>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Q. Come to you from our Palo Alto studio with our ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The digital experience Let's jump into a really excited to have our next guest CIA Sam Bird, the president of the Client Solutions Group for Dell. Sam, where you joining us from today? >>Hey, I am joining you live from Austin, Texas. Jeff looks beautiful. All weather? Yeah, its's turning really nice. Uh, nice time to be here in Austin, right? So, >>Sam, let's jump into it. I mean, you, you cover, you know, kind of the heart of what Dell started with which was which was PCs. And, you know, it's funny. A couple days ago, Michael tweeted because he likes to tweet, which is fun. An article that said that the PC officially died today. It's a reference back to an article I had to look at the January 26 2010. Officially, the PC officially died today. >>That >>is so bizarre, and that is not in fact, not true, you guys. We're seeing unprecedented demand, so I wonder if it is You Look back at that. And I'm sure you saw Michaels tweet. What kind of goes through your head? Because we're in a very different space than we were 10 years ago. >>Yeah, I think the world's changed a lot, Jeff from 10 years ago. I got to say, uh, the PC died 10 years ago. It feels pretty good being being dead for 10 years. So I think we actually saw a, you know, still alive and very vibrant. PC. So you think about everything that's happened with Cove it We have seen the PC and people using technology to stay connected, whether it's, you know, working in their business, learning from home, staying connected with other family members. So we'd like to talk about it Is the renaissance of the PC. It kind of this rebirth reemergence of this really good friend that you had has become really core toe how we're getting stuff done in the world today, and we've stayed bullish about the opportunity around the PC. Michaels had that view from, you know, when he started this company, and we've since expanded to many other areas beyond selling PCs. But we continue to be really committed to the value of that technology in people's hands, >>right? So just in defense of the of the article, it was written on the launch of the iPad right, which was a new a new form factor. And, you know, we've seen this proliferation of form factors both within PCs and mobile phones, and you know, the sizes of screens getting bigger and the size of green getting smaller and surface all kinds of different things. So I wonder if you could share, you know, kind of your perspective in, you know, kind of the opportunity that opens up when people are looking for different types of form factors. And then, more importantly, I think now it's horses for courses. So when I'm sitting at my desk, you know, I haven't a big giant XPS with all the ram and GPU and stuff Aiken stuff into it. If I'm going to the airport with a long flight, I want something small and light and easy to carry and what's interesting, I think, with cloud it enables you now to basically have the form factor that you need where you need it for the types of work that you're trying to get done. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, if you if you take that 10 years ago, article to today we have had an enormous amount of innovation in the industry that's made the device is exciting and appealing for how people wanna want to operate. So, you know, we've seen Jeff a shift towards more mobile form factors with cove in. So, um, a commercial space that used to be maybe half desktops, half notebooks is now in the 70% range. More mobile form factors which reflects how people want to use them. You know, they're sitting at home, they need that device to be portable. They wanna go between rooms and home. That's the other thing that we found in some of our, you know, research and work on the spaces. You know, people might want to sit at the kitchen table in the morning in the afternoon. Maybe they're outside. They might have their kids do in school from home and have to be around them part of the day, so they still need a mobile kind of form factor, but it's plugged in. I want full power to run my applications. And, like you said, we will get back to a world with travel and people being mobile. And then you need to dial in the right form factor that has maybe a smaller screen, more portable device. So one of the things that's kept this business vibrant, you know, for the past 10 years and right now is a bigger screen experience is really, really valuable. A keyboard and multiple ways of in putting into devices are valuable, so there's core. Things are great. And then we've got systems that are set up for how people want to use them. You know, we still have designers sitting at home using big desktop workstations because the most powerful thing there times really valuable. There's a right system for how you want to use technology, and I think that that's attendant, you know, an approach we take in our business, and that's what we see in the industry. I think that's what's helped keep it very vibrant and alive. >>I love it, I love it. It is truly that work from anywhere and anywhere as you just defined, could be a whole bunch of things, and it doesn't even mean just at home or just at the coffee shop. That's really interesting. Is you even change locations where you're working within within the home. That really supports that. So, >>you >>know, Cove, it hits light switch moment. Everybody's gotta work from home. So huge, huge pressure there. And now, as you said, you know, we're seven months into it. Still gonna be going on for a little bit while a little while before people go back. Huge, huge boost to your guys business. I'm curious if you can share some thoughts in terms of, you know, now, I I need to kind of project a little bit of that office back to the work from anywhere situation. And, you know, you guys are that you're kind of that edge device that ultimately connects back to the mother ship. >>Yeah, I think it's and that's where we've seen people realized. It's a really valuable device that helps keep them, you know, productive and connected. Um, we have seen it's very interesting of it used to be, you know, pre co vid for Most people work with the location, you know, Post Cove. It it's something you do, and suddenly it's very location agnostic, and we see the world operating that way in the future Jeff of these devices at the edge or need gonna be working in a world where sometimes it makes sense to be in an office. Maybe there's collaboration, other things you need to dio. But we're going to see people working from home working from a coffee shop, working from, you know, anywhere in the world, and we're gonna need to stay connected. In that way, it's enabling a great set of talent. It's enabling people to be where they want, you know, get done what they need to do in their personal lives and then be contributing in a great way, thio to a business. So I think technology plays a huge role in going and getting that done. And to me, the world doesn't just return back to a you know, pre cove in space. But we're now in this. We've learned we can operate in this kind of multi modality world where technology can help keep us connected, collaborating, getting stuff done in some cases more productive than ever before, and it's kind of unleashed this new wave of thinking. I think we will continue to see great creativity on stuff we're putting in our devices to enable that, you know, software applications approaches that are gonna enable that that will really take us forward as we look at the future. >>You know, I'm just curious if you could share, uh, you know, kind of Ah, general breakdown by kind of form factor. What do you see between kind of, you know, I don't know if you split high end desktops and low on desktops and then, you know, kind of laptops and Chromebooks, what's kind of the high level kind of breakdown, and how's that? Is it change significantly over the last several years? And you you just mentioned a boost. You know, during the time of Cove in >>Yeah, we've seen a shift towards notebooks. Now you know much Is the article you you pulled up from 10 years ago? I think the death, the death of the desktop has also been much exaggerated. So we're Maurin, a mode of 70% of the systems that were selling our notebooks 70 to 80% range. It's a little higher, and consumer Andi, that's, you know, 20 points up in the commercial space. So we're seeing, you know, people have valued that kind of portability of systems. You know that, said is we talk through some of the ways people use it. There are great uses for desktops, for people are in the same place where I need ultimate ultimate power and then a z your home. We've seen a little more shift Teoh a suddenly you know, portability. That was really valuable because you had Salesforce's engineers on the road all the time. And I really wanted something that, you know, lasted had great battery life and was really easy to carry around. Suddenly we're in a world plugged in at home like we look at our devices, we've gone. Now more than half of our laptops are basically on is we have intelligence built into our systems. That tunes how battery management is done. Empower Management's done. More than half those systems are now in a mode of all, basically, always on a C. So people are, you know, plugged in all the time. They would like a little more powerful system. So whether they're running, zoom or teams or some other app. Multitasking. It's like there's a, you know, different requirements there. I think that changes Azzawi go forward and we get back to, you know, the notebook. It's like the ultimate design people want is a great big screen. That's super light, and the battery lasts forever. And I'm like that keeps our engineers and designers working every day because that's a really hard, complex thing to solve. And, you know, we're we continue to work and and and push that next forward. Now it's a little more biased to power. Sitting on a desk. We will be back in a world where it's gonna be, Yeah, I want power to sit on the desk, be on a video conference, get work done. But I also need to be able to take that on the road with >>Yeah, I just think, you know, because of the proliferation of online applications, right? And you know so much of our work day no pun intended, you know, is done in all these different cloud based applications, whether its sales force or slack or asana or whether we're, you know, working in in, uh, social media applications or even are you know kind of cloud enabled local applications. You know, a lot of times I find you don't have to carry your device right. E can lead the one device of one location, one of the other. I know it's almost like you pick up exactly where you were when you log back into chrome or you log back into whatever your browser is. If you've got it all configured, you know you don't even need to carry. A lot of times I find it's it's it's really nice. And if I have to check a message on the phone, No, it's a very different way of working, and, uh, I think it's really pretty slick. I do want to get into productivity, which you've talked about a lot. You know, I've always said the best productivity investment anybody could make is a second screen on the desktop. I mean, it's so much more productive to have a second screen the third screen. You go to places like Wall Street and the NASDAQ floor, where time matters and productivity matters, their screens all over the place and you guys are doing a ton of fun stuff with screens. Big giant curve things, and you made an interesting observation in other interviews that now people are consuming their entertainment content via those screens, whether it's an over the top service with Netflix or or whatever. So this this kind of shift to, you know, kind of mawr content consumption as this blend between kind of what you do in your personal life and what you do in your work life, both in terms of time and content, you know, continue to mix so lot of exciting stuff happening in big, beautiful screens. >>Yeah, totally agree, Jeff. And we see you know we've looked at productivity and see boosts with a bigger screen around your system. Same thing with exactly as you describe putting two screens around the system or go to a trading floor and their screens everywhere because it's about the you know, it's about the content that you can consume and the, um, you know, the work that you go get done, and it's a lot more efficient to be able to have multiple screens. Whether it's looking at a presentation and doing a call, you know, a video call for work on on one screen or either side of Ah, screen. And we're seeing people build out that, you know, their home office, their work office. I think that's to me. The, you know, the exciting piece of you think about how technology is arming people to get their job done. Like you can't imagine if you had all the technology taken away from you. You're like, Okay, what am I gonna What am I go do? Like if the internet goes down, I don't quite know how to get go. Be productive here. You know, I go try to find someone who has a landline phone on the block and call someone up. Andi have actually have a discussion, but, like, I'm not gonna build out a work, you know, a workspace. I've gotta build out a home space companies that are pretty progressive, the ones that are investing Maurin technology for their employees. We're seeing them be ah, lot more successful in this covert air, which equals go get on the right tools the screen around the system, You know, the extra devices. So it's like, Hey, my postures. Great. I can actually go get work done. And I'm in a nice space. Same thing back in the office. We've built stuff. We're building low blue light technology into our commercial PCs. We put that on our high end consumer PC. So you know, now you can walk into your home office early in the morning. You can goto late at night. It will have you all tune so your body is ready to go to sleep. You know, you don't even have toe. I don't have to talk to your family at all during the day. You could just work all the time from your home office. But I think little pieces like that are going. How do we put technology in this world where it's, like, very easy toe walk in and out of your you know, your office and being tuned on. But, hey, I need to go to sleep or I need to be chilling out after that and get the right technology and capabilities that let people be successful. So I think it's pretty exciting. Everything we've been able to dio, >>right? So I want to shift gears a little bit. Um, talk about user interface. What? One of the reason of this article that we keep referencing 10 years ago was the launch of the iPad, right? And in the launch pad or the iPad didn't have, Ah, traditional keyboard. Um, but I think people found out that not having a traditional keyboard, depending on the type of your work you're doing is a little bit of an inhibitor to your productivity. But it really begs the question as we enter this new world of different types of interaction with these devices and the increased use of voice, whether it's with Siri or or Okay, Google, um, >>we've >>had, you know, regulations on the A d a. In terms of access to websites and this and that. Aziz, you kind of look into the future of of human interaction with these devices as you get more and more horsepower toe work with on the GPU and the CPU and you know, can free up more. Resource is to this type of activity. I know you can't share anything too far down the road. But what? How do you see kind of the future evolving to get beyond this quality keyboard that was designed to slow people down because types were, too. I'm still waiting for the more efficient keyboard option to be to be available. But what's the future of human interaction with these things? To take the the degree of efficiency up another level? >>Hey, Jeff, we will do a custom keyboard for you. So you get me your you get me your high speed layout, we'll get you get you one of those. Um, you know, we do see it is pretty remarkable how long the keyboards been around and we still see it's It's also remarkable to me how powerful that is as a input device for, you know, for some tasks in the world. So what we see is it's not gonna be what replaces the keyboard. And there's one way of going and doing things. But all this compute the sensors that capability on the systems are just gonna allow people to operate the way that they want to operate. So you look at a PC today. It still has this great keyboard. It still has a laptop form factor that has, you know, been there for It's probably 25 years or so. It's actually pretty nice because it fits on your lap. It balances really well on the coffee table. Um, it's, you know, We've looked at so many different form factors, and it actually is a stayed around for a good reason because it it's pretty pretty functional. You know, you take on top of that, though we've built touch in tow, all our systems and screen. So a capability that's available to many of our customers and I go people are just starting. In the beginning, it was like Okay, Hey, how do I take this PC with touch on the screen and then you go? I don't want to do everything with touch, but gosh, it's like how maney you now touch it. If it's something's not touch, you know you have little marks on the screen. I went thio, I went. Thio was looking and working with someone here in a design, a design firm, and, uh, they had a product that was non touch, and it's like I reached in touch the screen to try to make it bigger because my eyes were not quite as good and they were like, Oh yeah, that's not a touch that's not a touch system and everyone touches the screen so it's like that becomes normal voice is going to become normal we have capability on the PC. Like you said, there's a bunch of voice ecosystems. Not everything is easiest to go do invoice. There are some things where you go ahead. I just want to go touch that, you know, gesture in the same way we look at intelligence on the system of also going There are things I wanna have just happen because I always I always do that and I shouldn't have to do voice. I shouldn't have to do gesture, touch everything else like, Hey, maybe I start the morning and I always pull up my calendar. Why doesn't that happen? Or I like to listen to her, You know, a song in the evening as I'm typing away on email on getting things buttoned up for the day. It's like your system can anticipate some of those things and it will just do that for you. So I think I think you're exactly right. We're going to see multiple ways of interacting with technology, and it needs to be natural and easy for us and then let the user pick pick the way that they want to go and do things right. >>Well, you just touched on a whole, you jumped ahead to questions on my list of things I want to talk about. And really, that's the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence, not in a generic way. That's an app that sits inside of the PC, but but in terms of using that intelligence as you just described based on my work flow based on my habit based on the applications I use based on you know what, you can observe and learn about me. Or maybe it SSM dictate down from from the corporate set up. You know how that PC operates for me? Because I think that's it is a really interesting thing, right? Everyone uses their machine differently, and whether they use, you know, shortcuts or not, How many tabs do they have open? You know, the the variability. You must have crazy studies on this in terms of the way people actually operate. These things is so, so high, so huge opportunity to, you know, again kind of remove the the get the signal from the noise and help people decide what they should do. Prioritize what they should do and add a layer of of simplicity to you. know it is a complex amount of notifications firing at me all day long. >>Yeah, I think that's a huge. You know, you talked about the potential you have in a world where more APS that we use our cloud cloud based of going How do I augment the capability in this client device at the edge To be intelligent and helped me go do mawr versus just being, you know, really dumb and serving up this other other content. And I think everything you describe is opportunity that we see We started Jeff about five years ago and have been very aggressive and putting intelligence and machine learning into the systems we started on our work stations, where there is an obvious application of, like, how do I tune a system to get the most performance out of an application? And we saw settings configurations making them different helped tune these very specific, you know, cad engineering programs that developers were running their times really valuable. They want the most performance. We used to have to have people sit down and we go. Okay, let's go run this application. Under this workload, we can put a table together. Here's a bunch of recommendations. We started going well, Hey, how do we have that happened? Automat like, let's try different settings. Figure out what works. The machines should should self tune itself then and figure out what's right and get based on exactly what I'm running. And people can be running different combinations so suddenly got a lot smarter than our great engineer sitting in the lab and figuring out those tables. And then, you know, from that time then we brought it to I think, what's just tip of the iceberg Now, where we start looking at, uh, performance across all our systems? What applications of my running go set things up so that it works? We talked a little bit about batteries and power management. Hey, how am I using this system if I am a really mobile person? Always, you know, taking my battery down to really low levels, hopping on a plane, I need to be quickly charged, like the system can figure out. Hey, I really need to tune things. Not for when, when you go through all the mechanics of a battery, it's like I am willing to sacrifice some on the longevity of the battery to enable really fast charging of that system because Jeffs always on the go Jeff runs his battery down. I need to make sure when he plugs in, he has maximum juice. Hey, here's Sam who's in a work from home mode, always plugged in. It's not great on any battery in the world to always be at, you know, maximum maximum charge every single minute of the day. And Sam has not unplugged his system in the past. You know, five days. Hey, we can run that at 95% and he will have a long life to that battery and be really happy with the system. And he's never gonna run out of power. You can start doing in that space. You can start doing it around sound and the environment that people are in, how we get smart. And I think there's an enormous amount you could do on top of that, like you described just how people have used the systems and it can sound a little eerie, but like it's what we you know, the machine suddenly knows how I'm going to go do stuff, but I'm like I would like that it to be anticipating what I'm doing, and then it starts taking that mundane stuff that we have to do that just eats up time and, you know, goes and gets that done for us. So we could be focused on the creative and the really pushing the boundaries, thinking >>I love it because it always goes back to kind of what do you optimizing for right? And there isn't necessarily one answer to that question, and there's a lot of factors that go into that in terms of the timing. As you said, the person their behavior you know happen to GPS is I'm at an airport. Probably need to plug in for you in the airplane. It's a good stuff. I want to. I want to shift gears a little bit, Sam, to talk about operating systems, Um, and and you know, chromebooks air out now. And you know, it was kind of this breakthrough to go beyond kind of Windows based systems. I think there's a lot of people that you know hope at >>some point >>will be, you know, have the option to run Lennox based systems. But it's just, you know, with a cloud based world and a multi, you know, kind of device interaction with all those different applications, whether it's it's my phone or my my desktop or my laptop or my my chromebook or my whatever. Um, Aziz, you start to think about kind of operating systems and opening up, you know, kind of a new level of innovation with because the expectation now for for like, a chromebook is that it's almost 100% Web based APS, right? That there's really not a lot of need for anything local. Maybe a quick download, a picture too attached to to an email or something. How do you kind of look at the future and kind of operating systems for PC? Specifically? >>Yeah. Well, I think is You describe Jeff, the applications and what you're doing on the system has become increasingly important over time, and it will only become more important as we go go forward. So, you know, from that point of view window, we dio work with windows. We do work with Google and chrome. I mean, Windows 10 is a really good based operating system. Chrome has a lot of nice capability in that operating system, you know, Obviously Apple, a competitor, has a different approach in that space. But I think we have a really good set of offerings that we can put on our our systems. And then we're focused on tuning that experience on top of the operating system. I I think it's still too complicated to go and put a, you know, get a new PC into a work or home environment, retire the old PC and manage that system. And what we look at is independent of that operating system. People want to go get their stuff done. We need to make that great. They wanna get their device, they want to turn it on and they want to go use it. And we want to build a world where, like, as I'm getting a new device, my device should know me well enough to go. Hey, Sam, this is this is the right time to get a device. This is the right kind of device that you should get based on what you're going and doing. Hey, I'm going to just keep you up to date. I am going to you think about any issues with the system. We still have too many things that flow through a traditional Hey, there's an I T. Help desk and then they figure that out and then I go toe level two or level three if they can't sort that out. Hey, how do we put that stuff to your point, Jeff before around intelligence, How do we automate those processes? So we're thinking through You know what needs to happen on that system, keeping it up to date and fixing and remediating that system. So I think there's a huge potential regardless of what operating system is beneath it, and we have very good choices there to go. We've got to make that experience the one that's great for the users and that that's where we're really focusing our, you know, our time and our energy, Right? >>So let me shift gears again a little bit and full disclosure I've bought, and I don't know how many XPS towers in a row. I think I'm on my third or fourth in a row. I love >>it. I >>mean, I'm a desktop. I like to just pack those things full of as much horsepower and GPU and CPU and memory as I possibly can because to me again, Back to an investment and productivity. I don't wanna be waiting for slow machines. I just to me it's a couple 100 bucks for this upgrade. That upgrade, it seems brain dead to me that people don't do that. But in terms of when you get these things now and it comes in the mail, it's basically a >>box and a machine, and >>you think back to the old days right when there was books and warranty cards and, you know, a whole plethora of stuff that kind of fell out of that box. I know you know. That's That's probably a leading indicator on the consumer side, about some of your efforts around sustainability and and being efficient and obviously taking advantage of things like the cloud in terms of activating these machines in this and that. But I wonder if you can share a little bit on what you guys have been doing about sustainability, because I know it's important. You know, there's a big focus around, you know, kind of environmental trash on old electron ICS, which is a riel, a real problem that people are dressing. So I wonder if you can. You know. Take a minute, Thio, to share your guys efforts in this area. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Jeff. It is. It is really important. And we see, you know, arming the world with technology so people can do better. Things really matters, but I love doing stuff outside, like I want the environment to be great. And we need to do that in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. So a couple of places we, you know, pushed really aggressively. You touched on the packaging. So whether that's taking, um, content out of boxes, that doesn't that doesn't need to be there. We've made very aggressive commitments with a series of 2030 goals that we're marching towards is a company where we said, you know, 100% of our packaging will be from sustainable or recyclable sources. So we've already moved aggressively in that space. When you look at what ocean bound plastic we're putting in our boxes, how we think about the materials that were picking, you know, cardboard, and using that in ways that go through the you know, the mail and can be shipped effectively. So we have maximum content there that can be recycled. We've we've committed that we will take back a system for every system that we ship. So getting and building this circular economy for electron ICS, we think is is very important. So we take the stuff that we've got out there and we put that back into a recycle process where you know your old PC can become part of your new cutting edge technology PC and we've led the industry and doing that in plastics were taking plastics from cases and plastics from systems, getting that back into new systems. We've done that with precious metals from the from the, uh, PCB lay board designs inside the systems. We've done that with rare earth metals and magnets, and we think there's opportunity to go farther in that space and then the 3rd 3rd kind of thing that we've committed Jeff is by by 2030 to have half the content of our new systems, be from recycled or renewable content. And we do a good job today of having the content in the systems be recyclable. It's almost over 90% by weight, but what we want to do and the work we need to go do is go get that recycled content going into a cutting edge technology that we're putting out there, and it's not. That's not a simple problem of going. People want things a structurally strong as possible, a super thin as performance as possible. And then we need to you, you know, we gotta use, um, basically waste that comes through and gets turned into new products. So we have our engineers are material science people working on how we make that riel. And we set some aggressive goals with, you know, Michael and the company that will be leadership and that we don't quite exactly know how to get there, but put us on the right kind of edge of pushing and doing the things that we need. Thio. We can have great technology and, you know, be responsible in the way that, as you said, is very important. >>It's great, and it's good to write it down, right? If you don't write it down, then it's just it just disappears into the into the ether. So, Sam, I really enjoyed getting to catch up. I want to give you the final word with a little bit. Look to the path and a little bit look to the future, right? A lot of conversation about Moore's law, and we got to the end of Moore's law and blah, blah, blah. And and I think that, you know, there's obviously technology behind that, and there's some real conversations. But to me, the more interesting topic around Moore's law is really the idea of Moore's law and this continual advancement of technology that's better, faster, cheaper. You've been doing this for 20 years at Del. You've seen tons of, you know, kind of Moore's law impacts and operating in this world where, you know, compute, compute storage and networking just is on this exponential scale on whether you want to talk about GP use or whatever again to me, it's not about the number, of course, and the transistor. It's about the transition in the core. It's about really the concept of this working in a world where you know you're gonna have a lot more. Where is power work with How do you How do you kind of reflect on, you know, the stuff that you're shipping today versus what you were shipping five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and then, more importantly, is you look forward. Um, you know what is what are you excited about? What gets you up in the morning? What puts a big smile on your face? Still come to work after 20 years of Dell? >>Yeah. You know, Jeff, it's a great question because the industry has changed so much over the last 10 20 years. So it's sometimes a fun thing. Toe. Look back at some of the products that we put out before. That seemed amazing at that point in time and you stack them against what we're doing now and then it could bring you down to Earth a little bit. So you see, the, uh, you see just the exponential improvements that we're able to make around the design of the product, the capability of the products. And I see that continuing the thing that gives me, you know, huge thought around this the device and the PC and the role is gonna play at the edge. We just did some research and we were looking at Millennials and Gen Z and looking around the world, and that is a huge and growing part of the population. It will be the the users of technology in the future with the world we're in today, 45% of them. So almost half of them said they would take their dollars and they want a premium, high end PC experience, and they would prioritize that versus other things they spend money on to go and have a great PC as a personal tool. Do you think about that translating to in a work environment they're gonna expect those same kind of great tools? And then to the question you asked, You know, I see a huge opportunity to continue to push forward the value and the way people use these devices, whether it's the intelligence we talked about. That to me is really exciting around building a machine that knows me and does things for me and how I want to use it, our ability to build immersive experiences so that you know, whether I'm gaming after work, collaborating with co workers like how do I put it so that we're together and it's a good Aziz that in person experience, we're gonna be able to do that with technology. You talked in a great questions around. Hey, the ways people interact with the systems, it will become natural. It will become whatever way they want to go and do that. And I think we can do that in a world where, yes, you can walk between all kinds of different devices. There will not be one device to end all. You'll be in a small screen device. You're gonna use a monitor. You're going to use a PC device. There will be technology across the home. But toe have that have that link together in the role that PC is gonna play in. That to me, is exciting. And we continue to, you know, invest aggressively. Michael saw that when he started the company. We continue to believe in the power of technology, and we're gonna figure out and drive those breakthroughs that will make the, you know, products exciting. And I love doing that every day of seeing the innovation we can put together and how that makes a difference for people. To me, that's really an exciting thing. >>Well, Sam, thank you. Thank you for the update. Again, the rumors of the PCs demise were greatly overstated. 10 years and glad to see that you're just kicking tail and doing exciting things. So thanks for for sharing your insight and your experience with us. >>Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Jeff. Great to talk to you. >>Absolutely. All right. He's Sam. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020 The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. See you next time.