same benefits in say another workload domain of your existing vSAN deployment. Now, my favorite example of a use case for that is when you have sub millisecond latency, that's something like a PowerMax can provide. Let's say you're standing at the gas pump. It's cold, I'm here in Minnesota it was three degrees here yesterday. When I'm standing at the gas pump, swipe my card. I don't want to wait and wait and wait for that database kit. Put my card to go through I want it now. PowerMax and our PowerStore T, unity XT with those crazy low latencies, they allow our VCF on VxRail customers to not have to wait at the pump. So when our enterprise customers have those things deployed with that crazy low latency for database hits, you're not standing at the pump. You're not waiting awkwardly at the grocery store for your card to go through. You really get that extreme speed that those big storage arrays can provide. >> Yeah, so the weather in Minnesota, and so my brother lives in that area too. He was complaining about it on the family text, but this is an edge case, whether you're swiping your credit card on the pump, this latency discussion, the edge is really a key conversation because that's what you're, you're going to get cold waiting, but still you could be, key data store for say some equipment in a manufacturing operation, or on a farm or somewhere. So again, this brings up the whole edge. >> True. >> That an area is that the driver, one of the drivers, or is it also just in general the performance? >> You know I would say it depends on what you need out of your storage array. If you need that performance at the edge, VCF can deploy remote clusters in a metro distance within 50 milliseconds. So you can have your center and you can have your edges, you can put storage arrays behind those edges. You can have that kind of, speed from place to place, to place to place, or you can use traditional vSAN storage. So it really comes down to what your storage use case is. Maybe you have a need of the data replication that PowerMax can provide from one site to the other, and that's your backup for your edges. Those kinds of things can all be utilized with VCF on VxRail and remote clusters at the edge. >> What a similar customer use case? Can you just walk me through some examples of customers that you have and what they're interested in, what kind of advantages they're seeing with the capability? >> Certainly. So we have a number of customers who have high level of data resiliency requirements that we have that 99 point lots of nines resiliency that the PowerMax, and it's forebears, VMX have provided for 20 something years now, those customers say at our financial institutions where they have to have massive levels of resiliency. We have customers who frankly have separate buying cycles, where they buy their compute one year, and then maybe two years later, that's when their storage comes up for renewal. So those customers are able to leverage both VCF on VxRail and their external storage. I'm not going to drop customer names. I've got a couple that come to mind, but I'll say in the financial institution and in healthcare especially is where we see. >> What problem are they solving? You don't have to name names because I know it's probably the company, everything, but you know what all the reference stuff, but what's the anecdotal, what's the main problem, let's say kind of the use cases that jump out and people, if people are watching might think that they should be using this. What signals and signs should they be looking for? >> Absolutely. I would say first off data resiliency, and I'm just in love with PowerMax. So that's the first thing that jumps to mind. I'm extreme performance, whether it's databases or having a need to get data out to their customers as quickly as possible. Replication comes to mind. Those are the big three. And then of course, where you maybe need a little bit of compute and a lot of storage are dynamic nodes and VCF on VxRail means that we can sell our nodes without any storage. And that really gives us an ability to just say, I need a lot of compute, I need a little compute, whatever it might be, I'm going to scale my nodes and my storage independently of one another. >> Where can people get more information to find out? >> Sure, absolutely. So for more information, you can always go to dell.com. You can reach out to your sales team and talk to your VMware sales team as well, who are well-versed in VCF on VxRail deployments, but we're always here dell.com and we're always just an email away. >> So while I've got your here, say, I want to ask you about this notion of simplifying the IT operational experience. >> Sure. >> In your view, as you look out on the horizon from your perspective, being the product leader on this area, what's on the mind of the customer. What's the psychology out there? What's some of the environmental conditions that they're facing (indistinct) their landscape. Is it do more with less, the classic cliche? Is it actually a replatformin, is it refactoring? Is it application developers? what's some of the big drivers there in terms of the customers that you're seeing? >> So as a customer today, I have so many options for where to put my data and where to put my VMs and my development. I want to look at what is the best route for my business? Is it a hybrid cloud offering? And if yes, what's the easiest way to manage that because at the end of the day, if I'm spending money on maintenance spending money on staff who are not accelerating the business, but just keeping the thing going, what's the best way to do that? And VCF on VxRail today really allows our customers to deploy a private or a hybrid cloud rather, and maintain the entire thing through one interface. That interface being SDDC Manager. When we look at the benefits of it, VCF for on VxRail today provides Tanzu. So for customers who need to have a development platform in their hybrid cloud Tanzu is that the easy option or the easy answer for that. So, it is a big answer. What's driving this, lots of things, but really it's data center modernization. It's moving from a traditional servers with virtual machines on them into the hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, you were missing resilience here on the data. I think that's awesome because I mean, at the end of the day it's data driven. Everyone wants more data. Database has been around for a while. So making that go faster is really critical. Awesome, awesome conversation. And now on the VCF on VxRail, what's the bottom line, if you had to summarize the evolution capabilities that are coming on, they're evolving, you're the Product Manager, you got the keys to the kingdom, what's next, what's happening? >> If I'm looking at VCF and what's next and what's on the way, really lifecycle management. So, when our customers talk about what it looks like to lifecycle their systems without VCF on VxRail and the complexity of doing that without VCF it's lifecycle management is the reason for being. We look at the, from everything we lifecycle from the hardware of the VxRail nodes, including disc firmware, HPAs, NIC drivers, etc to the VCF SDDC software suite, all of those components they're in vSphere, VCenter ESXi. I'm going through the checklist in my head here. The V realized components, getting all of that lifecycle to a good continuous revalidated state is really, really tough. And then your add storage, that's one more thing. So I want to be able to just have a single click that will go through LCM my entire hybrid cloud environment from hardware to software stack, so that I can manage that external storage that I just added to my system without adding more pain. So really with VCF on VxRail, it's the only jointly engineered solution from an HCI vendor like VxRail and VMware to deliver that single click soup to nuts hardware to software suite LCM. LCM is the name of the game. And we're going to continue to make that innovate on that and new ways that I can't even say yet. >> I can't wait to hear the innovation is a great model. Putting that out there, getting the environmental all scaled up. Sam Niemi, Product Manager, VCF VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail with Dell Technologies. Thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Absolutely thanks, John. >> Okay, it's theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John for your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. It's a hybrid world, we're still doing remote in news. Of course, events are coming back in person, but more importantly conversations continue. We've got two great guests here, John Siegal, SVP ISG Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Dave McGraw, office of the CTO at VMware. Gentlemen, great to see you moving forward. Dell Technologies and VMware great partnership. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Yeah, hi, John, thanks for having us. >> You know, the world's coming back to kind of real life, Omnicon virus is out there, but people say it's not going to be as bad as we think, but it looks like events are happening. But more importantly, the cloud native, cloud operations is definitely forcing lots of great new things happening, new innovations on-premises and at the Edge. A lot of new things happening in Dell and VMware, both have been working together for a long time now. VMware a separate company, we'll get to that in a second, but let's get to the partnership. What's new, what's changed with the relationship? >> Yeah, so I mean, just to kick that off and certainly Dave can chime in, but I think in a word, you know, John, nothing changes in terms of my customer's perspective. I mean, in many ways our joint relationship has never been stronger. We've put a ton of investment in both joint engineering innovation, Joint Go To Market over the last several years. And we're really been making what was our vision a couple of years ago a reality, and we only expect that to continue. And I think much of the reason we expect that to continue is because we have a shared vision of this distributed multi-cloud, you know, cloud native, modern app environment that customers want to drive. >> Yeah, and John, I would add that we've been building platforms together for the last five years, a great example is VxRail. You know, it's a market-leading technology that we've co-engineered together. And now it's a platform that we're actually building out use cases on top of whether it's multi-cloud solutions, whether it's private and hybrid cloud or including Tansu for developer environments. You know, we're using the investments we made and then we're layering in and building more value into those investments together. And we put agreements in place by the way that, you know, multi-year agreements around commercial arrangements and partnering together as well as our technology collaboration together. So we feel really confident about the future and that's what we're communicating to our customer base. >> Yeah, indeed just go ahead sorry, John. >> No, good. >> I was going to say just to build on that, as he said, I really, when I say not much changes, I mean, VMware has always been an open ecosystem partner, right? With its OEM vendors out there. And I think the difference here is Dell has made a strategic choice and a decision to make a significant investment in joint innovation, joint engineering, joint testing for VMware environments. And so I think a lot of this comes down to the commitment and focus that we've already made. You mentioned VxRail, which is a fantastic example where we at Dell, we've invested our own IP. You know, HCI systems software, that's sort of the secret ingredient that the secret sauce that delivers that single click, you know, automated lifecycle management experience. And we're investing lots of dollars in test labs just to ensure that customers always have that, you know, that seamless experience. >> You know, one of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 11 years now, it's just been that long, both EMC World and Dell World back in the day was our first events we went to. We've watched you guys together over the years. One of the things that strikes to be consistently the same is this focus of end to end, but also modularity, but also interoperability and kind of componentizing kind of the solution, not to oversimplify it, but this is kind of the big discussion right now as cloud scale, horizontal scale is with cloud resources are being put into the development stream where modern applications now are clear using only cloud native operations. That doesn't mean it's just cloud. I mean, it's cloud everywhere, but it's distributed computing. So this is kind of the original vision if you go back even five years or more. You guys have been working on this. This is kind of an important inflection point because now it's well known that the modern application is going to have to be programmable under the hood. Meaning everything's going to be scaling and rise of superclouds or new Edge technologies, which is coming fast. This is the new normal. This is not something that we were talking about mainstream five years ago, but you guys have been working on this kind of simplicity solutions-based approach. What's your reaction? >> That's right, John, I'll tell you, you might remember at VMworld a couple of years ago we announced Project Monterey. And now this was really a redefining architecture for not only data center, core data centers, but also for cloud and Edge environments. And so it's leveraging technology, you know, data processing units also known as smart NICs. You know, we're essentially redefining what that infrastructure looks like, making it more efficient, more performance, depending on the use case. So we've been partnering very closely with Dell to develop that technology and it's going to really transform what you see at the Edge and what you also see in core data centers going forward. >> Yeah, and there's so many of those. I mean, I think it seems Monterey is a great example of one that we continue to invest in. I think there's also NBME over TCP is another, if you will key ingredient to how customer is going to essentially get the performance they need out of the infrastructure going forward. And so we were proud to be a partner there, at most recent VMware where we announced, you know, the ability to essentially automate the integration of MBME over TCP with Dell EMC system integrated with vSphere. And that's a great example as well, right? I think there's countless. >> John: Yeah. >> And I'll tell you, we are so excited to see what Dell has done in the storage business with PowerStore X, where they've integrated vSphere ESXi into a storage array. And, you know, that creates all kinds of opportunities going forward for better integration and really for plug and play of, you know, the storage technology into cloud infrastructure. >> What's interesting about what you guys talking about is remember the old DevOps moving infrastructure as code. Okay, that became DevSecOps. That's big part of Tansu and security. Now it's all about devs, right? So now devs have all that built in and now the operations are the big conversation because one of the things we pointed out in the theCUBE recently is that, you know, VMware has owned the IT operations world, in our opinion for a long, long time. Dell has owned the enterprise for a very long time in terms of infrastructure in front solutions. The operational efficiency of cloud hybrid is really kind of what's the gateway to multi-cloud. This has been a big part of IT transformation. Can you guys share how you guys were working together to make that flexibility to transform from the old IT to the new IT? And what are some of the things that you're seeing with your customers that can give them a map of how to do this? >> Yeah, so I would say, you know, one area in particular that we're really coming together is around APEX, right? From an as a service perspective. I think what APEX is really doing is really unifying much of what you just described. It's taking as a service, it's taking multi-cloud, it's taking cloud native development if you will, and modern app development. And we together partner to ensure that's a consistent experience for customers. And we have a number of new APEX cloud services that keep that in mind and that are built on joint innovations, like frankly, VxRail at the bottom of that as they've said earlier. So for customers are looking to get, you know, item managing infrastructure altogether, which we, you know, we're seeing more and more now, we recently announced the APEX Cloud Services With VMware Cloud you know, which is again, a joint solution that'll be available soon. And it's one that is managed by Dell, but, you know, it gives customers that simplicity and scale of the public cloud, but certainly that control and security and performance, if you will, that they prefer to have in the private club. >> Yeah, and I think because, you know, the APEX Cloud Service is designed with the VMware Cloud, you have a capability that drives consistency and portability of workloads for customers. So they don't have to re-skill and retrain to be able to manage the environment. They also are not locked in to any particular solution. They have this ability to move workloads depending on what their needs are; economically, performance, you know, logistics requirements, and they can react accordingly as they digitize their business going forward. >> It's interesting, you guys are talking about this demand in a way, addressing this demand for as a service, which is, you know, it can be one cloud or multiple clouds, but it's really more of an abstraction layer of what you deploy to essentially create that connective tissue between what's existing, what's new and how to make it all work together to again, satisfy the developer 'cause the new apps are coming, right? They want more data is coming into them. So this has been, is this the as a service focus, is that what's happening? >> Yes, absolutely, yeah. The, as a service focus is, you know, at the end of the day is how are we going to really simplify this. We've been on this journey now for at least a year and much more to go. And VMware has been a key partner here, you know, on that journey. So a number of cloud services. We've had APEX Hybrid Cloud, APEX Private Cloud, you know, out there for some time. In fact, that's where we're getting a lot of the traction right now, and this new offering that's going to come out soon that we just mentioned with VMware cloud is just going to build on that. >> And VMware is a super cloud, isn't it Dave? Because you guys would be considered by our new definition of Supercloud because you can sit on Amazon. You also have other clouds too, so your customers can operate on any cloud. >> Our view is that, you know, from a multi-cloud future for customers to be able to be on-premises with a, you know, APEX service, to be able to be operating in a Colo, to be able to operate in one of many different hyperscalers, you know, providing that consistency and flexibility is going to be key. And I think also you mentioned Tansu earlier, John. You know, being able to have the customer have choice around whether they're operating with VMs and containers is really key as well. So, you know, what Dell has done with APEX is they set up again, another platform that we can just provide our SASE offerings to very simply and easily and deliver that value to customers in a consistent fashion going forward here. >> You know, I just love the term Supercloud. Actually, I called it subclass, but Dave Vellante called them Superclouds. But the idea is that you can have all the super power in the cloud capabilities, but it's also distributed clouds, right? Where you have Edge, you've got the Core and the notion of a cloud isn't like one place in which there's distributed computing. This is what the world now realizes. Again, we've talked about in theCUBE many times. So let's discuss this whole Core to Edge dynamic because if everything's cloudified, if you will, or cloud operations, you've got devs and ops kind of working together with security, all that good stuff. Now you have almost a seamless environment where code can run anywhere, data should traverse anywhere, but the idea of an Edge changes dramatically and certainly with 5G. So can you guys tie that Edge computing story together how Dell and VMware are addressing this massive growth at the Edge? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, first and foremost, we are seeing a major shift. As you mentioned today, the data being generated at the Edge it's, I think Michael Dell has actually gone on record talking about the next frontier, right? So it's especially happening because we're seeing all these smart monitoring capabilities, IOT, right? At almost any end point now from retail, traffic lights, manufacturing floors, you name it. I think anywhere where data is being acted upon to generate critical insights, right? That's considered an Edge now and we're expecting to see, as ITC has already gone out there on record as saying 50% of the new infrastructure out there will be deployed at the Edge in the next couple of years, so. And it's a different world, right? I mean, I think in terms of what's needed and what the challenges are, there's certainly a lack of specialized technical resources, typically at the Edge, there's typically a scaling issue. How do you manage all those distributed endpoints and do so successfully? And how do you ensure you lay any concerns around security as well? So, you know, once again, we've had a very collaborative approach when it comes to working on challenges like Edge, and, you know, we, again, common theme here, but the VxRail, which is a leading, you know, joint ACI off in the market is the foundation of many of our Edge offerings out there in the market today. The new satellite nodes that we just announced just a few months ago, extends VxRail's, you know, value proposition to the Edge, using a single node deployment. And it's really perfect for customers that don't have that local technical resource expertise or specialized resources. And it still has cyber resilience built right in. >> And John, just to follow up on that real quick, before Dave chimes in. On the Edge, compute has been a huge issue. And I've talked with you guys about this too. You guys have the compute, you have the integrated systems now, any update there on what VxRail is doing different or other Edge power (John laughs) PowerEdge sounds familiar? We need some more power at the Edge. So what's new there? >> Well, you know, first of all, we had new PowerEdge platforms of course, come out in this past year, and, you know, there's, we're building on that. I mean, the latest VxRail is of course, leveraged that power of PowerEdge. Yeah, lots of a good naming arrogance, right? PowerEdge. >> John: I love that. And, but, you know, it's, you know, it's at the heart of much of what we're doing. We're taking a lot of our capabilities that have been IP, like streaming data platform, which enables streaming, video and real-time analytics and running that on a VxRail or PowerEdge platform. You know, we're doing the same thing, you know, with, in the manufacturing side. We're working with partners that have IOT Edge platforms, you know, and running those on VxRail and PowerEdge. So we are taking very much the idea here that, yes, you're right with our rich resources of infrastructure, both with PowerEdge and VxRail, you know, building on that. But working with partners like VMware and others to collapse an integrated solution for the Edge. And so we're seeing really good uptake so far. >> Dave, what's your take on the Dell Edge with VMware, because automation is big theme, not moving data across an internet that's obviously huge. And you got to have that operational stability there. >> Absolutely, and, you know, to your point, being able to do the processing at the Edge and move results around versus moving massive amounts of data around is really key to the future going forward. And, you know, we've taken an approach with Dell where we're working with customers, we're having detailed conversations, really using a "Tiger Team Approach" around the use cases; manufacturing and retail being two of the real key focuses, healthcare another one where we're understanding customer requirements, it's both today and where they want to go. And, you know, so it's about distributed computing, certainly at the Edge. Dell is coming out with some great new platforms that we're integrating our software with. At the same time, we have technology in STWIN and SASE that become part of that solution as well, with VeloCloud. And we're developing a global network of points of presence that really will help support distributed application environments and Edge-native Application environments working with Dell going forward. >> That's great stuff. The next ending question is what's next. I want to just tee that up by bringing up what you kind of made me think of there, Dave, and this is key supply chain on both hardware and software talking about security. So when you say those things you're talking about in terms of functionality, the question is security, right? Both hardware and software supply chain with open source, with automation. I mean, this is a big discussion. What do you guys react to that about what's next.. >> Yeah, I can tell you from a central engineering perspective, you know, we're looking at security compliance and privacy every day, we're working closely with Dell. In fact, we're in the middle of meetings today in this area. And, you know, I look at a few key areas of investment that we're making collectively together. One is in the area of end to end encryption of data. For virtualized environments or containerized environments, being able to have end-to-end encryption and manage a very efficient way, the keys and maintain the data compression and deduplication capabilities for customers, you know, efficiency and cost purposes while being very secure. The second area we're working closely on is in Zero Trust. You know, being able to develop Zero Trust infrastructure across Edge, to Core, to Colo, to Cloud and making sure that, you know, we have reference designs available to customers with procedures, policies, best practices, to be able to drive Zero Trust environments. >> John what you're (indistinct) is huge and you guys have, literally could be the keys to the kingdom pun intended. You guys are doing a lot of great security at the Edge too, whether the traffic stays with the Edge or goes across the network. >> That's all right, I'm as curious, like you said, it's been a joint focus and initiative across much of our portfolio for quite a while now. And I think, you know, you asked what's next and I think, you know, sky's the limit right now. I mean, we've got the shared vision, right? I think at the end of the day, you know, we've shared a number of joint initiatives that are ongoing right now with Project Monterrey. Obviously our integration with Tansu and a number of solutions we have there, work around APEX, et cetera. I think we have complimentary capabilities. You mentioned, you know, areas like supply chain, areas like security, you know, and I think these are all things that we both do well together. And the thing I will say that I think is probably the most key to us sustaining this great execution together is our collaborative cultures. I think, you know, there's something to be said for what we built, you know, all these last several years, you know, around these collaborative cultures, working together on joint roadmaps and focusing on really end of the day solving our customer's biggest challenges, whatever those may be, you know? And so at the end of the day behind us, we have the greatest supply chains, you know, services, support, and innovation engines. But I think, you know, I think that the passion, our groups working together I think is going to be key to us going forward. >> Well, great stuff moving forward together with Dell Technologies and VMware. David, thanks for coming on. John, great to see you. Thanks for sharing insight. Great CUBE conversation talking encryption, we've spoken about Edge and supply chain as well. Great stuff, great conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, with theCUBE. You're watching CUBE coverage. Thank you so much for watching. (bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE, our coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience continues. I have a long-time guest coming back, joining me in the next segment here. Jon Siegal is back, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Jon, it's good to see you, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, always great to be on. >> We last spoke about six months ago and here we are still at home. >> I know. >> But there has been no slowdown whatsoever in the last year. We were talking to you a lot about Edge last time but we're going to talk about PowerStore today. It's just coming up on its one year anniversary. You launched it right when the pandemic happened. >> That's right. >> Talk to me about what's happened in the last year with respect to PowerStore. Adoption, momentum, what's going on? >> Yeah, great, listen, what a year it's been, right? But certainly for PowerStore especially, I mean, customers and partners around the world have really embraced PowerStore, specifically really it's modern architecture. What many people may not know is this is actually the fastest ramping new architecture we've had in all of Dell's history, which is quite a history of course. And we saw 4 X quarter over quarter growth in the most recent quarter. And you know, in terms of shipments, we've shipped well over 400 petabytes of PowerStore, you know, so special thanks to lots of our customers around the world and industries like education, gaming, transportation, retail. More than 60 countries, I think 62 countries now. They include customers like Columbia Southern University, Habib Bank, Real Page, the University of Pisa and Ultra Leap, just to name a few. And to give you a sense of how truly game changing it's been in the market is that approximately 20% of the customers with PowerStore are new to Dell, new to Dell Technologies. And we've tripled the number of wins against some of our key competitors in just the last quarter as well. So look, it's been quite a year, like you said and we're not stopping there. >> Yeah, you must have to wear a neck brace from that whiplash of moving so quickly. (both laughing) But that's actually a good problem to have. >> It is. >> And curious about, is it 20% of the PowerStore customers are net new to Dell? >> Yeah. >> Interesting that you've captured that much in a very turbulent year. Any industries in particular that you see as really being transformed by the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think just like we're bringing a disruptive technology to market, there's a lot of industries out there that are disrupting themselves as well, right, and how they transform, particularly with, you know, in this new era during the pandemic. I think, I can give you a great example. One of the new capabilities of PowerStore is AppsON just for those that aren't familiar. AppsON is the ability for PowerStore to run apps directly on the appliance, good name, right? And it's thanks to a built-in VMware ESXi hypervisor. And where we've seen really good traction with AppsON, is in storage intensive applications at the edge. And that brings me to my example. And this one's in retail. And you know, of course just like every industry I think it's been up-ended in the past year. There's a large supermarket chain in northern China that is new to Dell. During the pandemic they needed to fast-track the development of a smart autonomous retail system in all their stores, so that their customers could make their purchases via smartphone app. And again, just limiting the essentially the person to person interaction during the pandemic and this required a significant increase in transaction processing to get to the store locations that they didn't have equipment for before, as well as support for big data analytics applications to understand the customer behavior that's going on in real-time. So the net result is they chose PowerStore. They were new to Dell and they deployed it in their stores and delivered a seamless shopping experience via smartphone apps. The whole shopping experience was completely revolutionized. And I think this is really a great example of again, how the innovations that are in PowerStore are enabling our customers to really rethink how they're transacting business. >> Well, enabling the supermarkets to be the edge but also in China where everything started, so much, the market dynamics are still going on, but how quickly were they able to get PowerStore up and running and facilitate that seamless smartphone shopping experience? >> It was only weeks, only weeks, weeks from beginning to getting them up to speed. I mean, we've had great coverage, great support. And again, they embraced, I mean, they happened to leverage the AppsON capabilities, so they were able to run some of their applications directly on the appliance and they were able to get that up and running very quickly. And they were already a VMware customer as well. So they were already familiar with some of the tools and the integration of the VMware. And again, that's also been a sweetspot for this particular offer. >> Okay, got it. So a lot in it's first year. You said 4 X growth, over 60 countries, 400 petabytes plus shipped, a lot of new net new customers. What is new? What are you announcing that's new and that's going to take that up even a higher level? >> That's right. We're always going to up the ante, right? We're always going to, we can't rest on our laurels for too long. Look, we're very excited to share what's new for PowerStore. And that is one of the reasons we're here of course. I can break it down into two key highlights. First is a major software update that brings more enterprise innovation, more speed, more automation in particular to both new and existing customers. And we're also excited to announce a new lower cost entry model for the PowerStore family called the PowerStore 500. And this offers an incredible amount of enterprise class storage capabilities, much of which I have talked about and will talk more about today, for the price. And the price itself is what's going to surprise some folks. It starts as low as 28,000 US street price which is pretty significant, you know, in terms of a game changer, we think, in this industry. >> So let's talk about the software update first. You've got PowerStore 2.0, happy birthday to your customers who are going to take advantage of this. >> That's right. >> Kind of talk me through what some of the technological advancements are that your customers are going to be able to leverage? >> That's a great point. Yeah, so from a software perspective I like how you said that, happy birthday, yeah so all of our, just to be clear from a software update perspective, all of our existing customers are going to get this as a simple free non-disruptive update. And this is a commitment we've had to our customers for some time. And really it's the mantra if you will, of PowerStore, which is all about ensuring that our customers can encounter our very flexible platform that will keep giving them the latest and greatest. So really a couple of things I want to highlight from PowerStore that are brand new. One is we're giving a speed boost to the entire PowerStore lineup. Customers now, existing customers, you get up to 25% faster, mixed workload performance which is incredible, right off the bat. Secondly, we're enabling our customers to take full advantage of NVME now across the data center with the option of running NVME over fiber channel. And this again requires just a simple software update and no additional hardware if they already have 32 gig capable switches and HBAs on-prem. We've also made our unique AppsON feature, which I just talked about in the China example, we've made that more powerful and with scale out. This means more aggregate power, more aggregate capacity and it makes it even more ideal now for storage intensive apps to run at the edge with PowerStore. Another capability that's been very popular with our customers is our data reduction specifically our intelligent Dido which is always on and automated. And now what it does is it enables customers to boost performance while still guaranteeing the four to one data reduction that we have, at the same time. So just to give a quick example, when the system is under extreme IO, duress if you will, it automatically prioritize that IO versus the DDUP itself and provides a 20% turbo boost if you will, of performance boost for the applications running. All this is done automatically, zero management effort, zero impact to the data reduction guarantee of four to one that we already have in place. And then the last highlight I'd like to bring up is, last but not least, is one we're really proud of is the ability for our customers to now take more cost advantage, if you will, cost effective advantage of SCM or storage class memory. PowerStore now differentiates between SCM drives and NVME drives within the same chassis. So they can use SCM as a high-performance layer, if you will with as few as one drive, right? So they don't have to populate the whole chassis, they can use just one SCM drive for cost-effectiveness, for embedded data access. And this actually helps reduce the workload latency by up to 15%. So, another great example on top of NVME that I already mentioned, of how PowerStore is leading the practical adoption of next generation technologies. >> Are you seeing with the lower cost PowerStore 500, is that an opportunity for Dell to expand into the midsize market and an opportunity for those smaller customers to be able to take advantage of this technology? >> Absolutely, yeah. So the PowerStore finder, which we're really excited about introducing does exactly what you just said, Lisa. It is going to allow us to bring PowerStore and the experience of PowerStore to a broad range of businesses, a much broader range of edge use cases as well. And we're really excited about that. It's an incredible amount of enterprise storage class performance, as I mentioned, and functionality for the price that is again, 28,000 starting. And this includes all of the enterprise software capabilities I've been talking about. The ability to cluster, four to one data reduction guarantee, anytime upgrades. And to put this in context, a single 2U appliance, the PowerStore 500 supports up to 2.4 million SQL transactions per minute. I mean, this thing packs a punch, like no other, right? And it's a great fit for stand-alone or edge deployments in virtually every industry, we've mentioned retail already also healthcare, manufacturing, education and more. It's an offering that's really ideal for any solution that requires an optimization of price/performance, small footprint and effortless automation. And I can tell you, it's not just customers that are excited about this, as you can imagine our channel partners, they can't wait to get their hands on this either. >> Was just going to ask you about the channel. >> It is going to help them reach new sets of customers that they never had before. You mentioned midsize, but also in addition to that, it's just going to open it up to all new sets of use cases as well. So I'm really excited to see the creativity from our channel partners and customers and how they adopt and use the PowerStore 500 going forward. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that it's going to open up. We've seen so many new things in the last year and such acceleration. What are some of the new use cases that this is going to help unlock value for? >> Yeah, again, I think it's going to come down a lot to the edge in particular, as well as mid-size, it can run, again, this can run storage, intensive applications. So it's really about coming down to a price point that I think the biggest example will be mid-sized businesses that now, it's now affordable to. That they weren't able to get this enterprise class capabilities in the past more than anything else. Cause it's all the same capabilities that I've mentioned but it allows them to run all types of things. It could be, they could run, new next-generation intensive data, intensive databases. They can run VDI, they can run SQL, it does, essentially more than anything else makes existing use cases more accessible to mid-sized businesses. >> Got it, okay. So, so much momentum going on in the first year. A lot of that you're souping it up with this your new software, we talked about the new mid-size enterprise version PowerStore 500. What else can we expect from PowerStore, the rest of calendar 2021? >> Yeah, I think lots of things. So first of all we're so pleased at the amount of commitment to innovation that we've had over the past year. We're going to continue to work very closely with VMware to drive more and more innovation and enhancements with capabilities like AppsON that I talked about, and VM-ware or (indistinct) which is a key enabler for that. We're also committed to continuing to lead the industry in the adoption of modern technologies. I gave some good examples today of NVME and AppsON and SCM, storage class memory, and customers can expect that continued commitment. Look, we've designed PowerStore from the ground up to be very flexible so that it can be enhanced and improved non-disruptively. And I think we did that with this release. We proved that and no one can predict the future, clearly, it's been a crazy year. And so businesses need storage that's going to be flexible with them and grow with them and evolve with them. And customers can expect that from PowerStore. And we plan on doing just that. >> So customers can, that are interested can go direct to Dell. They can also go through your huge channel, you said, in terms of those customers that are thinking about it maybe adding to the percentage of new customers. What's your advice on them in terms of next steps? >> Yeah, next steps is, you know, I got to say this, we've done, it's crazy, we've done over 20,000 demos of PowerStore in one year, no joke. And you know, it's a new world. And so the next step is to reach out to Dell. We'd love to showcase this through a demo, give them whether it's a remote experience that way or remote proof of concept but yeah, reach out to Dell, your local rep or local channel partner and we'd love to show you what's possible more than anything else and look, we're really proud of what we've accomplished here. Just as impressive as these updates, I must say, is that in many instances, the team that brought this to market, the engineering team, they did this just like we're doing today, right? Over Zoom, remotely, while balancing life and work. So I just also want to thank the team for their commitment to delivering innovation to our customers. It hasn't wavered at all and I want to thank our top notch team. >> Right, an amazing amount of work done. You've had a very busy year and glad that you're well and healthy and been as successful with PowerStore. We can't wait to see in the next year those numbers that you shared even go up even more. Jon, thank you for joining us >> Looking forward to it. and sharing what's new with PowerStore. We appreciate your time. >> Always a pleasure, Lisa. >> Likewise >> Look forward to talking to you soon. >> Yeah >> Take care. >> For Jon Siegal, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, a Digital Experience. (slow 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)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, actually, CUBE virtual coverage of Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE. We're not in person this year. Normally we're on the floor, we're talking to all the guests. This year, obviously, because of the pandemic we're going to be doing remote and of course, I'm proud to have a CUBE alumni back on the program. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing for Dell Technologies. Cheryl, great to see you remotely, bummer we couldn't be in person, thanks for coming on. >> I know, thank you John. It's great to be with you virtually again. >> You know, I just want to just point out that obviously we're not face to face. Normally Dell Technology World is a real celebration. It's the, it's a culmination of all the announcements, all the community, all the partners, it's, it's actually a huge partner event as well as a customer event. You're running global partners. How has this pandemic changed your world? People still got to do business. More pressure for modern apps, programmable infrastructure Hybrid Cloud. The world's not stopping. What is your take on this? Because it's been a real challenge but it's an also an opportunity for the folks who can get through it. What's your take? >> Yeah, it's just been remarkable. You know, I tell people in some ways I find this the great equalizer because it has all of us around the world in the exact same place but our partners have just been remarkable. You know, we see inspirational work all over the place. They're so resilient and they have just been focused on the customer. And so together we have just been really focused on helping all of our customers as we know, in the early weeks and months of this now, you know, it was pivoting to support business continuity and enabling their employees to work remotely. And our partners just rallied to the cause. You know, they bring their expertise and their capabilities and their services. And you know, we've all been talking about digital transformation and the need to modernize all of our infrastructures. And I think we're all seeing it just accelerate. So in so many ways, it's just pushed it to the forefront and a lot of us, because we don't have an alternative, we're all engaging in modalities like this, but we're getting business done, right? We're helping our customers really respond to the needs of the business. And I think in the early stages of this, you know, we've been characterizing it as there was a lot of go fast, go light. Now we're seeing, you know, that we're all recognizing we're going to be in this circumstance for the foreseeable future, a little longer than maybe we all intended and now it's do it right. So we see a lot of just good work around hardening infrastructure, working on security vulnerabilities. How do we harden a VPN environment? So to be candid, you know, the breadth of our portfolio and a lot of the infrastructure solutions, our partnership with VMware has never been more relevant. And a lot of those capabilities our partners are leveraging to be able to support their customers needs and demands. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the VMware and I want to bring that up because I've been doing a lot of interviews and one of the themes for Dell Tech World Digital Experience this year has been the VMware integration. And what's interesting is is that that investment of being tightly coupled with VMware and your other partners is paying off now because as people need to be truly agile and flexible because of the disruption, the way the work environment, the workforce, workloads and the workplace has been changed they really need to lean on Dell. And you guys have that slogan, the power of partnering with Dell Technologies. I want to dig into what that means because the customers, your partners, end user customer there's kind of two spectrums. There's the, this is a tailwind, I have to go faster and put this modern app, I'm going to double down and solve problems. Whether it's a call center is getting stuff built quickly to solve needs. Two, well, this is a pandemic that's integral. So we're going to retool while we're kind of downtime. I won't say downtime, but like, while they're not truly active, whether you're in airlines or whatever, there's different spectrums and everything in between. You guys are bringing a lot to the table through these partnerships and the integrations. Can you talk about how that's paying off and two, how you guys are helping your partners and give some examples? >> Yeah, well, thank you John. And, you know, we have been saying for some time that we really do think the cross sell up, sell opportunity is a differentiated opportunity for our partners teaming with Dell Technologies. You know, even in the last several months while we've all been kind of working from home, our innovation engine hasn't stopped. I mean, we've launched nine new products in nine weeks all of which are just innovations that continue to represent areas where partners can team with us to bring those modernized applications to bear. And to your point, many of our partners and our customers are using this time when we're all remote and you can't go onsite, they're doubling down on their training. You know, we've seen an unbelievable demand in our competency training and our certification capabilities, clearly with the product launches. I just mentioned, there's new training to enable them around the new offerings. Our PowerStore product was just launched. So unbelievable opportunities. And as you said with VMware, you know, we have been for some time, when we talk about cross sell our partners that sell two and three lines of business, their revenues are multiples higher than partners that don't and candidly partners that sell three lines of business and sell VMware are selling like 148 times the revenue and I think it's a reflection of their engaging in strategic sticky services, rich deployments of hybrid cloud implementations with their customers, and the customers need their help and expertise like never before. So I think the results are showing true. And I also think in this dynamic of everything's gone digital, everything's pivoted to digital, you know, our partners have been asking how can we help them be more effective and successful in their digital marketing efforts and activities? How can we assist them in virtual selling? You know, everybody's accustomed to face to face sales contacts and we've all learned how to use your platform and Zoom and teams and all these other modalities that allow us to frankly be highly effective and efficient. And our partners candidly are leaning into some of our services and tools and capabilities that honestly have been there for some time, but like remote diagnostics, for example, remote capabilities so that you don't have to go on the data center floor and you can still be doing assessments and provisioning and orchestration and deployment for your customers in this time. And you're right, some customers and partners are using this as an opportunity to invest so that, you know, when the world opens up, this will end at some point, they are incredibly well positioned to move forward and take advantage of what's already been a fast moving market. And I just think this environment it's accelerated, the move and adoption, like never before. >> Yeah, and to your point, I think the thing we're seeing is that the vendors and the customers that have been prepared, suppliers and customers that have been thinking about it, you can see them having performance. Even in the challenging handcuffed environment that they're in with the whole, you know, disruption working at home to the data center because the edge and the data center are now connecting and you've got hybrid public, multi-cloud developing and everyone's got to learn and build out at the same time. So it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because you know, the word virtual event has been kicked around. We have our own virtual event thing and everyone's doing it. This is theCUBE virtual but they don't use the word digital, but we say digital transformation. Is it digital, virtual transformation? So you've got virtual, I guess, reality virtual spaces, digital as digital, explain this from your perspective, how you see digital and virtual marketing and, or learning as a critical part of your program offerings because people still got to get the new things, they got to learn. >> I honestly, I think it's gone from a nice to have, and we all acknowledge that it's a transformation in the world of marketing to a, now it's a must have, right? I mean, when you no longer can do in person events, and many of our partners would have looked at that as a demand generation activity, they'd be capturing the leads from all the conversations we'd be having on a solution expo floor. We'd be having our in person events to now, we're going to convey our information and knowledge and maybe a virtual setting but that pivot to digital marketing, your online presence, the personalization at scale, making sure we acknowledged and understand that we have to meet our buyers and acknowledge the buyer journey has changed. And I think it's a must have now. So it's no longer a nice to have and we've all been describing the pace of change. But I think when you couple some of the trends in the industry with just the reality of this pandemic, that's making each of us be more resourceful than ever. You know, we, for example, I've seen our partners pivot the utilization of their MDF dollars into digital alternatives. They are certainly doing these Zoom experiences but they're also investing in their web properties and their search and making sure that as we pivot to digital we, for example, on the marketing side, we pivoted quickly to kind of stand up what we're calling an agile pod and it was a digital first agile pod that was frankly all aimed at training, enablement, social media guides, webinars on expertise on how we as a company were responding. What was our internal communication strategy, our external communication strategy. And I just think this appetite for training, knowledge. Some of it was necessity and some of it is we're all home and we have time and we want to hone our skills to ensure that we're ready. So I've never been busier as much as we're all working from home. We have never been busier on supporting the great and innovative work that our partners are doing but also really focused on the training, best practice sharing, enablement and webinars on how we're in it together, right? How can we help each other really respond in a sustaining way? Honestly, not just an interim way of our new digital capabilities, marketing capabilities. And I think we're experiencing, you know, what I think the opportunity of this digital trend in marketing is the handshake between marketing and sales has never been tighter. And I think really done well, we are going to provide a more personalized experience for our prospects and our customers. We're going to make our sellers more productive. We're going to be engaging along that continuum. We kind of it a digital heartbeat. We're going to be responding to where they are online and then we're also going to be meeting in person or over a virtual Zoom. And you're going to be accelerating in a highly relevant, much more personalized way to drive to the outcome of these solutions. It's a richer experience. So it's less about is marketing creating a bunch of leads that I can hand over to my sellers as much as what's the overall customer experience? And that experience needs to be a rich, personalized one that kind of transcends over marketing and sales. >> Yeah, Cheryl, you have an amazing vision, I think that is so spot on, you're on point. And I think you bring up a whole kind of sea change. It's really transformational just in the thinking, you mentioned, oh, just put out leads, also just, it's not about just standing up events either. You mentioned sustainability, how to have that heartbeat. This is a whole new level of thinking. I mean, every company the adage used to be, every company used to be a data company, every company will be a data company, true. Now you're seeing every company becoming a media company. Where you are probably doing more hosting of things. You're on camera more. So this new media API is developing where you want the command control, you want the truth, you want the community, you want the authenticity. This is the new, this is the new digital marketing, real time, agile and fast and relevant and cool too. What's your, expand more on your vision? >> And test and learn, you know, is a word we use a lot because instead of, you know, having to build something, go put it out, let's have some metrics and measures on how effective it was. The speed with which you can garner real time feedback. You know, everything needs to be more modular in natures, you know, snackable, if you will in nature, so that you can adapt and respond to what your customers are telling you, right? And I mean, I think we've been talking about consumerization of IT for some time. And I think this digital marketing is just the expression within marketing of how each of us come to work. And we're all at home as consumers engaging in this digital way as a consumer every day. So now when we bring it to work we bring our own preferences and in a B2B setting and a B2B context, we want to engage and it accelerates just the learning cycle. So I think it's a combination of the tools, the automation that exists now. So when you talk about leveraging AI and machine learning in the context of marketing automation, it's just putting to use all these technical trends that we've been discussing for some time in the context of customer experience. So I think this, like I said, the handshake between marketing and sales it's all about staying customer centric, listening to what the customers are telling you, their interests and preferences are. How do we respond in the most, highly relevant way around how we can help them, and done well, it's a positive experience but it's also an accelerated experience. You can get to the answer faster. And as long as we get to the answer faster, that's what the customer is looking for. Then it's a win, win for everybody. >> That's awesome, I love, I love that conversation because this brings up kind of the future for that, for your organization and your customers as you guys have this global partner network. Okay, and one of the things that the pandemic has shown is that with these digital technologies and virtual technologies, it's not a physical event, it's global. I mean, instantly Dell Technologies World you'd have to fly there, certainly from overseas, you could certainly do that. But now with one click of a button, you're in The programs that you have are global in nature. I'm sure there's some regional segmentation that's done with cloud and all that good stuff but you aren't going to have to recast your partner programs. Can you share how you're helping partners with their digital transformation? Didn't just give a couple examples of specifics of if I'm a partner what's in for me, Cheryl, what's going on? How is Dell helping me today? >> Yeah, well, I commented a little bit about this digital first kind of agile pod work we did. Some of that is selling guides, social media guides, how to actually do social selling, how to pivot some best practices around, you know, what activities can you put your MDF to good use that is showing really positive returns in the short term. So it's a lot of best practice sharing. And then candidly, we as a company, as we put campaigns in market, or we're giving marketing assets, collateral, social opportunities to our partners, it's all about how to help them get educated and use what we're already providing for them. So we recognize that, you know, partner's capabilities will vary across the board and certainly regionally, as you said but we definitely are helping them with, you know, here's what we're seeing around industry solutions. Here are certain industry verticals we know are responding or, you know, coming out of this environment faster than others. Here's campaigns that you can leverage both modularly or full-term key to be able to drive that. So to your point, the handshake, the support, the overall engagement of our partner community has never been higher. I mean, I'll give you a good example. You know, we talked about training and this opportunity to reach more people through these forums than in person. You know, we conduct trainings of presale technical teams around the world. We call it our heroes events, and these are in, you know, typically in person, but now they've gone virtual. We've trained over 18,000 presales technical engineers just in the first half alone to be able leverage our remote tools lean in and leverage the integration around VMware like we were just discussing. What are the new capabilities that have launched around, you know, VxRail with VCF Foundation and how they can go deploy. So in many ways we actually are touching and addressing the audience much wider than we might have otherwise. And I can put my subject matter experts, my best experts in the company on a Zoom forum like this. And I can have him in Sydney, Australia, Paris. I can have them in San Francisco on the same day and they never leave their home. So it's actually, we've all been very resilient, but are finding I think in the go-forward world, it'll be a hybrid model. We're going to leverage some of these best practices and tools. Even when the world reopens, we certainly will be doing in person events, again, that's going to come back but I do think it will be forever changed. And we're going to leverage this hybrid model with our partners and they're bringing their expertise to bear. And a lot of the vertical industry capabilities they bring, they're able to reach an audience broader over capabilities like this. >> You know, it's going to be a lot of fun too, all this new learning and all this headroom from asynchronous progressions that are nonlinear. As you mentioned training, people are getting trained faster to made for TV experiences. You're going to start to see, and then when hybrid events come back, they're going to be different. They may be more intimate. All new opportunities to learn and move fast and that's something that you guys have done. So congratulations, Cheryl, thanks for that great insight. My final question for you, this year for the partners watching who are there in person, 'cause we're not, we're remote. What should they take away from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience event this year? What's your, what's your, what's your summary here? >> Well, I hope they enjoy the couple of days and you certainly have heard, you know, Michael and Jeff and Pat and others talk about the innovation engine at Dell Technologies is not slowing down. You know, the tight partnership we have with VMware and the level of capabilities that we're bringing in this as a service, Hybrid Cloud, 5G, world of Hybrid Cloud deployments. We absolutely have our foot on the gas and are going to continue to be that partner to provide the world's best infrastructure and capabilities. And when you look at the power of partnership and to your point on what we're describing with our global alliance partners, the innovative and inspirational work, some of our OEM customers and partners have done is just remarkable. And like I said, we are growing faster than the competition, even in this environment. So we just really appreciate the partnership very much. And I want them to lean in with Dell Technologies because it's not going to slow down as we've just been discussing. I think it's going to continue to move fast and we absolutely are committed for the longterm to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to market. >> Well, certainly people who have good business performance in this environment certainly are relevant and have the right product mix, made the right moves and it's paying off, a lot more to do. Cheryl, congratulations for all the success and the you're a great leader heading up the global partner marketing group over there. Congratulations, you've got a great vision, we totally agree. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John, it's been a pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here with Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, theCUBE virtual covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin welcoming back to the Cuba One of our distinguished alumni, Travis V. Hild s VP of product management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >>Hey, how's it going, Lisa? >>Not bad. Nice to connect a few, virtually. Of course, this year everything is so different. You've already done Virtual Cube. So welcome back our very socially distance program. 3rd 1 13 market. Alright. Eso back in May, you were on the Cube talking about the launch of power store. Really? What Dell Technologies was doing thio, um, kind of converged, Formerly overlapping technologies. My acquisitions compelling extreme io give us an update last few months of what's going on with power store customer adoption, mo mentum stuff like that. >>Yeah, you know, it's it's been, um, almost six months that we've launched the product and it's been a nun. Believable experience. Um, you know, let let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, you know, we had Thio launch power store into a very different world than we had anticipated. Um, the global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everybody, you know, and everything around the world. You know, our first priority, Adele, is the health and safety of our customers of our team members of our partners. And, you know, it was a very interesting experience in that this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad, um, you know, backdrop against which we had tow launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic mo mentum. Since launch, we've shipped worldwide over 40. We've we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. Um, but, you know, I think to really talk about mo mentum and what's going on, it's it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Um, start maybe with a health care example. Healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt power stories, a multimillion dollar deal and what they were trying to do Waas modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. Um, there was a lot of technical debt and they wanted toe modernize things, make things more autonomous and at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into, uh, you know, still, they had data centers across across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites and with power store because of the efficiency because of the D duplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual optics they had related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year. By going to PowerMax. I'm sorry by going to PowerStore, Um, so that that was a big one. Another, another good example was in a me, a high tech customer. They adopted power store because of power stores, ability to scale performance and capacity independently and in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications. And the other is, uh, kind of ah, variable. And you know and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this this nearly million dollar deal with them and then and then one other one that that's one of my favorites. Uh um entertainment company in the A P J region. Obviously, with with all of us staying home, I can speak for my my kids that air, you know, remote learning right over my shoulder. There is a lot more video games going on, and so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing power store. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from, uh, multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decrease cost a storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development and decreased cost. So those were just a couple of the examples that we have for power store. We were seeing great adoption, great traction and really, uh, customers and partners are are really excited about what we brought to market. >>He talked about, you know, some of the things that are essential that even back in May, when power Start was launched, no one would have thought here in October 2020. We'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company in a p j being essential as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption. For example, the health care organization that you talked about North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization Thio upgrade or migrate to power store so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site if it was on Prem? Because, of course, all the challenges there, right? >>Yeah, you know it, za Really good question on. We have to Do you know, this was a brand new product for us And in order to enable proof of concepts in order in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product is taken an enormous amount of coordination, an enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so you know, it's actually taken a little bit more time than, you know, had we've been ableto fly people around the world to do it. But we've gotten very proficient at organizing, with the customer being ableto host. The demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely be able to do our. You know, our customer briefing is remotely eso. It is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >>So Power Start was big. In the beginning, there was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history, the >>largest launch that we never did that we've ever done, >>launching it during a pandemic, unpredictable, and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through when you're talking to customers. What are some of the key differentiators that really make power store unique? >>Yeah, you know, I like to start at at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about power store because, um, with storage products, the architecture er is the thing that all future features and capabilities air built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of power store, it was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today in the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that the NBN me or NBN me or ECM it was micro services based so that, you know, it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And, uh, it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. You know, when we first launched this this array and this this fact is true. Today we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today. That was seven times more performance and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So that that core performance is kind of point number one point number two Data reduction data reduction is the new normal. And with power store, we have a guaranteed Fourtou one data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of of midrange storage devices. That and in their particular environment, they saw 4.6 to 1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4 to 1. So being, you know, very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, er and I talked about it in the in the high tech company that I mentioned the European high tech company, the ability to scale, performance and capacity independently in our scale. Out design is another differentiator. Um, for folks that have been around storage arrays a long time traditional storage array. You know, you you would add capacity sometimes when you need it performance or you that performance. Sometimes when you need to capacity by being ableto separate. Those two things customers can really get optimized in their environment for what they're trying toe. What their needs are. They need more performance, they can have more performance, they need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural, um, differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners and then above and beyond that we brought some industry Onley capability to market. Um, in that we are the Onley purpose built storage appliance with a built in vm ware s X i hyper visor. So what this allows customers to do is run bm where based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage. That's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables the whole new host of use cases where customers can, um, changed the way that they're optimized in the core. And also, there's a lot of good edge, uh, deployments that this that this new capability can help enable. So it z, you know, being architecturally advanced in performance efficiency and scale up and scale out and bringing industry Onley capabilities in our integration, especially with VM, where to market that have really resonated with our customers. >>How about some of those new use cases that the VM ware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate, with massively that scattered workforce that you know, some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding with device proliferation. What >>are some >>of the new use cases That that what Power Mac power store can deliver, uniquely as you said is gonna be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >>Yeah, you know, I think that there there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core. But I think the new, uh, you know, either remote, uh, site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less less. And so if you can have hardware that is ableto, you know, provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability. Those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device which leads toe, you know, easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having toe deploy multiple multiple devices. >>So you're great with the stats you show you you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with power store all the testing, what you're seeing actually, in customer, uh, environments, which is fantastic when you're talking with analysts looking at what Dell Technologies has done when it's in to develop our store. And like I said, you know, merging technologies from compelling and extreme Iot, uh, etcetera, our analysts looking at this is maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing. >>Uh, yeah. You know, there was was some press that was written when we announced that that that the release of Power Store established a new benchmark of what was expected from a million very storage array, which is, you know, it was something that that was really fulfilling, especially all after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about that that and the innovation that we have put into it over the course of a multi multi year journey. And so you know what? We're what we're seeing, you know, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have, um, taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio, that we're able to direct our R and D investments into a single platform to bring mawr and more capability to that platform over time, and that message is resonating very strongly. >>So wrapping things up here, Power Store is in its first five or six months. And during that time, you know, crazy things have happened in the world were in a state still disarray, if you will, no pun intended what is next for the second half of power stores? First year. How is Dele? Technology is going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now into thriving so that they could be the winners of tomorrow. >>Yeah. You know, I think the second half of this year, the first half of this year was was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners, trained up on it, getting those key early wins, you know, established establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of mawr customers. Getting into that that, you know, enabling our partners to, you know, amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're gonna You're gonna see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of mawr adoption mawr mo mentum and mawr success on power store. Uh, and for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture er comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture, er is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come when new media comes when new, uh, you know, interfaces or interconnect technologies come when we, uh, you know, invest in even tighter integration with VM where, like at VM World? Just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VM Ware on a new interconnect technology nbn me over TCP that core architectures so flexible that it can adopt, you know, with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, adopted and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market of alls. >>And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well, Travis. Thank you. So much for sharing with us. The moments, um, for the first half of power stores, first year and what we can look to see. And it's not just second half that going forward. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Travis, Be Hill. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 The Digital Experience.

>> 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 version. I'm Lisa Martin, welcoming back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Travis Vigil, the SVP of Product Management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >> Hey, how's it going Lisa? >> Not bad, nice to connect with you virtually, of course this year, everything is so different. You've already done virtual CUBEs. So welcome back to our very-- >> Yeah, this is my third one. >> Socially distance program. Third one? Third time lucky. >> Yeah. >> All right, so back in May, you were on theCUBE talking about the launch of PowerStore. Really what Dell Technologies was doing to kind of converge formerly overlapping technologies by Acquisitions, Compellent, XtremeIO, give us an update last few months of what's going on with PowerStore, customer adoption, momentum, stuff like that. >> Yeah, it's been almost six months that we've launched the product, and it's been an unbelievable experience. Let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, we had to launch PowerStore into a very different world than we had anticipated. The global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everything around the world. Our first priority at Dell is the health and safety of our customers, of our team members, of our partners. And it was a very interesting experience in that, this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad backdrop against which we had to launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic momentum. Since launch, we've shipped world wide over 40, we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. And we have the biggest pipeline that we've ever generated for our product in the history of Dell and EMC at this point in its life. But, I think to really talk about momentum and what's going on, it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Start maybe with a healthcare example, a healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt PowerStore as a multimillion dollar deal. And what they were trying to do was modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. There was a lot of technical debt and they wanted to modernize things, make things more autonomous. And at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into most... Still they had data centers across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites. And with PowerStore because of the efficiency, because of the deduplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual Opex they have related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year by going to PowerMax, I'm sorry, by going to PowerStore. So that was a big one. Another good example was an AMEA high-tech customer. They adopted PowerStore because of PowerStore's ability to scale performance and capacity independently. And in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications, and the other is kind of a variable and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this nearly million dollar deal with them. And then other one that's one of my favorites, an entertainment company in the APJ region, obviously with all of us staying home, I can speak for my kids that are remote learning right over my shoulder. There's a lot more video games going on. And so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing PowerStore. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decreased costs of storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development, and decreased costs. So those are just a couple of the examples that we have for PowerStore. We're seeing great adoption, great traction, and really, customers and partners are really excited about what we've brought to market. >> You talked about some of the things that are essential, that even back in May when PowerStore was launched, no one would have thought here in October, 2020, we'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce, businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company, and APJ being essential, as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption, for example, the healthcare organization that you talked about in North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization to upgrade or migrate to PowerStore so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about, but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site, if it was on-prem, 'cause of course it was all the challenges there, right? >> Yeah, it's a really good question. This was a brand new product for us. And in order to enable proof of concept, in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product, it's taken an enormous amount of coordination and enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so, it's actually taken a little bit more time than had we been able to fly people around the world to do it, but we've gotten very proficient at organizing with the customer, being able to host the demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely, be able to do our customer briefings remotely. So it is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >> So PowerStore was big from the beginning. There was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history. >> The largest beta that we'd ever done, yes. >> Launching it during a pandemic that was unpredictable and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through, when you're talking to customers, what are some of the key differentiators that really make PowerStore unique? >> Yeah, I like to start at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about PowerStore, because with storage products, the architecture is the thing that all features and capabilities are built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of PowerStore, was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today and the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that be NVMe or SCM, it was microservices based so that it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. When we first launched this array, and this fact is true today, we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today, that was seven times more performant and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So, that core performance is kind of point number one. Point number two, data reduction. Data reduction is the new normal. And with PowerStore, we have a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of mid range storage devices. And in their particular environment, they saw 4.6:1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4:1. So being very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, and I talked about it in the high tech company that I mentioned, the European high tech company. The ability to scale performance and capacity independently in our scale out design is another differentiator. For folks that have been around storage arrays, a long time, traditional storage array, you would add capacity sometimes when you needed performance or you'd add performance sometimes when you needed capacity. By being able to separate those two things, customers can really get optimized in their environment for what their needs are. They need more performance, they can add more performance. They need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners. And then above and beyond that, we brought some industry only capability to market in that we are the only purpose built storage appliance with a built in VMware, ESXi hypervisor. So what this allows customers to do is, run VMware based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage that's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables a whole new host of use cases where customers can change the way that they're optimized in the core. And also there's a lot of good edge deployments that this new capability can help enable. So it's being architectually advanced in performance, efficiency, and scale up and scale out, and bringing industry only capabilities in our integration, especially with VMware to market that have really resonated with our customers. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that the VMware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate with massively scattered workforce that some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding, device proliferation. What are some of the new use cases that what PowerStore can deliver uniquely as you said, is going to be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >> Yeah, I think that there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core, but I think the new, either remote site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less. And so if you can have hardware that is able to provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability, those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device, which leads to easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having to deploy multiple devices. >> So you, great with the stats, you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with PowerStore, all the testing what you're seeing actually in customer environments, which is fantastic. When you're talking with analysts, looking at what Dell Technologies has done and to develop PowerStore. And like I said, merging technologies from Compellent and XtremeIO, et cetera. Are analysts looking at this as maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing? >> Yeah, there was some press that was written when we announced that the release of PowerStore established a new benchmark of what was expected from a mid range storage array which was something that was really fulfilling, especially after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about, that ended the innovation that we had put into it over the course of a multi-year journey. And so, what we're seeing, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio. That we're able to direct our R&D investments into a single platform to bring more and more capability to that platform over time. And that message is resonating very strongly. >> So wrapping things up here, PowerStore is in its first five or six months. And during that time, crazy things have happened in the world. We're in a state of still disarray, if you will, no pun intended. What is next for the second half of PowerStore's first year? How is Dell Technologies going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now, into thriving so that they can be the winners of tomorrow? >> Yeah, I think the first half of this year was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners trained up on it, getting those key early wins, establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of more customers, getting it into that... Enabling our partners to amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're going to see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of more adoption, more momentum and more success on PowerStore. And for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture, comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come, when new media comes, when new interfaces or interconnect technologies come, when we invest in even tighter integration with VMware, like at VMworld just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VMware on a new interconnect technology and NVMe-over-TCP. That core architecture is so flexible that it can adopt with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market evolves. >> And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about, the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well. Travis, thank you so much for sharing with us the moments for the first half of PowerStore's first year and what we can look to see in its, not just second half, but going forward, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> My pleasure, for Travis Vigil, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 Digital Experience. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World-Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Sam Groccot. Who's the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, great to see you. Welcome. >> Great to be here, Dave. >> All right, we're going to talk generally about cloud in the coming decade. And really how the cloud model is evolving. But I want to specifically ask Sam about the as a service news that Dell's making at DTW. What those solutions look like. How they're going to evolve. Maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Does that sound good? >> Yeah, sounds great. Let's dive right in. >> All right, let's do that. So look, you've come from the world of disrupter. When you joined Isilon, they got acquired by EMC and then Dell. So, you've been on both sides of the competitive table. And cloud is obviously a major force actually I'd say the major disruptive force in our industry. Let's talk about how Dell is responding to the cloud trend generally. Then we'll get into the announcements. >> Yeah, certainly. And you're right I've been on both sides of this. There is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so. How customers and partners are really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the value of moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen it happen over the last decade or so. And it's happening at a more frequent pace. There's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. Kind of a new lifestyle so to speak, around as a service. Because when you go to the cloud, that's the only way they roll. Is you get an as a service experience. So, that really has started to come into the data center. As organizations are moving specific workloads or applications to the cloud. Of hey, how do I get that in an on-premise experience? I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic and COVID-19. Has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker and more agilely by moving some applications to the cloud. Because frankly on-prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they'd like to see. We're seeing that macrotrend accelerate. I think we're in good shape to take advantage of that as we go forward. >> Well, that brings us to the hard news of what you're calling Project Apex i.e your as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >> Yeah. So, Project Apex is one of our big announcements and that's really where we're targeting. How we're bringing together and unifying our product development. Our sales go-to-market. Our marketing go-to-market. Everything coming together underneath Project Apex. Which is our as a service and cloud like experience. Look, we know in that world where customers we're constantly evaluating which applications stay on-prem. Which applications and workloads should go to the cloud. I think the market has certainly voted clearly that it's going to be both. It's going to be a hybrid multicloud world. But what they absolutely are clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience. Regardless of if they're on-prem or off-prem. And that's where really the traditional on-prem solutions fall down. Because it's just too darn complex still. They've got many different tools, managing many different applications that oversee their cloud operations, their various infrastructure, whether it's server or compute or networking. They all run different tools. So, it gets very, very complex. It also very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast as the cloud. It can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention to buy more. You typically got to get a sales rep in-house to come in and extend your environment and grow your environment. And then of course, the traditional method is very CapEx heavy. In a world where organizations are really trying to preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility traditionally or going forward that they'd like to see on that front. So, what they want to see is a consistent operating experience for their on and off-prem environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage, report and grow and do commerce across that environment. Regardless of if it's on or off-prem. They want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on-prem, it's not going to be a click of a button. But you should be able to buy and procure that with a click of a button. And then very quickly, within less than a handful of days. That equipment should be stood up deployed and running in their environment. And then finally, it's got to deliver this more flexible finance model. Whether it's leveraging a flexible subscription models or OPEX friendly models. Customers are really looking for that more OPEX friendly approach. Which we're going to be providing with Project Apex. So very, very excited about kind of the goals and the aspirations of Project Apex. We're going to see a lot of it come to market early next year. I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >> So, when I was looking through the announcement and sort of squinting through it. The three things jumped out and you've definitely hit on those. One is choice. But sometimes you don't want to give customers too much choice. So, it's got to be simple and it's got to be consistent. So, it feels like you're putting this abstraction layer over your entire portfolio and trying to hit on those three items. Which is somewhat of a balancing act. Is that right? >> Yeah. No, you're exactly right. The kind of the pillars of the Project Apex value proposition so to speak, is simplicity choice and consistency. So, we've got to deliver that simple kind of end to end journey view of their entire cloud and as a service experience. It needs to span our entire portfolio. So, whether it's servers, storage or networking or PCs or cloud. All of that needs to be integrated into essentially a large, single web interface that gives you visibility across all of that. And of course, the ease of scale up and frankly scaled down. Should be able to do that in real time through the system. Choice is a big, big factor for us. We've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure any way they want. Clearly they can consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure customers only pay for what they use. So, highly metered environment. Pay as they go. You leverage subscriptions. Essentially give them that OPEX flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the real key differentiator is that consistent operating experience. So, whether you move workloads on or off-prem. It's got to be in a single environment that doesn't require you to jump around between different application and management experiences. >> Alright, so I've got to ask you the tough question. I want to hear your answer to it. I mean, we've seen the cloud model. Everybody knows it very well. But why now? People are going to say, okay, you're just responding to HPE. What's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >> Yeah. So, I think it really comes down to the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're going to provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what will really define ourselves against them and shine ourselves against them is, that consistent operating experience. We've got that opportunity to provide both an on-prem, Edge and cloud experience. That doesn't require them to move out of that operating experience to jump between different tools. So, whether you're running a Storage as a service environment. Which we'll have in the first half of next year. Looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year as well. You're going to be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. And also be able to move workloads from on-prem and off-prem without breaking that consistent experience. I think that is probably the biggest differentiator we're going to have. When you ladder that onto just the general Dell Technologies value of being able to meet and deliver our solutions anywhere in the world at any point of the data center, at the Edge, or even cloud-native. We've got the broadest portfolio to meet our customer needs wherever we need to go. >> So, my understanding is the offerings, it's designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio. >> That's right. >> From client solutions, ISG, et cetera. Not VMware specifically. It's really that whole Dell Technologies portfolio. Correct? >> Yeah and look, over time we totally expect to be able to transact to VMware through this. We do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. So yeah, it is across, PC as a service, Storage as a service, Infrastructure as a service. Our cloud offers all of our services, traditional services that are helping to deliver this as a service experience. And even our traditional financial flexible consumption models will be included in this. Because again, we want to offer ultimate choice and flexibility. We're not going to force our customers to go down any of these paths. But what we want to do is present these paths and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breadth of the portfolio and the offers to get them there. >> Oh, okay. So, it's really a journey. You mentioned Storage as a service coming out first and then as well. If I understand it, the idea is to, I'm going to have visibility and control over my entire state on-prem, cloud, Edge, kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the shoot, but that's the vision. >> Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue to iterate over time and bring more environments, more applications, more cloud environments into this. But that is absolutely the vision of Project Apex is to deliver that fully integrated core, Edge, cloud partner experience. To all of the environments our customers could be running in. >> I want to put my customer hat on my CFO, CIO hat. Okay, what's the fine print. What are the minimum bars to get in? What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are some of those nuances? >> Yeah. So, both the Storage as a service, which will be our first offer of many in our portfolio. And the cloud console, which will give you that single web interface to kind of manage, report and kind of thrive in this as a service experience. All that will be released in the first half of the next year. So, we're still frankly defining what that will look like. But we want to make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments. From small business to medium business, to the biggest enterprises out there. Globally goal expansion through our channel partners. We're going to have Geos and channel partners fully integrated as well. Service providers as well. As a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience to our customers. So, the fine print Dave will be out early next year. As we GA these releases and bring into market. But ultimate flexibility and choice, up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal and the intent we plan to deliver that. >> Can you add any color to the sort of product journey, if you will? I even hesitate Sam, to use the word product. Because you're really sort of transferring your mindset into a platform mindset and a services mindset. As opposed to bolting services on top of a price. You sell a product and say okay, service guys you take it from here. You have to sort of rethink, how you deliver. And so you're saying, you start with storage. And then so what can we expect over the next midterm-longterm? >> Yeah. I'll give you an example. Look, we sell a ton of as a service and flexible consumption today. We've been at it for 10 years. In fact in Q2, we sold our annual recurring revenue rate is 1.3 billion growing at 30% very, very pleased. So, this is not new to us. But how you described it Dave is right. We adopt products, customers then pick their product. They pick their service that they want to bolt on. Then they pick their financial payment model they bolted on. So, it's a very good, customized way to build it. That's great. And customers are going to continue to want that and will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of it as the big easy button. They want to focus on an outcome. Storage as a service is a great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is part of that. They want it fully managed by Dell Technologies or one of our partners. They don't want to manage it themselves. And of course they want it to be pay-for-use on an OPEX plan that works for their business and gives them that flexibility. So, when customers going forward want to go down this as a service outcome driven path. They're simply going to say, hey, what data service do I want? I want file or block unified object. They pick their data service based on their workload. They pick their performance and capacity tier. There is a term limit, right now we're planning one to five years. Depending on the amount of terms you want to do. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies and it's of course leveraging our great technology portfolio to bring that service and that experience to our customers. So, the service is the product now. It really is making that shift. We are moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio and solutions for our customers. >> So, you actually have a lot of data on this. I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business. Maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers. But I'm really interested in the learnings and the feedback and how that's informed your strategy? >> Yeah. I mean, you're right. Again, we've been at this for many, many years. We have over 2000 customers today that have chosen to take advantage of our flexible consumption and as a service offers that we have today. Nevermind kind of as we move into these kind of turn-key, easy button as a service offers that are to come that early next year. So, we've leveraged all of that learnings and we've heard all of that feedback. It's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the Project Apex strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest PowerMax or the latest PowerStore. They want to choose their network. They want to choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service. They want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they want to maybe leverage additional, more traditional means to acquire that based on their business goals. That feedback has been loud and clear. But there is that segment that is like, no, no, no. I need to focus more on my business and not my infrastructure. And that's where you're going to see these more turn-key as a service solutions fit that need. Where they want to just define SLAs, outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them. So, they can really focus on their applications and their business, not their infrastructure. So, things like metering. Tons of feedback on how we'll want to meter this. Tons of feedback on the types of configurations and scale they're looking for. The applications and workloads that they're targeting for this world. Is very different than the more traditional world. So, we're leveraging all of that information to make sure we deliver our Infrastructure as a service and then eventually Solutions as a service. You think about SAP as a service, VDI as a service. AI machine learning as a service. We'll be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >> So, I want to ask you. You've given us a couple of data points there, billion dollar plus business. A couple thousand customers. You've got decent average contract values if I do my math right. So, it's not just the little guys. I'm sorry, it's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle as well that are taking this up. Is that fair to say? >> Totally. I mean, I would say frankly in the enterprise space. It's the mid to larger sides historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best of breed apart. Best of breed of products, Best of breed services. Best of breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape there. We're very confident or competitive and competing in that space today. I think going into the turn-key as a service space that will play up-market. But it will really play down-market, mid-market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there. Where they don't have the resources to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or a backup infrastructure or compute infrastructure. They're going to frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think our as a service offers will really play stronger in that mid and kind of lower end of the market. >> So, tell us again. The sort of availability of like the console, for example. When can I actually get-- >> Yeah. >> I can do as a service today. I can buy subscriptions from you. >> Absolutely. >> This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and rollout details? >> Sure. As we look to move to our integrated kind of turn-key as a service offers. The console we're announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So, for organizations, customers that want to start using it. They can start using it now. The Storage as a service offer is going to be available in the first half of next year. So, we're rapidly kind of working on that now. Looking to early next year to bring that to market. So, you'll see the console and the first as a service offer with storage as a service available in the first half of next year. Readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. We're not that far off right now. But we felt it was really, really important to make sure our customers. Our partners and the industry really understands how important this transformation to as a service and cloud is for Dell Technologies. That's why frankly, externally and internally Project Apex will be that north star to bring our end to end value together across the business. Across our customers, across our teams. And that's why we're really making sure that everybody understands Project Apex and as a services is the future for Dell. And we're very much focused on that. >> As the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset, a cultural change really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing in a way. How are you guys thinking about that mindset shift? >> Well really, it's how am I thinking about it? How is the broader marketing organization thinking about it? How is engineering clearly thinking about it? How is finance thinking about it? How is sale? Like this is transformative across every single function within Dell technologies has a role to play, to do things very differently. Now it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Various estimates have this as a fairly small percentage of business today in our segments. But we do expect that to start to, and it has started to accelerate ramp. We're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires changes in how we sell. Changes in how we market clearly. Changes in how we build products and so forth. And then ultimately, how we account for this has to change. So, we're approaching it I think the right way Dave. Where we're looking at this truly end to end. This isn't a tweak in how we do things or an evolution. This is a revolution. For us to kind of move faster to this model. Again, building on the learnings that we have today with our strong customer base and experience we've built up over the years. But this is a big shift. This isn't an incremental turn of the crank. We know that. I think you expect that. Our customers expect that. And that's the mission we're on with Project Apex. >> Well, I mean, with 30% growth. I mean, that's a clear indicator and people like growth. No doubt. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. I think many folks want to buy this way, and I think increasingly that's how they buy SaaS. That's how they buy cloud. Why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts Sam. What are the big takeaways? >> Yeah. The big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together our as a service and cloud capabilities into a easy to consume, simple, flexible offer. That provides ultimate choice to our customers. Look, the market has spoken. We're going to be living in a hybrid multicloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak. That they want that to be an as a service experience, regardless if it's on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that ease. That simplicity and elegance to the on-prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. So, that's the mission that we're on with Project Apex. I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're going to be after this, for the next couple of years. To refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >> Wow, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to theCUBE. We're seeing the cloud model. It's extending on-prem, cloud, multicloud it's going to the Edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same direction. So, Sam good luck with this and thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Thanks everyone. Take care. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. The virtual CUBE. We'll be right back right after this short break. (gentle music)

>> Advertiser: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to our ongoing CXO series, Charlie Giancarlo season, chief executive officer of Pure Storage. Charlie, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. >> Thanks, Dave. And like you said, always a pleasure, thank you. >> Well, I got to start asking you, the last time we talked, you were recovering from COVID. How are you doing? >> Yeah, I'm doing great actually. I seem to have fully recovered. I've been on 17 mile hikes at 10,000 feet. I've been doing a lot of biking, so it looks like other than my wife telling me that maybe I'm not all there, but she did that before COVID. So I'm used to it. >> Well, that's awesome to hear. Well, of course, just yesterday, you guys announced your quarter. I want to start there. You beat expectations, although revenue growth was a little less robust than we're used to from Pure, but you clearly had some activity regarding COVID in the US. International, very strong, but again, we'll talk about this US customers kind of reevaluating was your other key point. I got a lot of takeaways from the call that I want to ask you about. But the big thing was you had set a very confident tone on the Earnings Call. So I kind of want to start there. Well, give us your summary. >> Yeah, no, thank you for that. So first of all, we feel like we're operating really with all of our cylinders going. We have operational discipline. We've been adding to our R&D capabilities. We've hired people this year. and we showed a profit this quarter. So we're operating, I think very well. We've introduced a boatload of new products continuously over the last couple of quarters, including, FlashArray//C, the first and only all-flash product that competes at second Tier disc levels. We introduced our file services on FlashArray//C, which really allows us to go into the general purpose of file market. And we picked up a huge amount of share as you well know in Q1. We believe we're going to pick up significant share in Q2 as well, well above our competitors. So we feel like given everything we can control, we're doing very well. As you said, in Q2, what we saw was Europe, which came out of the crisis for the most part recover very, very nicely. The US, that's still in the crisis. Of course, we're seeing some slowness and especially among what we call the mid tier or the commercial market. They've been hurt very badly by the lockdown in the economy. And they have our sympathies, but we definitely saw some slow down there. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about the market share and maybe unpack some of that data. I mean, you guys gave a cautious outlook. It kind of gave no formal guidance, but you did informally guide flat, so you kind of gave some visibility there. So actually I appreciated it. I think some of the analysts were a little bit concerned there, but I think that's prudent. And they're really the expectations are a function of your expectations around the COVID recovery. I think you mentioned your account almost state by state and very clearly the international where you've seen comebacks have been very, very strong. >> Right, so I think our customers' data continues to grow if anything, growing faster under a lockdown environment and the move to more digital engagement with everyone, their customers, their employees, et cetera. So digital continues to grow, which generally creates more demand. However, of course, as you know, in storage customers generally always have a buffer. And what we saw on Q2 was customers starting to reconsider how they're going to spend their IT budget. And whenever you have a reconsideration, you have a slowdown. And that's what we experienced. And especially in the US where the effects of the pandemic, of the economy have been much more severe than in other parts of the world. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about some data. I often, as you know, like to share some data from our partner ETR every quarter we do the survey. So guys bring up that chart. And what it shows here, let's just set it up for the audience and Charlie for you as well. That this is essentially net score, which is a measure of spending velocity for the major primary guys. So we show Pure at the top in orange, that's just a coincidence guys. And then HPE, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. And you can see the net score, and then I've super imposed there in that table, in the upper left. And you can see Pure Storage is really the only one of these majors in the green. Everybody else is in the red, which is either the lower or high teens. And you can see a little bit of a COVID impact, last quarter, but holding strong at about a 40% net score where everybody else is, as I say, in the mid teens. And so that's a real positive. I point out, this is a forward looking survey. So we're asking people, what are you planning on spending in the second half relative to what you spent in the first half. And again, we see Pure with consistent momentum. I'll add, just if you looked at the past quarter, you guys announced plus 2% growth. IBM was plus 3% growth and we know why, they have the mainframe tailwind. HPE played a little hide, the growth ball. I don't know Charlie, how closely you looked at it, but they said 4% growth sequentially. Now, the last quarter they were down 16%. The same quarter last year, they were flat. So it looks to me like they were down this quarter. So we appreciate when you have clear guidance. >> Their storage, by the way, was down 10% year over year. >> Yeah, okay, great, thank you. I didn't pick up on that. And so, yeah, that seemed like that to me. And then NetApp happens tonight and we get Dell tomorrow. But so you were saying that you gained share, what gives you that confidence? >> Well, several, you mean for Q2? We know we gained Q1, right? We were 15 points above the industry average and maybe about 20 points ahead of our competitors. We saw a similar momentum from our partner. Remember, we're 100% partner fulfilled, right? And so in conversations with our partners, we have a general sense of how we're doing vis-a-vis competitive environments. We also know that our win rates have held very nicely and in quarters, almost every quarter, we're used to about a 20% per annum higher growth rate than our competitors. So when all of our metrics, that is our relative metrics. Things like win rates and so forth continue unabated, we generally expect to have the same outcome. >> Great, and then so let me go through some of the takeaways that I have from the quarter. I'll just run through them and we can go wherever you like. But the COVID snapback obviously is a key indicator. We saw that in international versus the US. >> Charlie: Right. >> New opportunities for growth. I want to talk about that, at some length the FlashArray//C object, the Cohesity pieces and other TAM expansion. The pipeline is very encouraging, but there's some uncertainty leading to your tepid guidance. Very strong, gross margins as usual. The subscription model is growing nicely. I want to hit on that. And the RPO, the remaining performance obligations grew to almost a billion dollars. That's a big number. New logo, solid at 20%. No real change in the competitive, but you called out, you'll see more PowerMax than PowerStore. That was really interesting. You're still hiring pretty aggressively, last quarter. And your technology investments continue. And I'll throw in the seven nines, which I think is another industry first, but where do you want to go there? >> Yeah, well, seven nines is a reliability figure for those of your audience that doesn't know. It relates to how much uptime or availability a product has or in our case, fleet of products. We have tens of thousands of arrays in the field. And last quarter we achieved what's called seven nines, which is the equivalent across the fleet of only three seconds of downtime per array per year. Which is, most other vendors had struggled to stay to five nines. And that's typically without even counting what they call scheduled downtime for upgrades. We don't even count that. We count all downtime of any type. So we're clearly, I think with no doubt, we're the most reliable product on the these days. >> So I want to come back to the TAM discussion because you, I inferred many opportunities for you guys to continue to grow. I mean, it's Flash, it's still about flash. flash is gaining share relative to spinning disk and relative to hybrid, you guys made that point a lot. FlashArray//C, you sound pretty happy with that, again, going after hybrid. And then this notion of bringing file services and object that unify play. kind of the man made great strides years ago with that capability. And then the data protection piece, the recovery with Cohesity, the faster recovery. That's another TAM expansion. So really, I identified four points of potential growth area for you over the next several years. I wonder if you could talk about that? >> Absolutely, we do feel very positive about all these areas. These areas open up a huge amount of the TAM that we didn't play in before. So FlashArray//C for example, as you say, flash was always a primary workload environment for flash 'cause it was very expensive compared to disc. Higher performance, better ecological footprint, denser, faster, cheaper, are more expensive though. So it only went after primary workload, but the vast majority of data storage is secondary workload. Things that don't require the high performance and therefore customers want it less expensive. And of course there were even more bits there. But FlashArray//C now competes very well with low cost disc, which is amazing. And of course it's 10 times lower footprint and 10 times more reliable. So this is the first and literally today only product that has all-flash in that secondary workload market. So just opens up a huge amount for us. And then, yes, I love talking about data protection for the following reason, customers actually don't want to do a backup, right? If you think about it, what they really want is recovery. Backup is what you have to do in order to get recovery. And these backup systems have been very good at backup, but usually can take 24 or 48 or even more hours to be able to recover from a failure. And now with ransomware, you don't want your website to be down for days before it comes back up. You don't want your traders not trading for days. It costs a lot of money. And with what we call rapid recovery and now flash recover, we can have companies come back within an hour or two at most, with a rapid recovery solution. And so the integrated solution that we've put together with Cohesity, allows customers to very quickly get up and running with an anti ransomware solution that allows them to get back up and operating in no time at all. >> Well, was interesting to see you choosing the partner route. I mean, you could have, if you remember EMC in the day. They bought in, data protection and it had actually worked out pretty well for them. You look at a company like NetApp, they've chosen not to vertically integrate with backup. You're choosing the same path. What's the thinking there? Stick to your knitting and partner up and add value where you can? >> Yeah, we have strong partnerships actually with all of the data backup players, Veritas Veeam, with Rubrik and others. In many cases, customers have already made their decision who their backup player is. Also, backup is actually a very relatively fragmented market. There's backup for different types of applications and different vendors have strengths and weaknesses in each one of those. And so our partnership across the backup board is very important to us. We did see however customers wanting an integrated solution, which we have, let's say initiated with Cohesity. But we believe it's the first of what will be multiple pure validated designs. Not all of which will be OEM, but all of which will be available as integrated systems in the market, through our channel partners. And so you can expect to see more of these as we go forward. >> So kind of the PVDs okay. I want to ask you about your subscription model. I mean, it's growing very nicely. Are there nuances there just in terms of understanding the income statement ie, product revenue was down, subscriptions growing. Are you going through that transition and having to sort of educate people on the impact on the income statement? You didn't make a big deal out of that on the Earnings Call and I thought, well, maybe I'm overstating that, but I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic? >> No, no, you're absolutely correct. And there is some of that going on on the earning statement. The bigger part, though, of let's say the lower growth this quarter was due, and the forecast was due to the pandemic. No doubt and especially in the US, especially hard hit in the US. But simultaneously we are going through the transition that many companies have had to go through in the past where a larger proportion over time of our sales are going to be what we call Pure as-a-Service and our unified subscription. So moving to subscription from CapEx. And whenever you do that, it takes a while, even though your sales, as in bookings, can stay in the growth path. The revenue takes a while to catch up as your subscription bookings grow. So there is some of that going on on our P and L as well. >> Yeah, well, it's the nirvana to the extent you can get that model. And of course your RPO is a good indication of you got a nice backlog that's yielding, that's certainty in revenue. >> That's correct. And the RPO is very nice and it reflects the fact that we have multi-year contracts going in with customers who are choosing Pure as-a-Service in Evergreen. And of course, the billing only reflects what we've actually built them for. >> I was struck by your comments regarding your main competitor, which is Dell, Dell EMC. Now, of course, in the early days of Pure, I've always said you guys drove a truck through the old VNX and symmetrics base. You said you're seeing PowerMax more than you're seeing PowerStore. That was interesting and somewhat surprising to me. >> Yeah, well, a standard play of Dell is to offer VMAX because it's less expensive versus our FlashArray. And then when the customer clearly says, well, it's just not performance enough or it just can't do the work that we need, then they'll offer PowerMax at a supposedly a deep discount to be able to compete with a FlashArray. So that's been a favorite tactic of theirs for quite some time. We maintain our win rates against that. PowerStore on the other hand, remember, it's a forklift upgrade with a new product on four different Dell existing products, right? And two things. One, is customers are just reluctant right now to try new things, right? They don't have the time to be able to test them properly. But I also think there's some reluctance even on Dell's part to put those properties up for grabs right now, when customers are more risk adverse. So, we continue, as I said, we are not seeing it as much as we had thought we might going into this. >> Yeah, we'll definitely find out more tomorrow. And I would expect that, to the extent that you're having more and more success in file, you're going to obviously run into NetApp more. >> Yeah, and that's what we're expecting. The file services on FlashArray//C really allow us to start to penetrate the general purpose file market. Clearly not on the very small, and we're not going after the very small market. We're going after the data center file share market on this and the Tier 2 workloads. >> Well, what's the early returns there? I mean, you saw the NetApp did the SolidFire acquisition to shore up NetApp kind of missed flash, and then bought SolidFire but that is obviously a good play. Do you feel like it's a tougher road than perhaps the old EMC install base or what are you seeing early on? >> Well, there's a lot of maturity obviously in files. And it will take us a while to be able to get up to full levels of maturity in files. But what customers love about us is our simplicity. And our file services on FlashArray is just as simple as our block services on FlashArray. And I think what customers are going to find is a very performant product that requires very little maintenance, very little tuning to meet their needs. And I think they're just going to appreciate the fact that it's a true fully capable block product with a fully capable set of file services. And that they'll be able to consolidate more and more of their use cases onto smaller and smaller footprint. So I think that's what they're going to appreciate about what we do. >> That's ironic, outsimplifying NetApp, which of course made its name, taken on guys like ASPEX for those of you remember that or even even the early day. So that's good. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about cloud. Thinking on cloud, I know it's early days and I know most of your subscriptions of course are still with on-prem, but you made an interesting announcement last year to accelerate with Cloud Block Store running on AWS. How's the uptake been there? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, we're seeing a good uptake there. I'd say more of it is in the DevOps environment than in the actual NDR, disaster recovery, more than it is in transition of primary workloads into the cloud. And we're just seeing a bit less of that than one would expect given all the press around it. I don't think it's us. I think customers are just taking a while. They're focusing their new activities in the cloud and much less about transitioning existing environments. But we are seeing work done there. What we are seeing is a huge uptake in what we call our unified subscription, which is a Pure as-a-Service on-prem where we deliver to our customers, basically cloud, the equivalent from their point of view of cloud storage on-prem, where we manage the entire environment plus the unified subscription is that plus Cloud Block Store. So regardless of where our customers want to place their data, either on-prem or in the cloud, it's the same price and the same contract, same interface, same management to them. So we've seen a huge, I mean, literally an incredible spike in uptake in that. >> Great, thank you for that. And then I got to end with, I asked you last time about networking. You have a, a very wide observation space and a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas. So I want to ask you about, we've seen the spate of IPOs this week. Snowflake came , Palantir, UniFi, JFrog, number of others. Very interesting to see that in the Valley, you're in the Valley. Of course you shot in the Valley like everybody else these days, but what do you make of that? Is it kind of everybody trying to get in before the election? Or is it just a really good time? What's your take on that? >> I think a lot of it is getting in before the election, but a lot of stock market movements as you well know, has to do with cash flows more than it has to do with the prospects of individual companies and just given the amount of stimulus that's taking place, not just in US but worldwide. There's a lot of money floating around, which is boiling stock market prices. And so it's a great, an old colleague of mine had a saying, "When Monday's on sale, take it." And that seems to be the case right now, at least as far as the stock market is concerned. And I've stood there for a good time for IPOs. >> Well, the Palantir IPO took a swipe at Silicon Valley broadly, really targeting, I think Facebook and Google. It really doesn't have anything to do with your business, but I mean, I think as an executive in Silicon Valley, you see the innovation and the software development that's going into so many good things. I was struck by that though. I thought it was a little bit of a cheap shot at Silicon Valley. It really was aimed at Google and Facebook because there's so many companies from you guys, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, it'll work on and on and on. They are just doing some great software work. And we're seeing that with COVID, where would we be without Big Tech? >> Well, thank you, Dave. I think the press tends to focus on the consumer companies. And we all have maybe our own individual opinions about the way they operate, but you're correct. I mean, I think the good foundational work that many companies in Silicon Valley are doing to make our lives easier every day, just continues to really impress. >> Well, Charles Giancarlo it's always a pleasure. Thanks so much. You're generous with your time. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Again, as you said, always a pleasure to speak with you and look forward to doing it next quarter. >> All right, us as well. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time, we're out. (bright 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)

>> 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)