>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Good evening, everyone. Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's "theCUBE". We are at Mobile World, MWC, excuse me, '23. New name this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we have had some great conversations. This is only day one of four days of coverage from "theCUBE" but one of the things that we've been talking about is disaggregation. You've wrote about it in your breaking analysis. We've been talking about it. Today is a big thing that's happening. We're going to be talking about that next. >> Yeah, open ecosystems require integration. Integration requires certification. And so, you got to have labs. We're going to talk about that and what value that brings to the community. >> Right. Please welcome Tibor Fabry-Asztalos, senior vice president of telecom systems and product engineering at Dell. >> Hi. >> And back to "theCUBE" after a couple of hours, Gautam Bhagra, vice president of partnerships at Dell. Guys, great to have you here. >> I love to be here. Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, day one, I'm sure lots of conversations, lots of meetings, lots of jet lag that we're all trying to get over. Talk about, Gautam, we'll start with you. Talk about the disaggregation era. What it is intended to support? What is it intended to enable? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think to be honest with you, Lisa, we spoke about this earlier also, like the whole vision with the disaggregation is to make sure our telco providers can take the benefits of having the innovation that comes along with it, right? So currently, we all know they're tied into like lock systems, which kind of constricts them in going after this whole innovative space. So, our hope is by working with our operators and our partners, we can help make that disaggregation journey a lot easier and work on some of these challenges, and make it easier for the telcos to innovate and consolidate going forward. So, we're working very closely and we talked about the community this morning. We're working very closely with Tibor and his team from an engineering perspective to help build those solutions with our partners and we're excited about the announcements we made this morning. >> When you hear challenges from this ecosystem, can you stack rank 'em? What are you hearing? Kind of what's top of mind? And so, the top three, if you would. >> Some of the challenges are just to define moving from a closed system and open system, just to making sure that the acceptance of that to see what's the value proposition is for an open system and then for the carriers to see the path going from a closed system to an open system. Of course, at the end, people realize the value at the end and speed of innovation that you're going to get all the new technologies and new features, functionality you get in an open system. But then the challenge comes with it, how you actually integrate those and then validate them, and you are to deploy them. So in a sense, that's the opportunity and also some of the challenge along the way. And that's where, as Gautam said, that's where we are also looking at playing the key role with the OTEL lab, the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, where we take these pieces of the open ecosystem and have combined them, validate them, and provide the pipeline to the customer. Pre-integration and then full integration into the production network. >> Those challenges, I presume, vary whether you're talking to a greenfield network operator versus somebody who's got a 40, 50 year history, a hundred-year history in the business, right? I mean migration is a big issue for them, right? Whereas the greenfield, we heard from DISH earlier, they want to drive innovation so they might be willing to sacrifice some other areas. So, is that a fair summarization and what are you hearing? >> [Tibor and Gautam] Yeah. >> Absolutely it is. I mean, that's where you see that DISH being kind of a leader in the space, as they were deploying in greenfield, they defined what the open ecosystem should look like, defined all the components of it, how you integrate them, validate them, and they were able to, well, go through it and deploy it. To your point, for an open, closed systems, as how you actually start transforming the existing network into the open one, that's going to go to a different process, right? You need to figure out how these new open systems can interrupt and work together with existing networks. So, that's one likely some of those carriers will start in an isolated area and grow from there. Deploy an open system in a rural area, for example, and then build from there. >> So, what a bank would do is they say, "Okay, we're going to write in our own abstraction layer." >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Right? "Using microservices, we're going to connect to the cloud. And we're going to, you know, put maybe some lower risk applications in the cloud first and then we're going to create our own cloud." Is there a similar dynamic here? >> Yeah, I mean, so I think you're spot on, right? Like, I think one of the things that we are seeing with the telco operators that we've spoken to is they're very risk averse. >> Yep. >> Right, they have very strong SLA requirements. They cannot go down even for a second. So, what that basically means is the innovation aspect is constrained by the risks that they perceive on any changes that you want to make on the architecture. So, the question that comes up is how do we make it easier for them to not worry about the bare minimum requirements of making sure the network's running and working while thinking about the new innovative technologies and solutions you want to build on the start. So, back to your bank example, nine years ago, no one in a bank even was thinking about like applications that will run on the cloud. Like for them, it was like a side project. They'll try and test something, see if it works, and then they'll think about cloud in the future, right? But now, core applications on banks are actually being built on public cloud. I think we see the same happening with the telco operators as well. Right now, they're understanding the move from a closed ecosystem to an open ecosystem. They understand the value proposition. On the core side, it's already happening a lot. And I think they are slowly moving there and that's where I think Tibor and team have been doing a great job working with our customers to make the transition happen. >> But there are so many permutations. >> Right. >> And integration points. How is Dell addressing that across the ecosystem? >> So, to give you an example, we talked about OTEL, which is our brand new, kind of 13,000 square feet lab that we kind of inaugurated last year based in Round Rock, Texas. >> Dave: Open Telecom. >> Dave and Tibor: Ecosystem Lab. >> Correct, great. And so, as part of that, that's a physical lab but more importantly, that's kind of a community where partners, customers come together to actually, and collaborate and work on these solutions. And as part of this, we also develop what we call the SIP, or Solution Integration Platform, to enable exactly what you just said. Making sure that we have a platform that actually can take all these various components, validate them individually, combine them, and then provide a DevOps and GitOps model, how you actually combine them, provide the BOM or SBOM, and then push that to pre-production and deployments for our customers. So, that's part of the challenge as we talked earlier. And that's how Dell and we are looking at actually enabling this basically, the validation of this disaggregated wall. >> Oh. >> Sorry, I just wanted to- >> Go ahead. >> just going to add one more point, right? So, when we look at the partners that we are working with as well in the OTEL and there are three ways we are working with them. At the bare minimum, we want to make sure that solution will run on the Dell infrastructure and the hardware, right? So, we have the self-certification process. We had a lot of good uptake on it and we are seeing a lot more come in. In fact, I had a check-in with "theCUBE" this morning in our side and it's more than a hundred plus partners already interested in going through that. Awesome. Then we have other places where we work on with partners to build reference architectures together, right? So, we want some sort of validated solution that will work together that we can take to the market. And then we also have engineered solutions that we are building with partners like the infrastructure block offering that we have taken where it's all pre-packaged, pre-built by Dell, working very closely with our partners. So, the telcos don't have to worry about deployment, integration, and everything else that comes along. >> And I presume the security supply chain is part of that- >> Yes. >> bill of materials- >> Absolutely. >> you just described. >> Yeah. >> Exactly. >> And that would include all those levels, the engineered systems, the reference architectures as well? And how do you decide like candidates, we can't do it all, right? So, it's the big markets get the engineered system, is that right? How do you adjudicate there? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think there are a couple of angles to look at it, right? I think the first and foremost is where we see the biggest demand is coming from the customers in terms of the stack they already have and where they have the pain points. >> Dave: Okay. >> Right, so this is why we are working with Red Hat and Wind River, as an example, because they are in most of the deployments that we are aware of with the customers and where we see an opportunity for Dell to partner with these partners. I think we are seeing a lot of new players also coming up the stack. And as they come up the stack and we find opportunities to co-build and co-innovate, absolutely we'll be building joint solutions with them as well. >> Where are you on, from a partnership perspective, on the strategic vision? You mentioned a number of things that have already been accomplished, quite a few. But from your journey perspective on that strategy, where are you? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question. I think we really want to be the partner of choice for all technology and services company within the telecom space. We're looking to drive the transformation in the network area, right? So, that's the vision that we have in the telecom system business from a partnership side. We have created some really good strategic partnerships with key providers, with independent software vendors, the network equipment providers. We're having some really good, strategic conversations with them. You've heard some of the announcement come out today, the work we are doing with Nokia, with Samsung, the Red Hat announcement, the Wind River, and so on and so forth. And there's a lot more in the pipeline. But more importantly, we want to grow the impact of the ecosystem. So, that's why we are launching the partner community today as well to make that happen. >> How does the lab work? Who has access to it? Can I self-certify? If I can self-certify, how do you make sure that I'm following the rules, all of the stuff- >> Sure. >> that you would- >> Absolutely. >> expect. >> So yes, you can self-certify, that's Gautam just mentioned. We already had quite a few ISVs go through that self-certification. And then there's also, there's reference architecture that's being done and other engineered solutions that we talked about earlier. And the lab is set up in a way that when needed, test lines can be isolated. So, only certain set of partners have access to it. So, it's made up in a way that enables collaborations. At the same times, it kind of enables a certain set of customers and partners working together without having challenges of having a completely open system. >> Okay, but so, if I want to do something with you guys and let's say, I am a candidate for an engineered system, so how does it work? Somebody's got to buy the equipment, right? He's got to ship it, right? There's a lot of Dell equipment involved. >> Tibor: That's correct. >> There's other third-party CapEx software, et cetera. So, you fund that, the partners fund that, it's a hybrid funding model, how does that all get done? >> So today, for obviously, we work closely with those partners. The engineered solutions we've developed so far, we've been funding it largely and as you said, is Dell infrastructure plus the cast layers and the cloud players we work with. So, we actually put those in place. We funded them, of course, with participation from them. And that's being done through those labs. >> Okay, great. So, you guys are providing that benefit to the ecosystem. Writing checks, bringing engineering talent to the table. >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Okay. >> And at the same time, I mean, it's a partnership at the end of the day, right? So, depending on the kind of partnership we are. So, if you're an ISV, it's fairly simple. Come into our labs. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure. >> Sure. >> Run it all in our labs and you're good. If you're a hardware vendor or a NEP, network equipment provider, that's where it gets interesting where they need to send us stuff, we need to send them stuff. And usually, like Tibor mentioned, it's a joint collaboration. We all put in our chips on the table and we work together. >> So, when you're having conversations with prospective partners, obviously different types of partners, Gautam, that you just talked about, what's in it for them? What's the value proposition? What does this community- >> Gautam: Yeah. >> give them from a competitive advantage standpoint? >> Yeah, so I mean there are, so the way I think about it, right? There are three things that Dell is bringing to the table. The first one is our experience and expertise on doing this transformation within the enterprise space and the learnings we have from there that we're bringing to telco now, right? So, Dell's been working with enterprises for many, many years. We are one of the big providers there. We all know what transformation enterprise went through. >> Tibor: Telco transformation, IT transformation. >> Exactly. And that's the experience we have, which we're bringing to telco. The second one is our investment, both from a go-to market side as well as the way we are working with our sales and marketing, and so on and so forth, with the engineering side. And finally, I think, and this for me is the best one, is Dell is a very partner-centric organization. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Our strategy is built around partnerships. So, that's the other piece that we bring to the table. >> Where are the labs? Oh, go ahead. >> And what's one more note on that, and also, we are talking about the engineered solutions. There's also the supply chain then because that's a basically appliance and then that goes to Dell's supply chain, which is best in class. >> Dave: And where are the labs? How many are there? >> So Round Rock, Texas is the biggest one, the 13,000 square feet. We also have extension to it. We just announced opening one in Cork for the EME market to making sure that we can cover any regulatory challenges. But also, basically any test lines that we need to cover that have latency challenges. That's why we want to make sure that we have labs in other areas as well. >> And the go-to market, is it an overlay organization, a dedicated organization? >> Yeah, so it's a bit of both as you know. But yeah, in the telecom business unit, we have a dedicated sales organization as well as an alliance organization working very closely with product and engineering to take it to market. >> Given the strength and the breadth of the partner program in the community, based on this is only day one of MWC but is there anything that you've heard today that excites you where telecom is going and where Dell and its ecosystem is going and really burgeoning? >> Oh, I've had I don't know how many meetings since 6:00 AM this morning. So, it's been an amazing event and we're just having so many great conversations with partners, our customers. And I think a lot of today is all about figuring out what our strategy and our vision is, where is each side going and what the overlap is. I think the end result's going to be follow up conversations with a lot of these partners that we are working with or will be working with soon. And then thinking about, do we build engineered solutions together? Do we go validated route? Like we going to figure that out. But I mean, for me, this is like the perfect place to come and share your vision and strategy and understand what we are trying to solve for. >> To me, what's been interesting that all the interactions and discussions are about how to get to or render open ecosystem. That's great to see that the focus is on how to make it work versus still questioning it and I think that's pretty good. >> Well, you guys launched this business I think during the pandemic, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So I mean, you could do a lot over Zoom, but as we were talking about earlier, having the face-to-face interaction, there's no replacement for it. The 6:00 AM meetings versus the 30 minute zoom calls and your body language, I mean, you learn so much that you can take away from these events. >> Absolutely. Seeing someone in 3D is so different and it's good to build that relationship and rapport as well with the folks. >> I agree. >> It is. There's so much value in the hallway conversations that you can't have over Zoom. So, I guess last question for you as we head into to day two, what are some of the things that we can be on the lookout for from Dell and its ecosystem? >> Hmm. >> Interesting. (Tibor chuckling) >> I mean, all our announcements are out. I think what you can look at for us to really be leading in this segment, taking a leadership role, and continuously looking at how we can really enable the open ecosystem and how we can provide more value there, and how we can see how we can lead in this space. >> How you can lead in this space. >> Yeah, I mean for me, I mean, day two is like, I have a lot more meetings in day two than day one so I don't know if it's like people flying in today or what, but it's amazing to just meet the partners and customers. >> So, that theme of velocity for you is going to keep going. >> Oh, it's not stopping. (Lisa laughing) That's for sure. We are excited about it. >> Well, thank you for carving out some time to talk to with us on "theCUBE" about the partner program, the open ecosystem and the commitment to growing that and enabling partners to really differentiate their services with Dell. We appreciate it. >> We appreciate it as well. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. Day one of our coverage. Be right back with our final guest of the day so stick around. (upbeat music continues)

>> 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)

>> 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)

>> Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering W T G transformed 2019 Accio by Winslow Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen And this is the Cubes. Third year at W. T. G. Transform 2019 which is the Window Technologies Group, Their user conference. Longtime compelling customer, of course. Compelling, bought by Del del Body M. C. So it's now the deli emcee user event and to help me kick off a day of content where we're gonna be talking. Toa some of the W T G executive some of their customers and some of their partners is first time guests on the program. Joe Batista, Who's a Creek and easy chief creative, apologised at Del Technologies. Joe Appreciate you making it all the way in from the suburbs to come here to downtown Boston in the shadow of Fenway. >> It was a long haul this morning with no traffic of 5 30 35 minutes in. >> Yeah, a Zeiss safe for the people. Adele. It's about the distant from Boston Towe where we live as it is to go from Austin to Round Rock. So >> there we go, >> you know, similar types of things. So I have to start create apologised. A song. You know, I did a little bit of reading and, you know, having watched Aquino, it's, you know, sparking that creativity. So I love the idea of it. You've had this title for quite a while since before you Riddell just give us a little bit about background of you know what you do, and you know why you're qualified to do it. >> Well, it was quite a fight. It's a fun brand, but literally. It sits at the nexus of business and technology, and my job's simply is to help it re image the business, because now every company's a technology company. So what does that look like? So I get involved Also, it's a really cool problems, opportunities that customers are facing by re imaging it >> well, it's funny that you say re image, because when I did my history, the oldest thing I found some article from the nineties talking about somebody from Polaroid that that title and I was actually talking to some of the young people in the office there, like everybody's using Polaroids. There's these days, it's cool. It's true. They're doing it. So what's old is new again. You know everything come back together. So luckily, you know our industry. I mean, nothing changes, right? You know, it's the same now as it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago. You know, I'll just go into the factory and pumping things out now. >> Still, you know, I've been a referee a long time, and in the old days we had swim lengths, right? You know, you thought about certain vendors. They were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, as I was talking about, and the level of it of even innovation cycle time and how the industry's become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity index has increased exponentially, and the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerate. So, no, it hasn't gotten easier. It's gotten more difficult. >> Yeah, fascinating. Actually. I just heard a segment on our national public radio station here in Boston talking about that. One of the biggest changes and how people think over the last few decades is we're better at recognizing patterns. Used to be, we could be an expert on something and do our thing, you know. We know the old trope is well, you know. My grandfather, you know, worked at a company for 30 years and did his same thing today. Things are changing constantly. You know, we didn't have, you know, the power of a supercomputer in our pocket, you know, 10 years ago, you know, let alone even older. So, you know, this is a user conference. So you know what air they did do. I mean, if if I understand, if I'm, you know, making a decision today for my business. And oftentimes that decision is something I need to live with for a while. How do I make sure that I'm making the right decisions That's going to keep me, you know, you know, keeping up with the competition and keeping my business moving forward as things constantly change. >> Yeah. So there is no easy answer to that question. There's a couple of thoughts and hasn't said in the presentation. You gotta look at these vectors that impacted trajectory of the thinking. And I love the Peter Drucker coat. Right. If he using yesterday's logic probably gonna get in trouble, you have to rethink the logic. In the example I gave you was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1960. So? So the question becomes one of those vectors, and I went through some of those vectors to help people think about, Okay, I do. My analysis on technology, that's all good. And, uh, tell technology you got a huge portfolio of technology. But how do you think about the perimeter? About how those things change over depreciation cycle. So is trying to add a little bit more color in there, thought processes. And I got a lot of post questions afterwards and a lot of engagements. So it seemed to resonate with the field. And I'll tell you what. The thing that they like the most was the business conversation off. They're like, you know, we don't do that enough. >> Yeah, right. I mean, you know, when we look at the successful companies today, it is not, You know, we've been talking for years, you know? Does it matter? Is it just a cost center? And it needs to be if it isn't helping the business drive forward and responding to what the business needs, uh, you know, could be replaced. That's where we got. Shadow it. It's It can't be the nowhere the slow needs to be. When the business says we need to go, you know, get on board and drive. I love one of the analogies you used is, you know, in this world of complexity, there's so many things out there, You know, when I've worked with, you know, enterprises and small cos you look at their environments and it's like, Oh my God, it's this Hedorah genius mess, you know? How do we standardize things? How do we make things easier? You had a fun little analogy talking about space. Maybe, maybe. >> Okay, that was good. I always try to use visuals as much as possible. So high, high, high light with challenges. So the challenge was, Oh, actually have it in my pocket. So they pulled this out and basically what it is. If you look at the international space shuttle, that's the only thing that they need to fix anything on Specialist 7/16 inch socket or the millimeter version of it. I can't read. Excited my glasses on to fix anything. So imagine if I had one tool to fix anything that's Nirvana. That's not reality. I have to fatigue. So I need to get to that simplicity. Its glasses law remember, every 25% increase in function shin is 100% increase in complexity. And that's public enemy number one for us. >> All right, so So you hopped on board the Dell family relatively recently, when most people think, Adele, it's well, you know, Delpy sees, you know, talk to my you know, my parents. They're like they know Dell computers. They've used them forever. You're talking most people, you know, Del servant. Like you talked a lot about your presentation software is eating the world. Give give us how you know where Del fits in that software was eating the world picture. >> Well, what I can tell you, though, is I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal not only about the hardware but the soft. And I think actually, Jeff said it best. I think we have more software engineers now that we have heart hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we're pivoting our talent, the software, but it's the innovation that's in this company. And I think I kind of rattled off a couple of statistics by how much we spend the quantity of I p that we have. And I think customers are amazed at that innovation. But the supercharger on is okay. How does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company? And what value do you extract from it? And that's where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you, though, I'm really excited that Del Technologies kind of doubling down on business outcomes. They're really trying to change the culture and helping customers understand what the technology >> means. Yeah, one of things that struck me. I've been to this event now for a couple of years, and, you know, there's a lot of product discussion here, you know, when you get down to the channel, it's like, Okay, great. You know, I'm doing a server refresh. I'm looking to things like hyper convert, you know? What am I doing in my network? You know, when you up level things a little bit, You know, when I went to del World, it's like, you know, we hear about the venture, you know, activity that's happening around and things like coyote coming down the pipe. But How does that trickle down to the customers? That talking event here? It's great to talk about innovation, but, you know, I got to run my business. You know what? You know. Where does Del fit in that picture >> for you? Got it? Well, it's a custom you got to do both, right? So this has got to be a shift, because now I have to think differently, right? I know how to do feature analysis and benefit analysis of a point in time product, but what's the periphery of activities that inspecting, impacting that decision? Does that architectures scale? What are the economics around that? So you need to think about all those things. And I think it's just a journey for not only us as a vendor, but also for customers as well. >> Okay, so you're relatively new in today. L I want to ask you You gave a great quote in your presentation from from Jack Welch. Er said if the rate of change outside the company is greater than inside the company, the end is near. >> I would say the post. >> So, you know, explain to us the pace of change inside of del technologies. >> Well, you know, that's That's a That's a big question. I mean, piece of change varies by organization by business unit I really can't comment on your individual business units, but I will say, though there's a definite desire toe. Understand? We're customers interested. He is there. So what's the customer trying to dio? And then how do we satisfy the customer request? It's a matter of fact. I don't know if you know this and it was amazing because that's what the customer the other day, you know, Stevie Awards. Which a customer satisfaction, which we double down on customer satisfaction. We have a customer chief customer officer was Karen, and we just won 15 Stevie Awards, which is about customer satisfaction. So I think there's a slow shift, but there's a real focus on customer Central City. For us, the velocity will get there. But if you put the customer at the center like we do, that's a winning strategy. >> Yeah, well, yeah, we know Karen Kim does quite well, you know, culture and working with customers. You know, quite dio you talked about the portfolio of companies and l We know Del Bhumi quite well. We've done their event in the team were well, and you know, VM wears no slouch in the industry. I've had one of the pleasures of my careers. You know, I started working with him. Where when they were, like, 100 person company. No, watch them grow and pack. El Singer, I think was just named like the number one number two, you know, CEO work for employees by employees from glass doors. So, you know No, no slouch on the the venture family. So congratulations, toe Dale family on all that. >> Thank you very much are exciting. >> Joe Batista. Thank you so much for joining me here at the W T. G. Transformed 2019. Pleasure to catch up with you. Appreciate the opportunity. All right, so we're here with customers, the executives, and digging into all the industry trends. Of course. Check out the cute dot net for where we will be. And, uh, I think it was always for watching the cube

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world I'm Lisa Martin we're in Vegas I'm with Keith Townsend and we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day - we've got Chad Dunn a cube alumni VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Harris senior director of product marketing at VMware welcome so guys lots of news coming out today saw in the press release Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure announcements 2vx rail VX rack sddc what's new obviously there's a lot new I mean really happy with with the market share and the and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyper-converged portfolio VX rail VX rack at CDC on VX rail we added new capabilities like 25 gig Ethernet nvme drives new security capabilities new graphical processing unit high density memory on the VX rack side we're now on Dell 14 G servers in fact that hardware is basically VX rail inside VX rack SD DC so you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap and we also announced a VMware validated design on VX rail and again we're starting to sort of merge the divisions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology so met helped paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical vmware vsphere we abstracted away the hardware so the hardware doing no longer matters right yeah well that's a great analogy actually so I'm a longtime vmware employee and one of the things that's Jean about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure so what cloud formations really doing it's like the next iteration of East here it's bringing together the storage compute network and management layers that make up our entire sddc solution and delivering that as a automated and and a two operated system the customers get the maximum value out of that and when we partner up with somebody like Dell I was able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities and Clapp foundation we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace and hardware always matters we're literally nothing without it first Dell technologies world in the name change an indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies what we'll say power does that are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware well I think the the obvious thing that everybody sees is the power of the portfolio that we now have ya know me as a product owner of a hyperconvergence platform I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server there are a lot - OH - MS do to get servers to build our product but now you know I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market yeah right here under the same roof and now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock or integrated with those teams so having the power both internally and npower for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio VMware pivotal RSA secure works virtuous dream I mean it's a really amazing IT portfolio and the great thing about coming to a show like this is I've seen a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them reenergized about the technology so Matt let's execute a similar question pre-merger one of the things that on the customer side you know I had an EMC rep rep I had a vmworld rep generally speaking never suck we've never met together can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with dale emc versus the previous emc where the pro folio was limited to mainly storage products yeah well so the reality is vmware has always had a great relationship with obviously emc where i owned us but also with dell I mean if I think about my years in the field with customers Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together they had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved it was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with the Dell Rob that's only gotten easier and because my product that I'm responsible for Clapp foundation is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dells solutions that just makes that conversation more meaningful it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to to leverage some of the IP that we created for VX rail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VX RAC sddc so you don't think our group and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with vmware in more places than anybody else in WMC we've had a long-standing collaboration on VX rail and now with cloud foundation it gets even better and what's the business value that you're seeing from VCS in the customer service in light of this strong new collaboration that's that's a great question so you know you know virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way datacenters actually exist today it's not just private and public cloud the dimensions of the datacenter expanding all over the place edge systems are important as public and private cloud and what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those streamlets operations it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workload consistently across all of those different platforms and and you know if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center I'm a great example this is the kind of work they were doing around IOT with Dell and that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of class foundation now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions so I can take the extra lvx rack instead of setting up a POC of open source software to find data centers I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say you know what we tried this this is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations where are the pain points that VCF but on top of vehicle rack it's all well start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as the customer don't have to there are between nine and twelve different programmable firmware devices inside of PowerEdge server do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers no of course not right you want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers out upgrade that firmware connect it to the right bits in in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're gonna get peak performance so we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you when people tried to do it themselves they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier so that's not on the hardware side on the software side yeah so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence hybrid cloud for example is not doable unless you can really remove make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration is really done and that's a critical pain point that you know customers have always derived benefit from NSX the Santa Ana VCR but to have these things all integrated into one product with the cloud foundation that was a game-changer for bringing these solutions together for lifecycle management day to operations as I mentioned that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing a ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies so the theme of the event make it real if you look at a financial services institution for example together what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation what is that reality that you're helping them achieve yeah well so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user to any mobile device or desktop device that's a real capability that we're delivering for example Clapp foundation can instantiate through this concept called workload domain both traditional infrastructures of service applications and VDI the virtual desktops so this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together yeah just not with 1:00 this morning and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week on to their VX rack sddc infrastructure and I believe they just crossed the 5500 VM mark and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project so that's real and and from the business outcomes perspective what does it allow that customer to achieve that then allows them to you know transition from where they are today which is about 60 percent virtualized to 95 percent virtualized when they when they reach the end of this journey and because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware managing the software on all of those lifecycle things and the automation that comes from the cloud management platform you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business right instead of worrying about all the you know the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure so what's next what was one on the horizon for the relationship what our customers asking for 200 meetings this week I'm sure there's been requests from customers tons of requests they want to see more automated lifecycle management they want to see vx rail releases in VMware releases get closer together in time they want us to be simultaneously shipping which is something that we're working on they want latest and greatest everybody wants to talk about nvme you know now we have nvme faster connectivity for the devices so you know the platform roadmap will continue but I think what Matt and I what we talk about quite frequently you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy as we have the x-ray oh and we have the X rack sddc and we have cloud foundation doesn't need to be - right how do these come together is this consumption model it's just a different consumption model for the same technology so we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products - to build a better portfolio for the VMware I've converged use case and I would say for our part we look to continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of you know VX rail and in VX rack having you know the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together I'll also say that looking out into the future I mentioned multiple workload profiles data analytics IOT NFV in addition to traditional high as it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack for from an automated perspective can we automate the applique underlying application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile and that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future well guys thanks so much for stopping by talking about what's new how you're enabling cuz to really facilitate the IT transformation enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that to be here thank you we want to thank you for watching the queue we are live at day two or finishing day two I should say of Delft technologies world in Las Vegas I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the theCUBE. Now here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special theCUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, Danny Cobb, who's with Dell EMC in the CTO office. >> Thanks Stu, great to see you here today. >> Great to see you too. So Danny, we're going to talk about a topic that like many things in the industry. It seems like it's something that happen overnight, but there's been a lot of hard work going on for quite a lot of years, even going back to heck when you and I worked together. >> Danny: That's right. >> A company use to be called EMC. NVMe, so first of all just bring everybody up to speed as to what you work on inside the Dell family. >> Danny: Sure, so my responsibility at now Dell EMC has been this whole notion of emergence systems. New technologies, new capabilities that are just coming into broad market adoption, broad readiness, technological feasibility, and those kinds of things. And then making sure that as a company we're prepared for their adoption and inclusion in our product portfolio. So it's a great set of capabilities a great set of work to be doing especially if you have a short attention span like I do. >> Danny, I spend a lot of time these days in the open source world. You talk about people are moving faster, people are trying lots of technologies. You've been doing some really hard work. The company and the industry in the standards world. What's the importance of standards these days, and bring us back to how this NVMe stuff started. >> So a great way to get everybody up to speed as you mentioned when you kicked off. NVMe, an overnight success, almost 11 years in the making now. The very first NVMe standard was about 2007. EMC joined the NVMe consortium in 2008 along with an Austin, Texas computer company called Dell. So Dell and EMC were both in the front row of defining the NVMe standard, and essentially putting in place a set of standards, a set of architectures, a set of protocols, product adoption capabilities, compatibility capabilities for the entire industry to follow, starting in 2008. Now you know from our work together that the storage industry likes to make sure that everything's mature, everything works reliably. Everything has broad interoperability standards and things like that. So since 2008, we've largely been about how do we continue to build momentum and generate support for a new storage technology that's based on broadly accepted industry standards, in order to allow the entire industry to move forward. Not just to achieve the most out of the flash revolution, but prepare the industry for coming enhancements to storage class memory. >> Yeah, so storage class memory you mentioned things like flash. One thing we've looked at for a long time is when flash rolled out. There's a lot of adoption on the consumer side first, and then that drove the enterprise piece, but flash today is still done through Ikusi interface with SaaS or Sata. And believe we're finally getting rid of when we go to NVMe. What some in the industry have called the horrible Ikusi stack. >> Danny: That's right. >> So explain to us a little bit about first, the consumer piece of where this fits first, and how it gets the enterprise. Where are we in the industry today with that? >> Yeah so as you pointed out a number of the new media technologies have actually gained a broad acceptance and a grounds full of support starting in the consumer space. The rapid adoption of mobile devices whether initially iPods and iPhones and things like that. Tablets where the more memory you have the more songs you carry, the more pictures you can take. A lot of very virtuous cycle type things occurred in the consumer space to allow flash to go from a fairly expensive perhaps niche technology to broad high volume manufacturing. And with high volume manufacturing comes much lower costs and so we always knew that flash was fast when we first started working on it at EMC in 2005. It became fast and robust when we shipped in 2008. It went from flash to robust to affordable with technologies like the move from SLC to MLC, and now TLC flash and the continuing advances of Moore's law. And so flash has been the beneficiary of high volume consumer economics along with our friend Moore's law over a number of years. >> Okay, so on the NVMe piece, your friends down in Round Rock in Dell. They've got not only the storage portfolio, but on the consumer side. There's pieces like my understanding NVMe already in the market for some part of this today, correct. >> That's right, I think one of the very first adoption scenarios for NVMe was in Lightweight laptop device. The storage deck could be more efficient. The fundamental number of gates in Silicon required to implement the stack was more efficient. Power was more efficient, so a whole bunch of things that were beneficial to a mobile high volume client device like an ultra light, ultra portable laptop made it a great place to launch the technology. >> Okay, and so bring us to what does that mean then for storage? Is that available in the enterprise storage today? >> Danny: Yeah. >> And where is that today and where is that today, and where are we going to see in the next years though? >> So here's the progression that the industry has more or less followed. If we went from that high volume, ultra light laptop device to very inexpensive M.2 devices that could be used in laptops and desktops more broadly, also gained a fair amount of traction with certain used cases and hyperscalers. And then as the spec matured and as the enterprise ecosystem around it, broader data integrity type solutions in the sili-case itself. A number of other things that are bread and butter for enterprise class devices. As those began to emerge, we've now seen NVMe move forward from laptop and client devices to high volume M.2 devices to full function, full capability dual ported enterprise NVMe devices really crossing over this year. >> Okay, so that means we're going to see not only in the customer pieces but should be seeing really enterprise roll out in I'm assuming things like storage arrays, maybe hyper converged. All the different flavors in the not too distant future. >> Absolutely right, the people who get paid to forecast these things when they look into their crystal balls. They've talked about when does NVMe get close enough to its predecessor SaaS to make the switch over be a no brainer. And often times, you get a performance factor where there's more value or you get a cost factor where suddenly that becomes the way the game is won. In the case of NVMe versus SaaS, both of those situations value and cost are more or less a wash right now across the industry. And so there are very few impediments to adoption. Much like a few years ago, there were very few impediment to adoption of enterprise SSDs versus high performance HDDs. The 15Ks and the 10K HDDs. Once we got to close enough in terms of cost parity. The entire industry went all flash over night. >> Yeah, it's a little bit different than say the original adoption of flash versus HDD. >> Danny: That's right. >> HDD versus SSD. Remember back, you had to have the algebra sheet. And you said okay, how many devices did I have.? What's the power savings that I could get out of that? Plus the performance that I had and then does this makes sense. It seems like this is a much more broadly applicable type of solution that we'll see. >> Danny: Right. >> For much faster adoption. >> Do you remember those days of a little goes a long way? >> Stu: Yeah. >> And then more is better? And then almost be really good, and so that's where we've come over what seems like a very few years. >> Okay, so we've only been talking about NVMe, the thing I know David Foyer's been look a lot from an architectural standpoint. Where we see benefit obviously from NVMe but NVMe over Fabrics is the thing that has him really excited if you talk about the architectures, maybe just explain a little bit about what I get with NVMe and what I'll get added on top with the over fabric piece of that. >> Danny: Sure. >> And what's that roll out look like? >> Can I tell you a little story about what I think of as the birth of NVMe over Fabrics? >> Stu: Please. >> Some of your viewers might remember a project at EMC called Thunder. And Thunder was PCI flash with an RDMA over ethernet front end on it. We took that system to Intel developers forum as a proof of concept. Around the corner from me was an engineer named Dave Min-turn, who's an Intel engineer. Who had almost exactly the same software stack up and running except it was an Intel RDMA capability nick and an Intel flash drive, and of course some changes to the Intel processor stack to support the used case that he had in mind. And we started talking and we realized that we were both counting the number of instructions from packet arriving across the network to bytes being read or written on the vis-tory fast PCI E device. And we realized that there has to be a better way, and so from that day, I think it was September 2013, maybe it was August. We actually started working together on how can we take the benefits of the NVMe standard that exists mapped onto PCI E. And then map those same parameters as cleanly as we possibly can onto, at that time ethernet but also InfiniBand, Fiber channel, and perhaps some other transports as a way to get the benefits of the NVMe software stack, and build on top of the new high performance capabilities of these RDMA capable interconnects. So it goes way back to 2013, we moved it into the NVMe standard as a proposal in 2014. And again three, four years later now, we're starting to see solutions roll out that begin to show the promise that we saw way back then. >> Yeah and the challenge with networking obviously is sounds like you've got a few different transport layers that I can use there. Probably a number of different providers. How baked is the standard? Where do things like hits the interoperability fit into the mix? When do customers get their hands on it, and what can they expect the roll out to be? >> We're clearly at the beginning of what's about to be a very, I think long and healthy future for NVMe over Fabrics. I don't know about you. I was at Flash Memory Summit back in August in Santa Clara and there were a number of vendors there starting to talk about NVMe over Fabrics basics. FPGA implementation, system on chip implementations, software implementations across a variety of stacks. The great thing was NVMe over Fabrics was a phrase of the entire show. The challenging thing was probably no two of those solutions interoperated with each other yet. We were still at the running water through the pipes phase, not really checking for leaks and getting to broad adoption. Broad adoption I think comes when we've got a number of vendors broad interoperability, multi-supplier, component availability and those things, that let a number of implementations exists and interoperate because our customers live in a diverse multi-vendor environment. So that's what it will take to go from interesting proof of concept technology which I think is what we're seeing in terms of early customers engagement today to broad base deployment in both existing fiber channel implementations, and also in some next generation data center implementations, probably beginning next year. >> Okay, so Danny, I talked to a lot of companies out there. Everyone that's involved in this (mumbles) has been talking about NVMe over Fabric for a couple of years now. From a user standpoint, how are they going to help sort this out? What will differentiate the check box. Yes, I have something that follows this to, oh wait this will actually help performance so much better. What works with my environment? Where are the pitfalls and where are the things that are going to help companies? What's going to differentiate the marketplace? >> As an engineer, we always get into the speeds and the feeds and the weeds on performance and things like that, and while those are all true. We can talk about fewer and fewer instructions in the networks stack. Fewer and fewer instructions in the storage stack. We can talk about more efficient Silicon implementations. More affinity for multi-processor, multi-core processing environments, more efficient operating system implementations and things like that. But that's just the performance side. The broader benefits come to beginning to move to more cost effective data center fabric implementation. Where I'm not managing an orange wire and a blue wire unless that's really what I want. There's still a number of people who want to manage their fiber channel and will run NVMe over that. They get the compatibility that they want. They get the policies that they want and the switch behavior that they want, and the provisioning model that they want and all of those things. They'll get that in an NVMe over Fabrics implementation. A new data center however will be able to go, you know what, I'm all in day one on 25, 5000 bit gigabit ethernet as my fundamental connection of choice. I'm going 400 gigabit ethernet ports as soon as Andy Beck-tels shine or somebody gives them to me and things like that. And so if that's the data center architecture model that I'm in, that's a fundamental implementation decision that I get to make knowing that I can run an enterprise grade, storage protocol over the top of that, and the industry is ready. My external storage is ready, my servers are ready and my workloads can get the benefit of that. >> Okay, so if I just step back for a second, NVMe sounds like a lot of it is what we would consider the backend in proving that NVMe over Fabrics helps with some of the front end. From a customer stand point, what about their application standpoint? Can they work with everything that they have today? Are there things that they're going to want to do to optimize for that? So the storage industry just take care of it for them. What do they think about today and future planning from an application standpoint? >> I think it's a matter of that readiness and what is it going to take. The good news and this has analogs to the industry change from HDD to SSDs in the first place. The good new is you can make that switch over today and your data management application, your database application, your warehouse, you're analytics or whatever. Not one line of software changes. NVMe device shows up in the block stack of your favorite operating system, and you get lower latency, more IOs in parallel. More CPU back for your application to run because you don't need it in the storage stack anymore. So you get the benefits of that just by changing over to this new protocol. For applications who then want to optimize for this new environment, you can start thinking about having more IOs in flight in parallel. You could start thinking about what happens when those IOs are satisfied more rapidly without as much overhead in and interrupt processing and a number of things like that. You could start thinking about what happens when your application goes from hundred micro-second latencies and IOs like the flash devices to 10 microsecond or one microsecond IOs. Would perhaps with some of these new storage class memory devices that are out there. Those are the benefits that people are going to see when they start thinking about an all NVMe stack. Not just being beneficial for existing flash implementations but being fundamentally required and mandatory to get the benefits of storage class memory implementations. So this whole notion of future ready was one of the things that was fundamental in how NVMe was initially designed over 10 years ago. And we're starting to see that long term view pay benefits in the marketplace. >> Any insight from the customer standpoint? Is it certain applications or verticals where this is really going to help? I think back to the move to SSDs. It was David Foyer who just wet around the entire news feed. He was like, database, database, database is where we can have the biggest impact. What's NVMe going to impact? >> I think what we always see with these things. First of all, NVMe is probably going to have a very rapid advancement and impact across the industry much more quickly than the transition from HDD to SSD, so we don't have to go through that phase of a little goes a long way. You can largely make the switch and as your ecosystem supports it as your vendor of choice supports it. You can make that switch and to a large extent have the application be agnostic from that. So that's a really good way to start. The other place is you and I have had this conversation before. If you take out a cocktail napkin and you draw an equation that says time equals money. That's an obvious place where NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics benefit someone initially. High speed analytics, real time, high frequency trading, a number of things where more efficiency. My ability to do more work per unit time than yours gives me a competitive advantage. Makes my algorithms better, exposes my IP in a more advantageous way. Those are wonderful places for these types of emerging technologies to get adopted because the value proposition is just slam dunk simple. >> Yeah, so running through my head are all the latest buzz words. Is everything at Wikibon when we did our predictions for this year, data is at the center of all of it. But machine learning, AI, heck blockchain, Edge computing all of these things can definitely be affected by that. Is NVMe going to help all of them? >> Oh machine learning. Incredible high bandwidth application. Wonderful thing stream data in, compute on it, get your answers and things like that. Wonderful benefits for a new squeaky clean storage stack to run into. Edge where often times, real time is required. The ability to react to a stimulus and provide a response because of human safety issue or a risk management issue or what have you. Any place that performance let's you get close, get you outer close to real time is a win. And the efficiency of NVMe has a significant advantage in those environments. So NVMe is largely able to help the industry be ready just at the time that new processing models are coming in such as machine learning, artificial intelligence. New data center deployment architectures like the Edge come in and the new types of telemetry and algorithms that they maybe running there. It's really a technology that's arriving just at the time that the industry needs it. >> Yeah, was reading up on some of the blogs on the Dell sites. Jeff Brew-dough said, "We should expect "to see things from 2018." Not expecting you to pre-announce anything but what should we be looking for from Dell and the Dell family in 2018 when it comes to this space? >> We're very bullish on NVMe. We've been pushing very, very hard in the standards community. Obviously, we have already shipped NVMe for a series of internal use cases in our storage platforms. So we have confidence in the technology, its readiness, the ability of our software stacks to do what they need to do. We have a robust, multi-supplier supply chain ready to go so that we can service our customers, and provide them the choice in capacities and capabilities and things like that that are required to bet your business, and long term supply assurance for and things like that. So we're seeing the next year or so be the full transition to NVMe and we're ready for it. We've been getting ready for a long time. Now, the ecosystem is there and we're predicting very big things in the future. >> Okay, so Danny, you've been working on this for 11 years. Give us just a little bit of insight. What you learned, what this group has learned from previous transitions? What's excited you the most? Give us a little bit of sausage making? >> What's been funny about this is we talk about the initial transition to flash, and just getting to the point where a little goes a long way. That was a three year journey. We started in 2005, we shipped in 2008. We moved from there. We flash in a raise as a tier, as a cache, as the places where a little latency, high performance media adds value and those things. Then we saw the industry begin to develop into some server centric storage solutions. You guys have been at the front of forecasting what that market looks like with software defined storage. We see that in technologies like ScaleIO and VSAN where their abilities to start using the media when it's resident in a server became important. And suddenly that began to grow as a peer to the external storage market. Another market San alternative came along with them. Now we're moving even further out where it seems like we use to ask why flash? And it will get asked that. Now it's why not flash? Why don't we move there? So what we've seen is a combination of things. As we get more and more efficient low latency storage protocols. The bottle neck stops being about the network and start being about something else. As we get more multi-core compute capabilities and Moore's law continues to tickle along. We suddenly have enough compute and enough bandwidth and the next thing to target is the media. As we get faster and faster more capable media such as the move to flash and now the move to storage class memory. Again the bottle neck moves away from the media, maybe back to something else in the stack. As I advance compute in media and interconnect, suddenly it becomes beneficial for me to rewrite my application or re-platform it, and create an entire new set of applications that exploit the current capabilities or the technologies. And so we are in that rinse, lather repeat cycle right now in the technology. And for guys like you and me who've been doing this for awhile, we've seen this movie before. We know how it hands. It actually doesn't end. There are just new technologies and new bottlenecks and new manifestations of Moore's law and Holmes law and Metcalfe's law that come into play here. >> Alright so Danny, any final predictions from you on what we should be seeing? What's the next thing you work on that you call victory soon right? >> Yes, so I'm starting to lift my eyes a little bit and we think we see some really good capabilities coming at us from the device physicists in the white coats with the pocket protectors back in the fabs. We're seeing a couple of storage class memories begin to come to market now. You're led by Intel and microns, 3D XPoint but a number of other candidates on the horizon that will take us from this 100 microsecond world to a 10 microsecond world maybe to a 100 nanosecond world. And you and I we back here talking about that fairly soon I predict. >> Excellent, well Danny Cobb always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for walking us through all of the pieces. We'll have lots more coverage of this technology and lots more more. Check out theCUBE.net. You can see Dell Technology World and lots of the other shows will be back. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)