>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies world 2021. The digital experience. I'm lisa martin. I've got two guests here with me today. Adam Glick is here. Senior Director of portfolio marketing for Apex at Dell Technologies. Adam welcome to the cube >>lisa. It's great to be here with you >>likewise. And Andrew Glinka is here VP of Competitive intelligence at Dell Technologies as well. Andrew welcome to you as well. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>So the last Dell Technologies world was only about six months or so ago and sadly I was sitting in the same room doing that. We're not in Vegas at the convention center but hopefully one day we will be soon. But a lot of news there um Adam was about Apex and this big transformation about what Dell wants to do, give us a little bit of a history and what's transpired in the last six months. >>Well, a lot of things have happened in the past six months with what we were calling Project Apex before probably the first most obvious one is we've removed project from the name as we've made the offering generally available. We've also added a lot to it. There's a lot of new pieces of technology that are part of Project Apex now, we've talked about bringing in the cloud, bringing the custom solutions, hear a lot about that at Dell Technologies where all this time and really practicing that all up together in a single experience for customers, giving them something that's super simple agile and gives them all the control that they want to use their infrastructure where they want it all of that as a service. >>Big changes Andrew. Let's go over to you now. Talk to me about some of the players in the market. >>Well, he has a service market is growing incredibly fast and will continue to grow over the next number of years. And what we're seeing is a lot of players trying to enter that market because it is growing so fast. So you have some of the traditional infrastructure players that are entering like HP has their offer out in the market and pure storage and that happened many others. And you also have the public cloud providers like amazon web services, google Microsoft azure that are starting to develop um on prem tech capabilities to kind of validate this hybrid cloud as a service, all things everywhere model. So uh rapidly growing market a lot changing in a lot of players entering this space very quickly. >>So a lot of acceleration we've seen with respect to digital transformation Andrew in the last year. So talk to me about how Apex compares to those infrastructure players, you mentioned peer storage, Netapp HP. Talk to me about the comparison there. >>Yeah, so one of the things is we continue to develop, Apex is we're going to offer the broadest portfolio of as a service solutions for customers, all with different consumption models. So we'll be offering outcome based meter based as well as custom solutions, which is a little bit different than what others can provide all delivered using market leading technology and all Dell supported. So we're not using third party to deliver any of the asset service, it's all Dell supported, um some other very tactical things like single rate, so we don't charge for over usage or charge extra, which is different than some um and also it's all self service. So through the console you can place an order for a new system or upgraded system and you're avoiding the lengthy sale cycles and all the back and forth. So just a couple of questions you can get the outcome that you're looking for. >>Adam. Talk to me about how apex compares to the public cloud providers, customers obviously have that choice as well. AWS google cloud platform. What's the comparison contrast there? >>So when we think about what's going on with public cloud providers, we really look at them as partners and people that we work with. There's a Venn diagram if you think about it and the reality is that although there is some overlap between, there's also a lot of differentiated value that we look at, that we bring their and it's how do we work together on those pieces? So the most obvious of those is when you're thinking about things like a hybrid cloud and how people work together to make sure that they've got a cloud that meets their needs, both on prem in their Coehlo locations out of the edge as well as whatever they're doing with public >>cloud. >>And so we're looking at how do we bring all those pieces together? And there are certain things that work better in certain places, certain ones that work better than others. We do a lot of things around the simplicity of billing to make that easy for customers, giving them really high performance ways to to work well that really meet the needs of a lot of workloads that might need regulatory needs or might have specific performance mapping, high performance computing, things like that. But it works together. And that's really the point is that what customers tell us is that they have needs for on premises, They have needs for things in their private cloud and follows. They also have needs in the public cloud. And how do they bring that together? And so we're working to say, how do we bridge that gap to make the best possible outcome for customers? We work on partnerships with the partnership that we announced with Equinix to bring together co location facilities around the world and bring apex services customers easily when they want to say reduce the latency between what they're running and what they control within their own hardware stacks and what might be running in the public cloud. It's kind of a merger of both that really helps customers get the best of all that they need because at the end of the day that's the goal is helping our customers get the best I. T. Outcomes for their businesses as possible. >>Right? And you mentioned Hybrid cloud and we talk about that so often customers are in that hybrid world for many reasons. So basically what you're saying is there is partnerships that Dell Technologies has with Apex and the other hyper scholars so that when customers come in, if they're most likely already using some of those other platforms, they actually could come in and work with Apex too, develop a solution that works very synergistically. >>Yeah, we're helping them pull together what they need. And if you take a look, 72 of organizations say that they're taking a hybrid cloud approach, they want to be able to bring the best of both worlds to what they're doing and really choose what's right for them. Where do they need to be able to really control what's happening with their data? Where do they want to be able to maintain and control the costs that they have and also be able to access the other services that might be out there that they would need. So how do they bring those together? And those ways that we work together for the benefit of customers? And we bridge those two pieces is really what we're aiming to do here. >>Excellent. So Andrew, let's go back over you. I want to talk about workloads here because you know when we look at some of the numbers, the 8020 rule with the cloud, 80 of those workloads still on prem customers needing to determine which workloads should go to the cloud. How does apex work with customers to facilitate making those decisions? Um about the workloads that are best suited for apex versus club? >>Well, I think that's the beauties, it's very flexible. And so some of those traditional workloads that are still on prem can be run as a service without a whole lot of change. So you don't have to re platform, you don't have to reengineer them and you can move them into an as a service model, continue to run them easily. But then there's a whole lot of new development like high performance computing and Ai And machine learning, particularly at an edge where Gartner says by 2025 75 of all data will be processed at the edge. So as these new capabilities are being built out, uh customers have been asking us to start to run that infrastructure in these new workloads and and at as a service model and so high performance computing ai. Ml these edge workloads are fantastic use cases just get started with as a service and can certainly extend back into some of the more traditional workloads that they've been running >>adam. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's transpired in the last six months from the customers lens as we talked a little bit about, we talked a lot in the last year about the acceleration of digital transformation and so many businesses having to pivot multiple times in the last year. A lot of acceleration of those getting to cloud for, for to survive. Talk to me about the customer experience, what you see in the last six months. >>So what we've heard a lot from our customers is that they're really looking for the benefits of consumption as a service that especially as you see the financial impacts that happened over the past year, People looking at ways to preserve capital and what are the ways that they can go and maintain what they want to do or perhaps even grow and accelerate. Take advantage of those new opportunities in ways that don't require large capital purchases and the ability to go in and purchase as a service is something we've heard from multiple customers is something that is really attractive to them as they look at. Hey, there's no opportunities they've opened up and how do they be able to expand on those as well as how do they be able to preserve the capital? They have, be able to continue with the projects that they're looking at but be able to take a more agile approach for those things. And so the as a service offerings that we've been talking to our customers about have been really something they've been excited about and they come to us kind of, hey, what do you have? What's the roadmap? How can we have more of those kinds of things? And that's why we're so excited Dell Technologies world to be talking about how we're bringing even more apex services as a service available to our customers. >>And I'm just curious in the last year since we've seen so many industries, every industry really rocked by the very dynamic market, but some of the things like healthcare and government, I'm just curious if you've seen any industries in particular really take a leading edge here and working with you in apex. >>one of the most >>interesting things that I've seen from the customers that I've been talking to is that it really is broad ranging that I've talked to customers who are governmental customers who are interested in expanding what they're doing with it but very concerned about things like data, locality and data sovereignty. That's very interesting to them. I've talked to manufacturing organizations, they're looking at how do they expand their operations in asian manufacturing for instance. And they're going from, how do they operate within the United States to how do they expand their operations? Be able to do that in a more quick fashion? What they're doing? Talk to healthcare organizations, they're looking at, how do they be able to bring digital healthcare and as you to think about what's happening more virtually that people are doing, What does that mean in terms of health care? Both from people who are actually doing virtual visits with their doctors as well as even things like digital surgery. So there's so many things that are happening really. I could talk to you about dozens of industries. But the takeaway that I've had is that there's no real one industry, it's really something that has impacted just operations globally and different folks. Look at different things in different ways. I talked to a company that does train that actually train company. They do logistics and they're looking at edge scenarios and how do they do train inspections faster to be able to provide better turnaround times for their trains because there's a limited amount of track and so if they miss a maintenance window like that's time that they not only have to wait for the next window, they have to wait for all the other trains to pass too. So it's really breathtaking, just the scope of all that's changing in it and all the opportunities that are coming up as people think about what consuming it services as a service can mean for them. >>Yeah, amazing opportunities. And you talked about, you know, the virtual and there's so much of it that's going to persist in in a good way, silver linings, right? Um and you want to go back over to you talk to me when we, when we talked about apex at Dell technologies world 2026 months ago, this was kind of revolutionary and really looking at it as a really big change to Dell's future strategy. Talk to me about that. >>Well, it's a change for the entire company, so having to rethink how we deliver all these services and outcomes to customers. So it's it's not just about the product. The product is now the service and the service is the product, so it's very different in how we approach it. Thinking more about how we can help our customers achieve these outcomes um and help deliver these services that get them there, which is a little different than just developing the products themselves. And so that's been a big thing that we've been taking on and making sure that we deliver these outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah. And then adam last question for you talk to me about kind of same perspective of looking at this as as how Dell intends to compete in the future and what customers can expect. Also how can they engage? Is this something that is available with Channel Partners? Dell Direct? >>So this is the beginning of a huge journey and transformation as Andrew spoke about, like this is a transformation of not only what we're providing, but a transformation across all of Dell. We're looking at how do we expand the X portfolio to bring a portfolio of options to our customers? You know, we're starting with with storage and cloud and some are custom solutions, but we really have a vision of how do we bring all of Dell's business products and into services for our customers? You know, it's a huge transformation, it's something I'm incredibly excited about because it really aligns what we do with what our customers do. We've never had an opportunity to be so closely connected with our customers and create great outcomes for them. So the transformation, like we're just at the beginning of this and it's an incredible path that we're on that's providing amazing value for the people that we've already started working with. For people that want to find out more about it. You can certainly come to our website, Dell technologies dot com slash apex. People who have a relationship with Dell already contact their sales representative will be more than happy to talk to them about what their current needs are and what effects can do to help them continue their digital transformation and create better outcomes for their organization. >>Excellent, Adam Andrew, Thank you for joining me today to talk about what's going on. Project apex to apex the tremendous amount of opportunities that it's helping customers in any industry uncover. We look forward to seeing down the road some of those great customer outcomes that come from this. I thank you both for joining me today. >>Thank you very much. Thank you >>for Adam Glick and Andrew Glinka. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021 The Digital Experience.

>>Welcome back to Dell Technology World. 2021. Del Tech World. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte. We're gonna talk about the Edge. Very excited to invite Pierluigi Deli, who's the Vice President, Product management for the Edge portfolio. Adele and Gil Schwarzman, who is the Senior Vice President. Edge portfolio, also with Dell Technologies Gentlemen. Great to see you. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. You see you, >>Yeah, great to see you guys to which we were face to face, but maybe maybe in 22 Gil, let's start with you. The edge is very exciting. Uh, it's, you know, not really defined, it's very fragmented, but it's there, you know, it's kind of, you know, it when you see it, what do you get excited about when you think about the edge? >>Yeah, I think uh there's two elements. The first one is that we all live at the edge. In other words, the areas we deal with our around us every day will show up um when we uh, you know, when we consume when we drive. So it's a, it's a very physical type of activity. We know it's there. What's really exciting motive to me is that you started with talking about fragmentation right on the bet. Um, it is a great opportunity for the technology is to add value um because it's so fragmented because it's so new because it has developed and evolved the way it is. We see an amazing opportunity for us to add much more value than we do today and solve problems that have yet to be solved in the industry. >>And it's an exciting, it's almost like an infinite playground for a technologist. You >>dave, I think that's exactly what we find out. The Edge is very exciting. There is a lot of motion, especially due to the pandemic and other things. Big factor that accelerate innovation at the edge but this is an inorganic acceleration and what it kills for one of the most of our customer is also confusion, right? They need to apply multiple solution but not very organized. So you try to solve the outcome like having the right production on the, on your line because demand is surging but you don't have an organic things to do that and solve the problem. So you see a lot of silence coming in for each one of the solution and that's what Gil was referring. That's a great opportunity for us as dealt with the breath of the portfolio we have and what our team that is a new team is focusing doing is to bring that idea to be able to consolidate multiple things at the edge and process things at the edge. >>We did a an event cube, had an event called the Cuban cloud and Q one and we had john Rosen and the title of segment was something like gaining the technology edge And we were kind of freaking out on, on the tech at the edge. Uh it might take away there was trying to like what is the edge? It's like, well it's the place where it makes most sense to process the data and so that brings up a lot of challenges. There are technical challenges and there are business challenges. I wonder if we could sort of dig into those a little bit. How do you guys look at that? Maybe gil you want to start maybe on the business side and then we can dig a short, right >>the way things evolved if you think about it, um, at the edge of very vertical lesson because of that they're very use case driven And so in every industry possible you start with some business person making a decision whether they have a need or they want to grow their business. And so for example they would buy an applying to do fraud protection in retail or detection retail or they will apply an application to medical robotics in the factory. And it would come with its own gateway in plant compute in a cloud portal and then you do it again and again and again every time you have a business opportunity all of the sudden you have this proliferation of I. T. Type equipment at the end where it's it's the worst place to have it really because you don't have the right I. T. Resources and you are um in the need to protect it in a much more um in a different way than you do in a data center. And so all of that brings to bring us to a point that you know we see an opportunity to simplify. Um And so not only simplification and this is you know simplification or simplicity is the most important driver for any I. T. Purchase. Um Things that are simple are the easiest that the most economical to operate the next demand that we see from a customary security because things are at the they have a much more um you know extended attack surface um they need to be connected to networks, they need to be connected without I. T. Staff. So if you can simplify insecure you can really unlock amazing value by processing data where closely to where it's created without it. You know we were seeing this opportunity as businesses but we can we get to it because there are so those two hurdles in front of us. >>So when you say thank you for that bill, when you think about, when you hear you hear a lot about AI influencing at the edge and and if you think about AI today much of the work is modeling, it's done in the cloud, but you're not going to be doing A i influencing in real time in the cloud, you know, take the autonomous vehicle example, so that brings some some technical challenges. Um, there's obviously data challenges. I'm curious as to how you think about that. I mean we always talk about how much data is going to be persisted, I think Tesla persists like five minutes of data, right? But some of it is gonna go back, that's true, but a lot of it is going to be processed real time and that's just really different than the way we typically think about. Yeah, >>absolutely. So at the Edge, especially in manufacturing, we see right now or in a uh, another use case, it's very important to get the outcome very quickly. Now. You don't use that a deep learning model for that. You need to just understand, for example, in a computer vision use case where you take the image of your production line, you actually to your point dave you not keep those image when you keep the image where you have the defect. But you need to process that. Ai Ml needs to be intelligent enough to understand that you have a defect and send that image them to the club. So the search of the data at the edge is a very important factor and why you need to process data, the Edge because your point, you can't wait to send to the cloud and I'm waiting right? Um, Tesla is a clear example of that all the autonomous car where you need to react instantaneously to change. But in manufacturing for example that is our focus for now is for example the robots that if you need to optimize the robot, you need to have a immediate understanding of where the pieces are and when they need to put in the tolerance need to be act immediately. Otherwise you come out with the thousands of pieces that they are not in the right tolerance. So at the end of the day, what we see is not only the search of the need of processing ai ml to the edge but also the need of a new type of compute at the edge. So in the past was just Gateway and you get the gate when you send the data to the cloud. Now it's a form of a new computer that come as also GPU capability and other things to process the data. So very important. And I think the Dell especially we are very focused on that because is uh is really where the customer need to extract the value. >>Thank you. And Gil I want to get into the unique value proposition to tell what makes you distinct. And it's uh I infer from your comments, your strategy you said is to simplify and so I see two vectors. There. One is to simplify at the edge. The other is to where we're needed, connect that edge, whether it's on prem public cloud across cloud, that kind of simplification layer that abstracts the complex, the underlying complexity. Uh Maybe you could talk about your strategy and what makes you guys different. >>Sure. Um We've been talking to a, well we always talk to our customers and we've been doing business at the edge for many many years. Um You know let's call it coincidental were very large company we have reached, we serve our customers so when they decide to buy something for their you know environment, they come to us as well as other vendors and we win a percentage of the time based on our market share. Um But when we decided to take another look at how can we be even more relevant? We started talking to a lot of them great depth. And what would we do we discovered was the problem I talked about before, the problem of complexity, the problem of security and the problem of you know choice. And so our focus is to do what we do best. We at the end of the day we're an I. T. Company. Um and our our customers for the most part our I. T. People and we see them dragged more and more into edge projects because customers need to connect edge to the network and they need to security and that's how it starts. And so those worlds of I. T. And OTR coming together and their coming together applying best practices which is exactly what we know how to do. And so because of that we think that they need to think about architecture versus unique silent solutions architecture can support multiple use cases that can grow with time, consolidate more and more use cases as they grow. Simplify what they do by applying you know tried and true or tried and true best practices in a secure manner. So the deal approach would be doing that taking a more architectural approach to the adverse as a use case and then just like you predicted um meet the customers where they are from an application stand book. And so we we know that a lot of applications are growing and development on a hyper scale or public clouds. We would like to connect to those. We would like to allow them to keep working as they have except when they run into the edge. Think about environments that could consolidate multiple workloads and not solve it for each one at the same time. And so that would be our overall approach. That's what we're working on. >>Yeah. Okay. So that horizontal layer, if you will uh to to to serve many many use cases, not just you're not gonna go a mile deep into one and be the expert at some narrow use case. You want to be that horizontal platform. But at the same time, look, I wonder does does that call for more program ability as we over time of the of the products to to really allow people to kind of design in that flexibility if you will build my own. Uh is that something that we can expect? >>Yeah, absolutely. So uh we spoke a little bit about this before the interview and the things that is very important is compose ability starting from a very small from factor to the cluster and then expand to the cloud is a fundamental things and a trend that we see. The fact that you can compose the infrastructure um starting from a small gateway that is changing in this market, right up to the cloud and be able to use the same layer that allow you to run the same application is the fundamental things and we are working on that. Um we are working on this vision and our strategy is really to be able to be transparent but provide the right building block to do all the use case that they are required where the data are. So we again, not only meeting the customer but meeting where the data are, what the customer wants out of those data. So that's a fundamental things. And you know, we we have project Apex. So obviously we are plugging into the project apex from an edge point of view, will allow the customer to have this unique experience to go in Apex and also deploy the edge infrastructure that is needed. So that's that's we started right now with that. So we will touch later, but that's the first building block of that journey. >>Actually, let's touch now you've got some news around Apex and and and and talking what are you announcing? So >>we are very exciting because as I said, our team is, it's pretty new and um, it's a very important investment that Dell makes uh not only in us as a team but as a motion. Um, so we are announcing a reference architecture with PTC. PTC is the one of the biggest company for actually based here in boston uh for manufacturing and reference architecture will be run on based on apex private cloud so the customer can go to the portal, order, order apex private cloud and deploy deploy PTC on top of that. So, very important things is that the first step in this journey and but it's an important, very, very important steps. So we want to thank you also PTC to allow us to work with them. Um, we have other stuff as well that we are announcing. Um, I don't know if you are familiar but we have a very unique streaming data platform, um, streaming data platform that can stream multiple data collected from Gateway from every place. And uh it's a need obviously when you need to process data in real time, very important to have a streaming, what we're doing with the new streaming data platform approach is the ability to deploy single note. So it can be very appealing for the edge and up to free notes and last but not least gil if you want to speak about our other partnership is very important. >>Sure. Um once we started looking more in depth into manufacturing, we discover that this market is today served by combinations of um oT vendors, people who make equipment? S eyes, people who consult on integration and um and you know, a lot of SVS that make up this ecosystem and people like ourselves. And so one of the things that we decided to do is partner with accenture, accenture Industry X practice to bring our joint value to customers. We started by investing in in a five G lab. They have four industry act. So you know the usage of five G. Manufacturing industry and we will still we will expand that and work on that as a as a joint offer for our joint customers going forward. So we're really excited about this because we feel that consolidation needs to happen not only technology but also in the partnerships, we need to partner if you want to bring true value to our customers and that's the first step, >>awesome. That's great. So a couple of comments on that. So it's funny, we did the live work show in the cube a couple years ago. PTC is a big, big event and it was like it was the edge and I remember looking around saying where's all the vendors? So that's great to see you guys leaning in like that parallel to the streaming platform. Tell me more about that. What's the tech behind it? >>Uh So the streaming data platform is a project that we start a couple of years ago is actually uh start from open source Provida. Um it's uh it's a very interesting technology where you can stream multiple data, it is not a traditional storage, ah use a technology that can ah really collect thousands of different streams and that's very important when you need to mind the data, bring the data um in the structure data in a inefficient that you, you can process them at the real time. It's very important. So um there are very cool use case of that. But now that we look at the edge, this is make more and more tangible sense because we have a lot of partners that they're working with us, especially to extend when you have all this sensor, you bring the data to the gateways and from the gateways then you can use data streaming platform to collect all these dreams and then you can easily process them. So it's a very fundamental technology, we are very proud of that. Um as I said, our enterprise version uh is getting more and more and now we can land this on different architecture, so it is, it can be backed up by an Iceland. Uh it can be also on different storage type now and as I said, we're looking now to bring from a what was a data center kind of structure down to the edge because now we can put a single node up to three notes, >>it makes a lot of sense. Is this like a Kafka based thing or open source or is it something you guys built or a combination? >>It's a combination. We actually project. The project is an open source project, but we did that, we start this many years ago and um he works with Kafka, but he's not Kafka. So it's, it's a he has plugging that can work with Kafka and all the other things and, and it's very easy to deploy. So it's a very, very, very important. And the other things is the scalability of this platform. >>I mean, it sounds like the kind of thing you had in the labs and you said, OK, this is going to be important. That boom all of a sudden the market comes to you as if you pop it right in. And then of course, the accenture of relationship deep, deep industry expertise, so that makes a lot of sense. 55 Gs happening a different world the next 10 years in the last 10 years isn't it? What is it about manufacturing? Why why did you start there? >>I can take this. Um We looked at where the opportunity was from two perspectives. One is where the opportunity, what the opportunities to sell, even the other one obviously comes with it because there is an opportunity to have and manufacturing today at the edges about 30 of the opportunity in sales according to NBC but more so it's been around for the longer time and so they it's very it's maturing um it's the most demanding. Um and you know, it's got very long horizons of investment and what we did was we figured that if we can solve problems for industry we can then extend that and solving for everyone years. Because this would be the toughest one to solve and we like challenge. And so we decided to focus and go deep. You said it before? Well, our approach is definitely horizontal approach. We cannot take a horizontal approach without vertical izing and understand specific needs. So nobody can avoid doing both at the same time. You need to understand. But you also want to solve it in a way that doesn't proliferate the silos. So that's our role. We will understand what we will make it more generic so other people can never get later on >>and David, if I cannot. Uh I think the manufacturing is also very exciting for us as a technologist, right? Uh and uh Dell technology as in the name the technology. So it's very exciting because if I look at manufacturing, we we are really in the middle of a industrial transformation. I mean it's a new era. Um If you think about um nobody care in the past to connect their machinery with that the F. P. L. C. To the network. All of this is changing because the life that where we live right now with the pandemic with the remote working with the fact that you need to have a much more control and be able to have predictive matters. So you're not stopping your manufacturing is pushing the entire manufacturing instrument industry to connect this machine and with the connectivity of this machinery you get a lot of data. You get also a lot of challenge. For example security. So now that's the place where connectivity brings the I. T. Aspect in and U. T. Guys now they're starting to speak with because now it's a more complex things right? It's not any more computerized competitor eyes only to one machinery specific is the entire floor. So it's a very interesting dynamics >>is the connection between that programmable logic controller and the Dell solution is you mentioned to secure better security and I presume it's also to connect back to whatever the core or the cloud etcetera. Is it also to do you know, something locally? Does it improve? Is their value add that you can provide locally? And what is that value add? >>Absolutely. So the value, as I said, um if you think right in the past right, you have a machine that uh, probably stay in the manufacturing for 2025 years, then you have an artwork attached to that machine that it is the P. L. C. About 11 years. The guy that he knows better about that machine is actually not the software component on. But he's the guy that has been working on that machine for 15 years now. How you translate that knowledge To a learning algorithm that actually can do that 4000 of machine. And and that's really the key right. You need to centralize information, process those information but not in the cloud, not in the central data center, but on the manufacturing floor. And you need to have a way to represent these things in a very simple way. So the plant manager can take action or the or the guy that is responsible for the entire line can take action immediately. And that's where the changes is not anymore to is trying to extend that knowledge to multiple machine multiple floor and try to get this change immediately. So that's really >>so the PLC doesn't become a general purpose computer or even necessarily the Uber computer. It connects to that capability because that enables data sharing across clouds and that's >>enabled the entire things. You know, you you can't do a model just with one source. You need to have multiple sources. Um, and also think about the manufacturing is changing not only for the machinery, but people that they build new manufacturing right? They need to be smart building. They need to have a technology for being more green solar energy consumption. So the manufacturing itself is mean five or six different things that you need to solve. It's not just the machine. So this idea of the silence environment is started to collapse in one and that's why it's important for us to start from a vertical, but also in the manufacturing, you already see this will expand to multiple things. Also like smart building another thing because they need it. >>Yeah. The red guilt to your point manufacturers like the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere and you've got adjacent seas, you can, you know, you can take the learnings from manufacturing and apply them to those adjacent industries. Uh, give us the last word. >>Um, look, usually when we talk at the technologies world, we talked to an I. D. Audience and we were, we're thinking this year that the way to talk about edge, at least with the people who traditionally buy from us is exposed them to the fact that they are more and more are going to be responsible for projects. And so our advice would be our hope that they would partner with us to think ahead. Just like they do with data center with their cloud strategy, think ahead as they think about their edge and try to set up some architectural guidelines. So when they do get the request, they're ready for it and think about what they think about the best practices that they applied, all of that is coming to them. They need to be prepared as well. And so we would like to partner with all of our customers to make them ready and obviously help them simplify secure, consolidate as they grow. >>Well guys, thank you, I learned a lot today. I you made a lot of progress. You know, this is the hallmark of Dell, right? It's a very high, let me make sure I get this right, very high due to say ratio right. You guys talked about doing this, you know, a couple a couple of years ago, uh, and you've made a lot of progress and I really appreciate you coming in the cube to explain the strategy. It makes a lot of sense. And so congratulations and uh, good luck in the future. >>Thank you. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the cubes, ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2021. The virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back, >>mm.

>> Narrator: 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 continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. It was last week, we're going to have some continued conversations here. I've got a couple of guests joining me. One is an alumni. That's Jen Felch, the Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell Technologies. Jen, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thank you. And joining Jen is Deepak Patil the SVP and GM of Dell Technologies Cloud. Deepak, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much Lisa. Excited to be here. >> So the event was last week. It was huge. We know that. And, of course, challenging in the fact that we're also used to being surrounded by thousands and thousands of people in Las Vegas and thousands and thousands of partners, but it's still a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to engage its customers and its partners in the ecosystem. We heard a lot, Deepak, last week about this shift from Dell to deliver as a service. This is what Project APEX powered by Cloud Console. What can you tell us about that? >> Absolutely, Lisa, and what an exciting week it was. We did announce Project APEX at the Dell Technologies World. We are very excited about it. Project APEX marks a strategic milestone for us and our company in three specific areas. Number one is we are on a path to significantly accelerate our transformation into an as a service world. Number two, we are investing in radically simplify the way our customers engage with us. Discover, purchase, manage offers from us. And number three is we are continuing our commitment to provide more flexibility, more choice to our customers. And to make it happen, Project APEX essentially brings all the efforts across the entire Dell Technologies from product development to services, to go to market motions, marketing, finance under the Project APEX umbrella. It's a significant endeavor and we are really excited about it. Of course- >> Companies, oh go ahead, sorry. >> I'm sorry. Of course the Cloud Console that you mentioned is a key component of realizing the Project APEX Division and taking Project APEX to our customers. We are in the public preview of the Cloud Console. Using the Cloud Console with a few clicks, our customers can browse through a catalog of cloud services from us, as well as our partners using a self-serve immersive experience, they can then purchase products like the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription. IT professionals then can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid solutions like VMware Tanzu. Our customers can then manage and monitor workloads, and using real time insights and data, they can take actions like extending and expanding the system when the capacity is running low. As you know, we also announced storage as a service offering, but an offering like storage as a service using Cloud Console, our customers can see real time insights and cost breakdowns by the teams or cost centers. So, in many ways, the cloud Console really brings the power of Project APEX and the entire cloud operating model to our customer's fingertips. We're very excited about it. >> Lot of work there. So one the things I remember talking Dell Technologies World 2019 about the big digital transformation that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Deepak, you mentioned from a Project APEX perspective, this acceleration of transformation. Jen, over to you, as the Chief Digital Officer and the CIO, how has your team been able to enable this shift to the as a service model to facilitate the self-service and all of the capabilities that Deepak talked about? What's that been like? >> Well, it's been pretty exciting from a couple fronts is, you know, we've always had some aspect of as a service in our offering, whether that is software, our DFS organization, or, you know, as funny as it might sound, our actual services organization is certainly as a service. But as Deepak mentioned, and what our customers tell us, is that let's do more of that. Let's take the broad portfolio of technical solutions and services that we have today and make them simple, consistent, give IT leaders and organizations choice. And so, as the internal team, internal IT team, we play two roles. One is to, we're an internal customer. We're a very large customer of all of the Dell technology products and solutions. And so, we get to offer a lot of feedback about how we would like to work, what we've been doing to really innovate in terms of how we bring things together. And mostly we get to be those early adopters for our product groups in groups like, like Deepak's, which is wonderful to be able to give that early feedback and contribute to great solutions. The second part of it is actually doing the enablement of as a service of how, what are the underlying components that go into the engagement platform that Deepak mentioned, the Cloud Console. How does that leverage the scale of Dell, yet create those really simple consistent, transparent choices for our customers? So our teams get to sit side by side in terms of how we develop these solutions and how we're bringing Project APEX to life, both as a customer and as a development partner, so that we can really bring that together for our customers. And I'm pretty excited about using the solutions. We get to, you know, be involved with it every day. And I can't wait until it's running even more of our infrastructure internally. >> Big, big effort. Deepak, let's come back to you and talk about the market. As we know, this is a very competitive market, congested. You talked about some of the other things that we talked about on theCUBE as well for Dell technologies, world storage as a service. With this landscape that is highly competitive and has been for quite some time with this new strategy, Project APEX, what part of the market, or parts, is Dell going after? >> Absolutely. And just one comment on what Jen said. The work that Jen's team and my team are doing sitting side by side is an example, and just one of the many examples, but a shining example of how we are putting the power of unified Dell technologies behind this effort. Going back to your question, Lisa, we are in what we call it the fourth industrial revolution or whatever you want to call it. We are in a massive shift to a simple, flexible and an operating model full of choices with respect to this as a service cloud transformation, across the industry. Over the next few years, whoever essentially captures the market is going to have to deliver three core promises to our customers. Number one, is we know that we're in the middle of a multi-cloud hybrid cloud world. Any service provider, any cloud provider that eliminates the seams across different cloud environments and makes a multi-cloud experience truly consistent and simple and modern and seamless is going to have a massive advantage. Number two, customers' workforce are going to be all over the place. Good portion of their workforce are going to be in their data centers, good portions of workloads are going to be on Edge, And then are going to be good portions of workloads that are going to be in public cloud. Anybody who meets customers where they're at so that customers don't have to massively invest, invest massively in re-engineering and the VR protector and refactoring, but still enjoy the benefits of this new cloud operating model, from performance and reliability to scalability and efficiency, with the minimum possible efforts, is going to create a significant value proposition. And number three, anybody who essentially focuses on outcomes and experiences and workloads, rather than products and specific offers is going to have a significant benefit. And the work we're doing under the umbrella of Project APEX essentially delivers on all three of those promises. As I mentioned, we radically and massively simplify and eliminate the seams across different cloud environments. We focus on outcome based conversation and with the work that we're doing on with VMware on our massive 4,200 plus people partner, 4,200 plus partner ecosystem, we are working to meet customers where they're at instead of forcing them to re-engineer and re-architect and move to cloud instead of the cloud coming to meet them wherever they're at. So we do believe that the strengths that we traditionally have always had with respect to the broad technology and product and services portfolio, 30 plus thousand sales force, 4,200 plus people partner ecosystem, and a massive asset through the partner, just the best 20 plus year old partnership we have with NEOM brand, and the broad product, as well as partner portfolio at NEOM. We even like a chances in terms of helping each and every customer we work with fundamentally modernize their own portfolio, help their customers and make significant progress on their digital transformation journey. >> We definitely know that there was a big engine, a lot of momentum behind the size and the scale of Dell itself. So going back to you, Jen, if we think about some of the things that we heard again at Dell Technologies World, when we spoke with Jeff Clark, who's the COO and Vice Chairman of Dell technologies. Just in the last couple of weeks, he talked about six areas and IT innovation that Dell is focusing on. and I wanted to get your thoughts on these. Pirate Cloud, Edge, 5G, AI and ML, data management and security. In your opinion, Jen, what of this suite of six areas of IT innovation sets Dell up for success? >> That's a good question. And you know, I would say these six areas are not foreign to us. They're not necessarily brand new. They're all sit kind of right next to areas where we have very deep expertise. And so I think about the fact that, you know, we design, manufacturer, service and manage IT solutions all over the world. Large customers, small customers, consumers. We have an incredible breadth and reach of what we're doing today both from the solutions that we provide and the experiences that our customers are driving. Whether that is, you know, extending work from home or learn from home or they're, you know, going through a digital transformation as Deepak talked about, trying to really simplify their ecosystem. Oftentimes it's Dell, that's sitting right there with them. So we have an opportunity, I think unlike many others, to bring the technical expertise from the products and services that we offer, along with the experience from really working with the best and brightest of customers, as well as this ecosystem of partners 42,000, I mean, Deepak, that's a really big number, but that creates a real opportunity for innovation as things like 5G really emerge. And we have the power behind the data management analytics to support ML and AI. So, you know, when I step back and, and look at kind of what sets us up for success, it's not something that just happened yesterday. It's something that's been happening at Dell for a very long time, which is the deep technical expertise and really close engagements with our customers so that we can focus on bringing technology to solve the problems of today and set us up for the future. I know, as an IT leader, I appreciate the fact that solutions from Dell are very open. So they give us a lot of flexibility to not only provide a solution for today, but solutions that will last over time, that we have some flexibility. We don't have an incredible lock that we can never get out of it. So I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to these innovations and really, we have solutions in most, all of these areas today. I know they'll just continue to get better and better. >> Jen, last question for you before we wrap, because of course, Project APEX that Deepak talked about and kind of dug into, massive undertaking, of course, during the time of a massive change to the entire world, where suddenly, this shift to work from home was a rapid pivot. I can imagine as your teams, you talked about both of your teams really kind of not co-locating physically anymore but being able to work together. How did you manage that, and to enable the team to stay on track, to deliver this for Dell Technologies World? That's a big, it's a big task. >> It is a big task, but we have great teams. And, you know, I think as we've, we've kind of, the status quo has been disrupted, not necessarily by us, right, but by the environment that we're in. And so Deepak and I, and several other leaders, we keep our teams close and focused on where we're aiming, what we're, you know, what our mission is so that we can continue to innovate. And I will tell you, I feel like we have an incredible focus. The vision is clear as to where we want to go. And it probably just sounds simple but it's just engaged leadership. That's how we keep people focused. That's how we're keeping our eye on the ball of where we're headed. >> That's, couldn't be more important. You know, you talked about simplicity, about that engaged leadership is so key. You guys, thank you so much. There's so much more we could dig into. I wish we had more time. Thank you for sharing what's going on with Project APEX, Dell technologies, how it's helping customers transform, because we know right now, that digital transformation is only accelerating. So we'll have to have you back to talk about what's going on. Deepak, Jen, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, Jen Felch and Deepak Patil, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual experience. (digitized music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of del Tech World 2020. This is David Want, and I'm here with Sam. Grow Kat. Who's the senior vice president of product marketing? Adele Technology. Sam. Great to see you. Welcome. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, we're gonna talk generally about Cloud in the coming decade, but in really how the cloud models evolving. But I want to specifically ask them about the as a service news that Dell's making at DT W You know what those solutions look like? How they're gonna evolve. Maybe maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Is 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 disruptor. You know, when you joined Isil on that got acquired by M. C. And then Del So you've you've been on both sides of the competitive table and cloud is obviously a major force. Actually, you know, I'd say, the major disruptive force in our industry. So let's talk about how Dell's 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, and there is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so, how customers are partners. We're really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the 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. And there's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. You know, 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 in as a service experience. Eso that really has started to come into the data centers organizations or moving specific workloads and applications to the cloud of Hey, how do I get that in a non premise experience? And I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic, and Kobe, 19 has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker room or gradually by moving some applications to the cloud. Because, frankly, on Prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they like to see. So we're seeing that macro trend accelerate. And, you know, 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 year as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >>Yes. 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 or 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 were 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 gonna be both. It's gonna be a hybrid, multi cloud world, but what they absolutely or clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience, regardless of if their on primer off from. And that's where. Really, the traditional on premise 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's very, very complex. It also is very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast because they can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention toe by more you to think I got a get a sales rep in house to come in and, uh, extend your environment and grow your environment. And then, of course, the traditional method is very cap ex heavy. In a world where organizations air really trying thio preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility. Traditionally, um, are 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 from, uh, environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage and report to grow and do commerce across that environment, regardless of its on or off friend. Uh, they want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on Prem, it's not gonna be a click of a button, but you should be able to buy and procure that with the 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 flexible subscription models or optics friendly models. Customers were really looking for that more off X friendly approach, which we're gonna 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 come to market early next year, but we're I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >>So when I was looking through the announcement in sort of squinting through it, the three things jumped out and you definitely hit on. Those. One is choice, but sometimes you don't wanna give customers too much choice, so it's gotta 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. Uh, which is somewhat of a balancing act. But is that right? >>Yeah. No, you're 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 end journey view of their entire cloud and as his for his experience, that need span our entire portfolio. So whether it's servers or stores are 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. You should be able to do that in real time through the system, you know, choices a big, big factor for us. You know, we've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure anyway. They want clearly they consume consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure people customers on Lee pay for what they use So highly metered environment pay for pay as they go. Leverage subscriptions essentially give them that op X flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the rial 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. >>Right? So I gotta 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 But why now? People going to say Okay, you're just responding to HP. What's what's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >>Yeah, so I think it really comes down Thio the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're gonna provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what we're what will really define ourselves against them in China, 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 will have in the first after next year, um, looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year is Well, you're gonna be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. It 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 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 offering is designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio from applying solutions I s G etcetera, not VM where specifically But that Zraly, that whole Dell Technologies portfolio correct. >>Yeah. And look, over time we totally expectable transacted VM ware through this so way. Do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. Eso Yeah, it is across. You know, PCs. A service storage is a service infrastructure. As a service, our cloud offers all of our services traditional services, um 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 gonna force our customers to go down any of these pads, but we want to do is present thes pads and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breath of the portfolio in the offers. Thio, Get them there. >>Okay, so it's it's really a journey. You mentioned storage as a service coming out first, and then Aziz. Well, if I understand it, the idea is that I'm gonna have visibility and control over my entire state on Prem Cloud edge. Kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the chute. But that's the vision. >>Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue thio iterating over time and bring mawr 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. Uh, partner experienced thio all of the environments, our customers to be running it. >>I wanna put my my customer had on my CFO CEO had Okay, What's the fine print? You know, one of the minimum bars to get in. What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are the some of those? Those nuances? >>Yeah. So you know both the storage is 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 wanna make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments from small business, the media business to the biggest enterprises out there globally. Goal expansion through our channel partners, we're gonna have gos and Channel Partners fully integrated as well service providers as well as a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience for our customers. So the fine print day will be out early next year. Is we G A. These releases and bring in the market. But ultimate flexibility and choice up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal of the intent. We plan to deliver that. >>Can you add any color to the sort of 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 in the services mindset as opposed to bolting services. On top of a product you sell a product is okay, service guys, you take it from here. It's really you have to sort of re think you know your how you deliver on DSO You say you start with storage on then So what can we expect over the next midterm? Long term? >>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 Q two, 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 Dave is right. We adopt products customers in pick their product. They pick their service that they want a 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 will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of the big easy button they want to focus on an outcome. Storage is a service is a great, great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is. Part of that, um, 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 paid for use on an op X plan that works for, works their business and gives them the 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 workloads. They pick their performance and capacity tear. There is a term limit. You know, right now, we're playing 1125 years, depending on the amount of terms you want Dio. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies on bits, 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 that we are. We're moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio on solutions for our customers. >>So you actually have a lot of data on this? I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business, uh, maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. Uh, you know, I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers, but what 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, you know, 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 never mind, kind of as we move into these kind of turn key easy button as a service offers that air to come that early next year. So we've leveraged all of that learnings, and we've heard all of that feedback. And it's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the project. APEC strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest power max or the latest power store. They want to choose their network. They wanna choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service they they want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they wanna 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 a 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 turnkey as a service. Solutions fit that need where they want to just define s l. A's outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them so they can really thick focus on their applications in their business, not their infrastructure. So things like metering tons of feedback and how well wanna meter this, uh, 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 S A P is a service vb isa service ai machine learning as a service will be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >>So I wanna ask you so I mean, you've given us a couple of data points, their billion dollar plus business couple 1000 customers is this? I mean, you've got decent average contract values. If if I do my math right s so it's not just the little guys. I mean, I'm sorry. It's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle is, well, that they're taking this up. Is that fair to say >>totally? I mean, I would say frankly, you know, in the enterprise space, it's the mid the larger sides have historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best a breed apart. Best debris to products, best of breed services. Best to breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape. There were very competitive, very, very confident or competitive and competing in that space. Today, I think going into the turkey as a service space that will play up market. But it will really play downmarket mid market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there where they don't have. The resource is to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or backup infrastructure, compute infrastructure. They're gonna frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think are 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 the actual, like the console, for example, when when can I actually get? I mean, I can get I could do as a service today. I could buy subscriptions from you. This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and roll out details? >>Sure. So as we look to move, move to our integrated kind of turn key as a service offers the console or announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So for organizations of customers that want to start using it, they can start using it. Now, Uh, the storage, as a service offers gonna 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 offered with storage, is a service available in the first half of next year, readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. So we're 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 you know, frankly, externally and internally, Project Apex will be that North Star to bring our end end value together across the business, across our customers across our 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. >>So I mean, is the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset of cultural change, really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing. In a way, How are you guys thinking about you know, that mindset shift? >>What? Really, it's 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 its 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 gonna happen overnight. You know, various estimates have. This is 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. You know, we're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires some changes in how we sell changes in how we mark. It clearly changes in how we build products and so forth, and then ultimately, have you know 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. And this isn't a a tweak and how we do things or in 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 on experience. We built up over the years. But this is a 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 that's the mission we're on with Project date. >>Well, I mean with 30% growth. I mean that za clear indicator and people like growth. We're going. I've no doubt that clients are. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. And and I think many folks wanna buy this way. And I think increasingly, that's how they buy SAS. That's how they buy Cloud. You know, why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts, Sam. What are the big takeaways? >>Yeah, Big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together or 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 gonna be living in a hybrid, multi cloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak, that they want that to be in as a service experience, regardless of its on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that he's that simplicity and elegance to the on Prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. Eso That's the mission that we're on with Project Apex and I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're gonna We're gonna be after this for the next couple of years to refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >>Well, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to the Cuban. We were seeing the cloud model. I mean, it's extending on Prem Cloud, multi clouds going to the edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same same direction. So, Sam, good luck with this. And thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >>Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Everyone. Take care. >>All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The Virtual Cube will be right back right after this short break

>> Announcer: 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 Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World del Tech, World 2020. Jeff Clark is here. He is the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me today. Appreciate it. >>Yeah, you're very welcome. When my first question is, when do you have time to be vice chairman? Well, >>you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries. And unless you establish some boundaries so I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally, but also allows me to look after the company and, uh, kind of keep things moving and making progress of Dell. So pretty exciting times. It's certainly been a challenge finding new ways to break through new ways to get things done. But our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. >>Well, you know, a Z. You know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and do it going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew you were obviously, but you have been able to see you know, how you operate in the decision making on how you rally the troops. Your several years now into the new Dell, you had to do a lot of tactical things, you know, including product portfolio rationalizations. But I wanted to start with the macro picture in a particular Can you share some of the acceleration points and the levers that you're really pulling in the operation? >>Well, clearly, if you look back at the company's strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform if you think about the first tenet of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our court marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the course server market in the course storage market, and clearly what we've been able to do and certainly been at this now for Gosh, I think it's three years now that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the I s g side and to the point you referenced earlier. We've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all the power brand and now represents new, fresh modern architecture er modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire eyes. T portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy, which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell Technologies portfolio, we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years, particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our I S G portfolio with the M R. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side will quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace work workspace one are leading services and are leading PC products to be able to bring a different change experience for end users on the PC side on the side. This all started with getting again this competitive portfolio. It started with Dell Technology Cloud a little over a year ago. It now is in joint collaboration around the edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around five g going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out. We now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VM, are now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. >>So it sounds like I mean, covitz change so many things, but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed your thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is gonna pre cove in Post Cove. It you kind of sort of approaching the same playbook, if you will. >>Well, a covert in many levels. While it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world, which we shouldn't, that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and many parts of the world. If you step back and what I try to mention the keynote, what cove it has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations, but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote learning remote the world as we look at it going forward, data driven. It's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade. In many cases the first three years, Uh, this nomenclature that I've talk about is the future is now, and what it's really done is actually reinforced. The points that we thought were going toe happen brought them sooner and has made us believe mawr double down, if you will, that the path we're on is the right path, and we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting? If you look at customers who embrace digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders. They're actually breaking away from the pack, sort of speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector. We think that's a great, obviously proof point of digital transformation. But what all companies will have to go through to compete >>Well, it's interesting we saw early on in the US locked down worldwide, locked down you have you have such a broad portfolio that yeah, maybe some parts of the portfolio or, you know, directly negatively affected. Certainly. For instance, your you know your airline customers or your hospitality customers, etcetera. But the work from home was was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio somewhat, you know, one part of the business that cushioned you, maybe the other part of the business, You felt that. But on balance, you're able to get through that, and part of that was your supply chain. And some of your competitors struggled, you know, for instance, with laptop supplies. But you guys really have done a good job, sort of navigating through that, almost like you've been through it before. But nobody's been through this before. >>No, you know, David, thanks for recognizing it. One of the benefits of the Indian portfolio we have, which no one else has. The Indian portfolio that we do. We're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors, whether it's different parts of the business. And we've been able to do that on our our supply chain has performed well. It's been unbelievably resilient. We think it's appointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace. You couple that with our global service footprint, the two of them working together we designated those capabilities is essential. Very early in the pandemic, we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers and a pretty non disruptive way. Now, behind the scenes are teams were doing all sorts of things to bring, uh, that continuity supply and those expectations we sent to our customers to the forefront. But I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded, and it set us up to where things were going to go. When we think about the future and migrating tomb or integrated solutions, I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed with that services in the supply chain play a key role. >>I guess so much to talk to you about. What? I wanna come back to digital transformation For a minute. I was talking to the C i o the other day and I asked him what was the digital transformation mean to you? He said, David, I got a 15 year old s a P system. Digital transformation means to me I My business has changed in the last 15 years, but my s a P system Hasn't I gotta bring it up to speed. I have to modernize. So there's a spectrum. On the other hand, if if you're not digital today and you're, say, a restaurant, you can't do business. So what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? >>Well, I think your examples were very good. I mean, our industries as a long reputation of overhyping, different constructs. The fact is, the world is rapidly digitizing. It's undeniable. If you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors air now being placed in everything, all of the data that's being collected as a result, That's certainly the forefront of what's happening. And every business has to deal with that. You mean you can't We talked about hospitality. You got hotel rooms that have sensors in them for lights, for water, for a temperature. You think about what's happening in the finance sector in the amount of data that's being created on the edge of that has to be processed on the edge. You think about smart factory smart hospitals in the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront. So in my mind. Digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going. We know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world, and as that acceleration, mhm goes faster and faster and faster, which I absolutely we absolutely believe this happening. Companies have to change the business. They have to change their models. They have to figure out how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes. We tend to get into this digital transformation and everyone to talk about this piece of gear, this piece of gear, this piece of gear. I actually don't spend any time on that. It's where customers are going. What are they doing to really instrument, if you will, the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors. That's where we come in. We help them help them with certainly the gear part of it, but more importantly, the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them, to help them get to where they want to go. Does that help? >>Yes, and it does, and it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud multi cloud. To me, it's edges all part of that and it's critical for your customers. Digital transformations. I mean, what I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on, whether you're on Prem when you're in a public cloud, whether you're at the edge, so multi cloud is part of that. You know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational. It seems to becoming more and more really. Where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? >>Well, I love the way you described it. What we see is the notion of Cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about earlier on when I got this job was the public cloud. No, there's Public Cloud. There's private clouds, and clearly the edge is going to be a cloud operating a model. In fact, we see the world of five G edge and cloud, those three circles intersecting toe high degree. So we're gonna bring a cloud operating model to the edge. We're gonna bring new advanced connectivity data driven connective ity to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created that will have toe have real time analytics done, uh, at the edge we think, is this opportunity to really step back and go well. Those cloud things can't be separate. They have to be a set of systems. In fact, it has to become an integrated system. And we think that integrated system has to be able to move data, be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrate and consistently Dr Operations across those three cloud environments, I think we have gone. Probably the best characterization is early innings. We're certainly not in the first inning. We're not in the ninth inning, but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multi cloud hybrid cloud environment. If you think about what we've done with VM wars enablement or interaction with the public domains, the work that we've done from our private area, we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time, I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us as this spends very quickly and the edge of balls we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself. We have to bring it together. We're bringing into the public and private cloud domains that we have today, >>and I definitely wanna hit on as a service. But since we're on this topic, I wanna I wanna talk about five G and Telco a little bit. Let me just spiel for a bit and then you can respond. So I mean, this seems to be a lot of confusion around five G. There's very high expectations. There's there's a there's a lot of talk, but if it's hard toe sort of identify the true impact, that's that's tangible today, anyway. And then you got the telecom telco transformation going on. We've been We've been hearing this for a long, long time. Meanwhile, you got the over over the top providers. They're living off the infrastructure. The telcos price per bit is declining, but the usage is exploding. And so what do you make of all this? You know, the telcos air reinventing themselves. Five g is a part of that consumers Airway waiting for that. There's a lot of, you know, mixed marketing messages going on. What's your take on this and what's tells role? >>Well, look, I I tend to try to break it down into things. At least I can understand. If I look at five G is the next generation Cellular, which I believe it's far more than that. I mean, I think it's the next data fabric for the data era. I think it's going to be this intersection, as I mentioned moments ago of five g Cloud and Edge, all coming together. But I think about it from the infrastructure side that you describe. What we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before. And I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector, and this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster. So now if you bring a cloud operating model to this which I believe five g enables, there is now the opportunity to bring, I think, um, or standard based infrastructure rather than the proprietary ones. In the past, we now can bring a industry standard set of architectures was softer to find layers in the stack. And for the first time in the telcos space, you have the ran going through significant transformation. And on my mind, Iran is one of the significant control points in the telco or five g stack, and that is going to be more open. And then we have to think of five. G is just more than a cellular network. I mean, we're gonna have private private five G. So to the degree that it displaces why, if I will be interesting to see and unfold. But there's a huge opportunity now. Is those sensors that I talked about in the digitization of hospitals and factories and cities, all interconnected by a bunch of private five G networks, all working in an interactive combined system way. I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation, a standardization orientation, a cloud model, and that's sort of what we do. So I get excited. All of what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point. You've been hearing this discussion for some time, but the opportunity is large for us. It's one of the single biggest largest opportune, single biggest opportunity that we see for Delon View more and we're going to pursue it together. And we think we can take our at scale technologies that we brought to the Enterprise Data Center and bring those to the telco providers in the private five g build out. >>It's amazing, Jeff, when you think about the when you and I started in this business and how far we've come, it's It's just just mind boggling, isn't it? It >>really is. We've been at this a while and things have changed. But again, it's been on this consistent technology curve, this consistent standardization curve, and it's now applying to new sectors >>I want to end with as a service. You mentioned that before and and so you've got actually really growing business in subscriptions? Uh, you got a lot of options for customers, which is good, but sometimes it's confusing. What's the strategy around as a service? What can we expect there? >>Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right, we've made a lot of progress. We launched L Technology on demand last year. We have 2000 plus customers of $1.3 billion revenue run rate, it's growing at 30% so we're pleased. But at the same time, all the data suggest customers we're gonna want to deploy even at a greater rate. So I think I made reference during our keynote. Today, about 75% of the world's data is gonna be created outside of the data center, 75% off the edge. Build out is going to be done as a service, as is half of the infrastructure. So we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level. We announced Project Apex, Project Apex for us to take all of the properties that we have across the company, all of the different activities and to unify them a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward for our entire portfolio. We think the timing is right. We think we have to be able to, if you will project APEC should be translated as the easy button for our customers. It's a way to make things simpler. It's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model, and that's the path Ron, we're pretty excited about this unification, if you will. Galvanizing across the entire organization with Project Apex. >>Awesome. Listen, I know you're super busy. Appreciate all the time you've given us your You're a fun executive toe. Hang around with a mission, man. I wish we were together, but hopefully, hopefully sometime soon we can We could see each other face to face. >>I would like that very much. I missed the interactions themselves. I appreciate the time today. Thank you, Dave. >>All right, We'll see you, Jeff. Thanks again. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there. We're back with our next guest. It del Technology World 2020. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: 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 Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed 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)