>>The cube presents. Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante. The cube is live at Dell technologies world 2022. Dave, hope you say live, live <laugh>. We are live. We are in person. We are three-D. We are also here on the first day of our coverage with an eight time, right? Eight time cube alum, GA Norris joins us the senior vice president of edge portfolio solutions at Dell technologies. Welcome back our friend. >>Thank you. It's great to be here in this forum with live people, you know, and 3d, >>Isn't it. We're amazing. We're not, we're not via a screen. This is actually real. So Gill a a lot, a lot of buzz, great attendance at this first event, since 20, lot's been going on since then, we're talking a lot about edge. It's not new, but there's a lot changing what's going on there. >>Well, you know, edge has been around for a while. Um, actually since, you know, the beginning of time people were doing, you know, compute and, and applications, they in the, um, in the physical space where data it, but more and more, um, data is based on sensors in cameras and machine vision. And if you wanna make real time decisions, there's a few reasons why you can't just send everything back to a data center or a cloud. Maybe you don't have the right latency, maybe, um, you it's too costly. Maybe you don't have the right end with maybe you have security challenges, maybe have compliance challenges. So the world's moving more and more resources towards where the data is created and to make real time decisions and to generate new business values, things are changing and they're becoming much more, um, um, involved than before, much more. Um, so basically that that's, what's changing. You know, we need to deal with distributed architectures much more than we needed before. >>I think one of the things we've learned in the last very dynamic two years is that access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have it's table stakes for whether we're talking about retail, healthcare, et cetera. So that the, the realtime data access is critical for everybody to these days. >>Right? And it, it could be a real time decision, or it could even be data collection either way. You need to place some device, some comput next to the source. And then, you know, you have a lot of them and you just multiply by multiple use cases and you be, you basically, you have a very complex problem to solve. And if you ask me what's new is that complexity is big coming more and more, um, critical to solve >>Critical. >>Oh, go ahead, please. >>I was just gonna say, talk to me about some of the, from a, from a complexity resolution perspective, what are some of the things that Dell is doing to help organizations as they spread out to the edge more to meet that consumer demand, but reduce that complexity from an infrastructure standpoint. >>So we focus on simplifying. I think that's what people need right now. So there are two things we do. We, we optimize our products, um, whether they need regularization or different temperature envelopes or, uh, management capability, remote management capability, and we create solutions. And so we develop, um, solutions that look at specific, um, outcomes and we size it and we create deployment guides. Um, we do everything we can, um, to simplify the, uh, the edge uses for our customers. >>You know, you guys is talking about, it's not new. I, and I know you do a lot in retail. I think of like the NCR cash register as the, the original edge, you know, but there's other use cases. Uh there's you Gil, you and I have talked about AI inferencing in, in real time, there was a question today in the analyst forum, uh, I think it went to Jeff or nobody wanted to take it. No, maybe it was Michael, but the metaverse, but that there's edge space is the edge industrial I OT. So how do you, I mean, the Tam is enormous. How do you think about the use cases? Are there ones that, that aren't necessarily sort of horizontal for you that you don't go after, like EVs and TA the cars? Or how are you thinking about >>It? Depends. I agree that the, uh, edge business is very verticalized. Um, at the same time, there are very, uh, there is, there are themes that emerge across every industry. Um, so we're trying to solve things horizontally being Dell, we need to solve for, um, repeatability and scale, but we do package, you know, vertical solutions on top of them because that's what people need. Um, so for example, you know, you said, um, NCR being the, uh, the original edge. If I asked you today, name how many applications are, are running in a retail store to enable your experience? You'd say, well, there's self checkout. Maybe there is a, um, fraud detection, >>Let's say a handful >>It's handful. The fact is it's not, it's about 30 different applications, 30 that are running. So you have, you know, digital labels and you have, you know, a curbside delivery and you have inventory management and you have crowd management and you have safety and security. And what happens today is that every one of those solar is purchased separately and deployed separately and connected to the network separately and secured separately. Hence you see the problem, right? And so I know what we do, and we create a solution. For example, we see, okay, infrastructure, what can we consolidate onto an infrastructure that could scale over time? And then we look at it in the context of a solution. So, you know, the solution we're announcing, or we announced last week does just that on the left side, it looks at a consolidated infrastructure based on VxRail and VMware stack. So you can run multiple applications on the right side, it working with a company called deep north for Inso analytics and actually people that, um, and the show they can go and see this in action, um, in our, um, you know, fake retail store, uh, back at the edge booth. Um, but the point is those elements of siloed applications and the need to consolidate their true for every industry. And that's what we're trying to solve for. >>I was just wondering, you said they're true for every industry. Every industry is facing the same challenges there. What, what makes retail so prime for transformation right now? >>That's a great question. So, you know, using my example from before, if you are faced with this set, have a shopper that buys online and they now are coming back to the stores and they need to, they want the same experience. They want the stuff that they search for. They want it available to them. Um, and in fact, we research that 80% of people say, if they have a bad experience will not come back to a retail store. So you've got all of those use cases that you need to put to, you've got this savvy shopping that comes in, you've got heightened labor costs. You've got a supply chain problem in most of those markets, labor >>Shortages as >>Well. It's a perfect storm. And you wanna give an experience, right? So CIOs are looking at this and they go, how do I do all of that? Um, and they, they, as I said before, the key management, the key problem is management of all of those things is why they can innovate faster. And so retail is in this perfect storm where they need to innovate and they want to innovate. And now they're looking for options and we're here to help them. >>You know, a lot of times we talk about the in industrial IOT, we talk about the it and the OT schism. Is there a similar sort of dissonance between it, your peeps, Dell's traditional market, and what's happening, you know, at the near edge, the retail infrastructure sort of different requirements. How are you thinking about that and managing that >>About, um, 50% of edge projects today are, are somehow involving it. Um, usually every project will involve it for networking and security, so they have to manage it either way. And today there's a lot of what we used to call shadow it. When we talked about cloud, this has happens at the edge as well. Now this happened for a good reason because the expertise are the OT people expertise on the, the specific use case. It's true for manufacturing. It's also for true for, for retail. Um, our traditional audience is the it audience and, and we will never be able to merger two worlds unless it was better able to service the OT buyers. And even in the show, I I've had multiple conversations today. We, with people to talk about the divide, how to bring it together, it will come together when it can deliver a better service to the OT, um, constituents. And that's definitely a job for Dell, right? This is what we do. If we enable our it buyer to do a better job in servicing the OT crowd or their business crowd in retail, um, more innovation will happen, you know, across the, those different dimensions. So I'm happy you asked that because that's actually part of the mission we're taking on. >>Where is one of the things I think about when you, you talk about that consumer experience and we're very demanding as consumers. We wanna ha as you described, we wanna have the same experience we expect to have that regardless of where we are. And if that doesn't happen, you, you mentioned that number of 80% of people's survey said, if I have a bad experience with a merchant, I'm out, I'm going somewhere else. Right. So where is the rest of the Csuite in the conversation? I can think of, um, a COO the chief marketing officer from brand value, brand reputation perspective. Are you talking with those folks as well to help make the connective so reality? >>Um, I, I, I don't know that we're having those conversation with those business owners. We we're a, um, a system, an infrastructure company. So, you know, we get involved once they understand, you know, what they want to do. We just look at it in. And so if you solve it one way, it's gonna be one outcome. Maybe there is a better way to look at it. Maybe there's an architecture, maybe there's a more, you know, thoughtful way to think about, you know, the problems before they happen. And, um, but the fact that they're all looking shows you, that their business owners are very, very concerned with, with this reality, their >>Key stakeholders. Can >>We come back to your announcement? Can you, can we unpack that a little bit, uh, for those who might not be familiar with it? What, what, what is it called again? And give us a peel, the onion a little bit Gil. Yeah. >>So, so we call it a Dell technologies validated design. Um, it is essentially reference architecture. Um, we take a use case, we size it. So we, you know, we, um, we save customers, the effort of, of testing and sizing. We document the deployment step by step. We just make it simpler. And as says, before we look for consolidation, so we took a VXL, which is our leading ACI product based on VMware technology with a VMware application management stack with Tansu. Um, and then we, we, we look at that as the infrastructure, and then we test it with a company called deep north and deep north, um, are, um, store analytics. So through machine vision, they can tell you where people are queuing up. If there is somebody in the store that needs help and nobody's approaching, if there is a water spill and somebody might, you know, slip and hurt themselves, if a fridge is open and something may get spot. >>And so all of those things together through machine vision and realtime decisions can have this much better experience. So we put all of this together, we created a design and now it's out there in the market for our partners to use for our customers to use. Um, this is an extension of our manufacturing solutions, where we did the same thing. We partner with a company called PTC. I know of obviously in a company called Litmos, um, to create, um, industrial and the leading solution. So this whole word of solutioning is supposed to look at the infrastructure and a use case and bring them together and document in a way that simplifies things for >>Customers. Do you ever see that becoming a Aku at some point in time or, >>Um, personal, if you ask me? I don't think so. And the reason is there's still a lot of variability in those and skewing, but that's a very formal, you know, internal discussion. Yeah. Um, the point is we are, we want people to buy as much of it as they need to, and, and we really want to help them if Aku could help them, we will get there, but we need to see repeatability before creating skews. >>Can you give us an example of a, of a retail or a manufacturing customer that's using this Dell validated design, this DVD, and that really has reduced or eliminated that complexity that was there before. >>So this solution is new. I mean, it's brand new, we just announced it. So, no, but, um, I don't know what names I can call out, cuz referenceability is probably examples though about generic, but I will tell you that most of the large retailers in the us are based in their stores on Dell technologies. Um, a lot of the trail is in, in those stores and you're talking about thousands of locations with remote management. Um, what we're doing here is we're taking it to the next step by looking at new use cases that they have not been implementing before and saying, look, same infrastructure is valid. You know, scalable is it's scalable. And here are the new use cases with machine vision and other things that here is how you do that. But we're seeing a lot of success in retail in the last few years. >>So what should we expect looking forward, you know, any gaps that customers are asking for trying to fill? What, what two to three years out, what should we expect? >>Um, I think we're gonna stay very true to our simplification message. We want to help people simplify. So if it's simplifying, um, maintenance, if it's simplifying management, if it's simplifying through solutioning, you're gonna see us more and more and more, um, investing in simplification of edge. Um, and that's through our own IP, through our partnerships. Um, there, there is a lot more coming if, if I may say it myself, but, but it's, it's a little too early to, uh, to talk about it. >>So for those folks that are here at the show that get to see it and play with it and touch it and feel it, what would you say some of the biggest impacts are that this technology can deliver tomorrow? >>Well, first of all, it's enabling to do what they want. See, we don't have to go and, and tell people, oh, you probably really need to move things through the edge. They know they need to do it. Our job is to tell them how to do it in a secure way, in a simplified way. So that's, that's a nice thing about this, this market it's happening, whether we want it or not. Um, people in this show can go see some things in action. They can see the solution in action. They can see the manufacturing solution in action and even more so. And I forgot to say part of our announcement was a set of solution centers in Limerick island and in Singapore, that was just open. And soon enough in Austin, Texas saw that, and we will have people come in and have the full experience of IOT OT and edge device devices in action. So AR and VR, I T IEN technology and scanning technology. So they could be, um, thinking about the art of the possible, right? Thinking about this immersive experience that will help them invent with us. And so we're expecting a lot of innovation to come out of those conversations for us and for them. >>So doing a lot of testing before deployment and really gleaning that testing >>Before deployment solution architecture, just ideation, if they're not there yet. So, and I've just been to Singapore in one of those, um, they asked me to, um, pretend I was a, um, retail ski enter in a distribution center and I didn't do so well, but I was still impressed with the technology. So, >>Well, eight time Q alumni. Now you have a career to fall back on if you need to. Exactly. >><laugh> >>GA it's been great to have you. Thank you so much for coming back, talking to us about what's new on day one of Dell technologies world 22. Thank >>You for having me again, >>Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas at Dell technologies world 2022. This is day one of our coverage stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

(bright upbeat melody) >> Welcome back to Dell Technology World 2021. Dell Tech World, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about the Edge. I'm very excited to invite Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management for the Edge portfolio at Dell. And Gil Shneorson, who's the Senior Vice President, Edge portfolio also at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, great to see you welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you guys too. Wish we were face to face but maybe in '22. Gil, let's start with you. The Edge is very exciting, it's not really defined. It's very fragmented, but it's there. It's kind of, you know it, when you see it. What do you get excited about when you think about the Edge? >> I think of there's two elements. The first one, is that we all live at the Edge. In other words, the areas we deal with are around us everyday. When we shop, when we consume, when we drive. So it's a very physical type of activity, we know it's there. What's really exciting mostly to me is that, and you started with talking about fragmentation right off the bat. It is a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to add value. Because it's so fragmented, because it's so new, because it has developed and evolved the way it is. We see an amazing opportunity for us to add much more value than we do today and solve problems that have yet to be solved in the industry. >> And Pierluca, it's an exciting, it's almost like an infinite playground for a technologist. I mean. >> Yeah, Dave, I think that's exactly what we find out. The Edge is very exciting, there is a lot of motion especially due to the pandemic and other things. Big factor that is accelerating the innovation at the Edge but this is an inorganic acceleration and what it cause for most of our customers is also confusion, right? They need to apply multiple solutions but not very organized. So you try to solve the outcome like having the right production on your line because demand is surging. But you don't have an organic things to do that and solve the problem. So you see a lot of silos coming in for each one of the solution, and that's what Gil was referring. That's a great opportunity for us as Dell with the breadth of the portfolio we have and what our team that is a new team is focusing doing is to bring that idea to be able to consolidate multiple things at the Edge and process things at the Edge. >> We did an event. CUBE had an event called the CUBE on Cloud and Q1, we had John Rose on and the title of the segment was something like gaining the technology Edge. And we were kind of geeking out on the tech at the Edge. And my takeaway there was... We were trying to like what is Edge? It's like, well, it's the place where it makes most sense to process the data. And so that brings up a lot of challenges. There are technical challenges and there are business challenges. I wonder if we could sort of dig into those a little bit. How do you guys look at that? Maybe Gil, you want to start maybe. Maybe on the business side and then we can dig into that. >> Sure. The way things evolved. If you think about it, at the Edge is very verticalized. And because of that, they're very use case driven. And so in every industry possible, you start with some business person making a decision whether they have a need or they want to grow their business. And so for example, they will buy an applying to do fraud protection in retail or detection retail. Or they will apply an application to merit robotics and the factory need would come with its own gateway, implant, compute, and a cloud portal. And then you do it again and again, and again, every time you have a business opportunity. All of the sudden you have this proliferation of IT type equipment. At the end where it's the worst place to have it really because you don't have the right IT resources and you are in the need to protect it in a much more... In a different way that you can do in a data center. And so all of that, bring us to a point that we see an opportunity to simplify. And so not only simplification. And this is, you know, simplification or simplicity is the most important driver for any IP purchase. Things that are simple or the easiest and the most economical to operate. The next demand that we see from a customer is security. Because things are at the edge, they have a much more extended attack surface. They need to be connected to networks. They need to be connected without IT staff. So if you can simplify insecure, you can really unlock amazing value by processing data close to where it's created. Without it, we're seeing this opportunity as businesses but we can't really get to it because there are those two hurdles in front of us. >> So Pierluca. We need to you thank you for that, Gill. When you hear a lot about AI inferencing at the Edge. And if you think about AI today, much of the work is modeling. It's done in the cloud. But you're not going to be doing AI inferencing in real time in the cloud. Take the autonomous vehicle example. So that brings some technical challenges. There's obviously data challenges. I'm curious as to how you think about that. I mean, we always talk about how much data is going to be persisted. I think Tesla persists like five minutes of data, right? But some of it is going to go back. That's true. But a lot of it is going to be processed real time. And that's just really different than the way we typically think about IT. >> Yeah, absolutely. So at the Edge, especially in manufacturing, we see right now, or in other use case, it's very important to get the outcome very quickly. Now, you don't use that a deep learning model for that. You need to just understand. For example, in the computer vision use case where you take image of your production line. To your point, Dave, you not keep those image, you keep the image where you have the defect. But you need to process that AIML needs to be intelligent enough to understand that you have a defect, and send that image then to the club. So the search of the data at the Edge is a very important factor. And why you need to process data at the Edge, because as your point, you can't wait to send to the cloud and then wait, right? Tesla is a clear example of that. All the autonomous car where you need to react instantaneously to a change. But in manufacturing, for example, that is our focus for now, is for example, the robots. That if you need to optimize the robot, you need to have a immediate understanding of where the pieces are and when they need to put. And the tolerance need to be act immediately. Otherwise, you come out with the thousand of pieces that they are not in the right tolerance. So, and at the end of the day, what we see is not only the search of the need of processing AIML to the Edge, but also the need to have a new type of compute at the Edge. So in the past, was just gateway and you'd get the gateway and you send the data to the cloud. Now, it's a form of a new compute that has also GPU capability and other things to process this data. So very important. And I think that Dell, especially, we are very focused on that because is really where the customer need to extract the value. >> Thank you. And Gil, I want to get Gil to the unique value proposition to Dell and what makes you distinct. If I infer from your comments, your strategy, you said it's to simplify. And so I see two vectors there. One is to simplify at the Edge. The other is where needed connect that Edge, whether it's on prem, a public cloud, cross-cloud, that kind of simplification layer that abstracts the complex the underlying complexity. Maybe you could talk about your strategy and what makes you guys different? >> Sure. We've been talking to our... Well, we always talk to our customers. And we've been doing business at the Edge for many, many years. Let's call it coincidence that we're a very large company. We have reached, we serve our customers. So when they decide to buy something for their Edge, you know, environments, they come to us as well as other vendors. When the percentage of the time based on our market share. But when we decided to take another look at how can we be even more relevant, we started talking to a lot of them great depth. And what we discovered was the problem I talked about before. The problem of complexity, the problem of security and the problem of choice. And so our focus is to do what we do best. At the end of the day, we're an IT company and our customers for the most part are IT people. And we see them dragged more and more into Edge projects because customers need to connect Edge to the network. And they need to security, and that's how it starts. And so those worlds of IT and OT are coming together and they're coming together, applying IT best practices, which is exactly what we know how to do. And so, because of that, we think that they need to think about architecture versus unique silence solutions. Architecture that can support multiple use cases that can grow with time, consolidate more and more use cases as they grow, simplify what they do by applying tried and true or tried and true IT best practices in a secure manner. So the dealer approach would be doing that, taking a more architectural approach to the adverse as a use case. And then just like you predicted, meet the customers where they are from an application standpoint. And so we know that a lot of applications are growing and be developing on a hyper scale or public clouds. We would like to connect to those. We would like to allow them to keep working as they have, except, when they run it at the Edge. Think about environments, if can consolidate multiple workloads and not solve it for each one at the same time. And so that will be our overall approach. That's what we're working on. >> Yeah. So, okay. So in that horizontal layer, if you will, to serve many, many use cases, not just... You're not going to go a mile deep into one and be the expert at some narrow use case. You want to be that horizontal platform. Here, look, I wonder, does that call for more programmability over time of the products to really allow people to kind of design in that flexibility, if you will, build my own. Is that something that we can expect? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we spoke a little bit about this before the interview. And the things that is very important is composability, starting from a very small form factor to the cluster, and then expand to the cloud is the fundamental things. And the trend that we see. The fact that you can compose the infrastructure, starting from a small gateway that is changing in this market right up to the cloud, and be able to use the same layer that allow you to run the same application is a fundamental things. And we are working on that. We are working on this vision and our strategy is really to be able to be transparent but provide the right building block to do all the use cases that they are required. Where the data. So we, again, not only meeting the customer but meeting where the data are, what the customer wants out of those data. So that's a fundamental things. And we have project Apex. So obviously we are plugging in the project Apex. From a Edge point of view, will allow the customer to have these unique experience to go in Apex and also deploy the Edge infrastructure that is needed. We're starting right now with that. So we will touch later, but that's the first building block of that journey. >> Excellent. Let's touch now. You've got some news around Apex and what are you announcing? >> So we are very excited because as I said our team it's pretty new and it's a very important investment that Dell makes. Not only in us as a team, but as a motion. So we are announcing a reference architecture with PTC. PTC is one of the biggest company for... Actually based here in Boston for manufacturing. And reference architecture will be run on base on Apex private cloud. So the customer can go to the portal, order Apex private cloud and deploy PTC on top of that. So very important things is the first step in this journey. But it's very important steps so we want to thank you also PTC to allow us to work with them. We have other stuff as well that we are announcing. I don't know if you are familiar but we have a very unique streaming data platform. Streaming data platform that can stream multiple data collected from gateway, from every place. And that it's a need. Obviously, when you need to process data in real time, whatever is streaming. What are we doing with the new streaming data platform approach is the ability to deploy single node. So it can be very appealing for the Edge and up to three nodes. >>Awesome. That's great. So a couple of comments on that. So it was funny. We did the LiveWorx show in theCUBE a couple of years ago. PTC is a big event and it was the Edge. And I remember looking around and saying "Where's all the IT vendors?". And so that's great to see you guys leaning in like that. Pierluca, the streaming platform. Tell me more about that. What's the tech behind it? >> So the streaming data platform is a project, that we start couple of year ago, is actually start from open source Pravega. It's a very interesting technology where you can stream multiple data. It's not a traditional storage. Use a technology that can really collect thousands of different streams. And that's very important when you need to mind the data. Bring the data, the structured data in efficient that you can process them at the real time. It's very important. So there are very cool use case of that. But now, that we look at the Edge, this is make more and more tangible sense because we have a lot of partners that they're working with us, especially to extend. When you have all these sensor, you bring the data to the gateways and from the gateways, then you can use data streaming platform to collect all these streams. And then you can easily process them. So it's a very fundamental technology. We are very proud of that. As I said, our enterprise version, it's getting more and more. And now we can land these on different architecture. So it can be backed up by an unison. It can be also on different storage type now. And as I said, we looking now to bring from a what was it data center kind of structure, down to the Edge because now we can put it in a single node up to three nodes. >> It makes a lot of sense. Is this like a Kafka based thing or open source or is it something you guys built or a combination? >> It's a combination. The project is an open source project but we did that. We start this many years ago. And it works with Kafka but it's not Kafka. So it has plugging that can work with Kafka and all the other things. And it's very easy to deploy. So it's a very, very important. And the other things is the scalability of this platform. >> Yeah, so I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing you had in the labs. And you said, "Okay, this is going to be important". And then boom, all of a sudden, the market comes to you. As if you pop it right in. And then of course, the Accenture relationship. Deep, deep industry expertise. So that makes a of sense. 5G's happening. A different world the next 10 years than the last 10 years. Isn't it? >> Yep. >> What is it about manufacturing? Why did you start there? >> I can take this. We looked at where the opportunity was from two perspective. One is whether what are the opportunities to sell, Dave. And the other one obviously comes with it because there's an opportunity to have. And manufacturing today at the Edge is about 30% of the opportunity in sales. According to IDC. But more so, it's been around for the longer time. And so it's maturing, it's the most demanding. And you know, it's got very long horizons of investment. And what we did was, we figured that if we can solve problems for industry, we can then extend that and solve it for everybody else. Because this would be the toughest one to solve. And we like challenge. And then, so we decided to focus and go deep. And you said it before, well, our approach is definitely horizontal approach. We cannot take an horizontal approach without verticalizing and understanding specific needs. So nobody can avoid doing both at the same time. You need to understand. But you also want to solve it in a way that doesn't proliferate the silos. So that's our role. We will understand, but we will make it more generic. So other people can never (indistinct). >> Yeah. And David, if I can add, I think the manufacturing is also very exciting for us as a technologist, right? And Dell technology, as in the name, the technology. So it's very exciting because if I look at manufacturing, we are really in the middle of a industrial transformation. I mean, it's a new era. If you think about, nobody care in the past to connect their machinery with... That they have PLC to the network. All of these is changing because the life where we live right now, with the pandemic, with the remote working, with the fact that you need to have a much more control and be able to have predictive matter. So you're not stopping your manufacturing. Is pushing the entire manufacturing institute industry to connect these machines. And with the connectivity of these machinery, you get a lot of data. You get also a lot of challenge. For example, security. So now, that's the place where connectivity brings the IT aspect in. And the OT guys, now they starting to speak (indistinct) because now it's a more complex things, right? It's not any more computerized only to one machinery. Specifically, is the entire floor. So it's a very interesting dynamics. >> Is the connection between that programmable logic controller and the Dell solution, you mentioned to secure, better security. And I presume it's also to connect back to whatever the core or the cloud, et cetera. Is it also to do something locally? Does it improve? Is there value add that you can provide locally? And what is that value add? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the value add, as I said, if you think right in the past, right? You have a machine that probably stay in the manufacturing for 20, 25 years then you have an hardware attached to that machine that they used the POC about 11 year. The guy that he knows better about that machine, is actually not the software component of it. But he's the guy that he's been working on that machine for 15 years. Now, how you translate that knowledge to a learning algorithm that actually can do that for thousand of machine. And that's really the key, right? You need to centralize information, process those information, but not in the cloud, not in a central data center, but on the manufacturing floor. And you need to have a way to represent these things in a very simple way. So the plant manager can take action, or the guy that is responsible for the entire line, can take action immediately. And that's where the change is. It's not anymore to... Is trying to extend that knowledge to multiple machine, multiple floor, and try to get these change immediately. So that's very important. >> So the PLC doesn't become a general purpose computer, or even necessarily an Uber computer. It connects to that capability because that enables data sharing across clouds. >> That's enable the entire things. You can't do a model just with one source. You need to have multiple sources. And also think about the manufacturing is changing not only for the machinery, but people that they build new manufacturing, right? They need to be smart building. They need to have a technology for being more green, solar energy consumption. So the manufacturing itself is mean five or six different things that you need to solve. It's not just the machine. So this idea of this silos environment is starting to collapse in one. And that's why it's important for us to start from a vertical, but also in the manufacturer, you already see this will expand to multiple things. Also, smart building another thing because they need it. >> Yeah. The red guilt to your point of view. Manufacturing is like the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And you've got adjacencies that you can take the learnings, and manufacturing, and apply them to those adjacent industries. Gil, give us the last word. >> No, usually when we talk at Dell technologies world, we talk to an ideal audience. And we're thinking this year that the way to talk about Edge, at least with the people who traditionally buy from us is expose them to the fact that they are more and more going to be responsible for every projects. And so our advice would be, our hope that they would partner with us to think ahead. Just like they do with data center with our cloud strategy. Thinking ahead as they think about their Edge and try to set up some architectural guidelines. So when they do get the request, they're ready for it. And think about what they know, think about the IP best practices that they applied. All of that is coming to them. They need to be prepared as well. And so we would like to partner with all of our customers to make them ready. And obviously help them simplify, secure, consolidated as they grow. >> Well, guys, thank you. I learned a lot today. We've made a lot of progress. You know, this is the hallmark of Dell, right? It's a very high, let me make sure I get this right. Very high do to say ratio, right? As you guys talked about doing this, a couple of couple of years ago. And you've made a lot of progress and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE to explain this strategy. It makes a lot of sense. And so congratulations and good luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's ongoing coverage of Dell Tech World 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, I'll be right back. (closing music)

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

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World. The Digital Experience in 2020 I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni on the Cube. Joining me is Gil Shorts in the SPP and the Edge Portfolio Strategy at Execution for Dell Technologies. Gil, it's great to see you, even virtually. >>It's great to see you again, Lisa. >>It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world if I didn't get a chance to talk to you. We didn't have you on the Cube, so we appreciate it. And you are very socially distant from me. I am in California. You're in Israel, so we're following guidelines. But one of the one of the other things that's changed since I've lasting you is you're now in this new role with respect to edge. Tell me a little bit about that. >>Well, a few months ago, the Dell Technologies Management asked me to look after our, um, its strategy and execution. Um, they put me in this role to execute on a strategy that has been developed for a while. Look at the market looking, looking at the opportunity. Onda also, you know, based on where I came from with VX rail looking at similar concept, that would be implemented across the board. And so here I am today in the process of setting up 18 that would help the company to capture that future opportunity. >>Well, congratulations on that. So we've been talking about the edge for a while. It isn't anything new, but talk to us about what's going on from Dell Technologies Perspective. What are some of the things that you're seeing with respect to the value that the Edge will provide two businesses in any industry? >>Um, you're right and he's not new. We have bean at the edge, all of us, the industry, definitely Dell Technologies forever. What's different is that for the last few years, a lot of the applications that are there to capture information and make real time decisions have bean in data centers or in the cloud, and we used to connect all sorts of sensors directly to those of data centers or clouds. Well, now we have too much information. That information is very costly. to move. It takes time to move it. I'm sometimes you don't want to move into a cloud or even your own data center. And so the industry is starting to move more and more. Compute storage, networking towards the edge. Eso It's nothing new, but you know there's use cases. Some of them are all use cases that need to migrate towards where the data is created to be a manufacturing plant or a retail store or or a minor or utility company. And there are a new use cases that are just being enabled by technology by, uh, better connectivity. Um, computer vision. You know, it used to be there in a store. There was a point of sale. Well, now there's a self check out, sometimes with the front detection capability. So all of those presents a fairly drastic change, where some expectation as 75% of the world's data, is created outside of the traditional data center cloud by 2025. And that's why we need to be working towards being the best choice for our customers for the edge applications. >>So, yeah, you quoted Gartner saying that 75% of that cloud enterprised it or the enterprise data is going to be processed outside formal data center or the cloud by 2025 is, you said That's in five short years, hopefully short years when we return to normal, so tremendous amount of change going on. But you also talk about some new use cases. I'm just curious, since the world has so dramatically changed our since we last saw you in person, are any of those use cases driven by the pandemic and how many businesses have had to Tibbett so quickly and change their way of operating? >>Well, that that's a very good example of how edge applications are being being leveraged. Obviously, computer vision, thermal imaging. Um, in some places, though, that's, you know, a very loaded term. You know, some social distancing applications are being created around the world. The the the world is a new way to respond to this, uh, this pandemic. But this pandemic, you know, will come will hopefully go soon. Go away soon when we get the vaccine. Um, but even day to day has changed the we doom or in a digital manner, we leverage more sensors and all sorts of electronic feelers out there. Um, you know, I talked to in agriculture Company recently that they have a robot that looks at their plans every day and decides which one are healthy and which one are sick and what to do about it. Um, they have a robot that follows that one and take section, and I suggested that they should have another robot to just eat the fruits. And, you know, none of us will be required anymore. But the point is, on a mission e no applications are being created because we can, and that that requires real time decision making. And that's why compute and storage and networking are moving towards where the data is created, and hence the growth in edge applications as we see them, >>that really time implication is absolutely critical. And that's something that businesses, whether it's agricultural or construction or retail, for example, or manufacturing that needs that real time insight. We talk about that all the time. We also talk about the term, you know, businesses need to get actionable insights from data, and that's one of those terms, like data driven. That could mean multiple different things. What from Dell technologies perspective, enabling a business to get actionable insights from data. What does that mean from Dell? Text perspective. And how is the edge of facilitator of that? >>Well, I think we need to look at, you know, our value, it our focus, which is in the infrastructure. I'm there. And so if somebody has information created at the edge, they would have their own way to analyze that data. Sometimes it's gonna be people data scientists with another latest application. Many times more and more, it's gonna be machines through machine learning that will analyze the situation and make recommendations. Either way, this environment needs to be up and running. It needs to be resilient. It needs to be outside of the data center, which presents a lot of challenges. Um, it's, you know, fragmented technology that is moving from different places to the edge in multiple multiple physical and environmental constraints. Um, those environments are remote and distributed. It's not in your data center, which means that you need to make sure that you have reliable service and support. You also need to secure it better. Suddenly, there is more entry points of things that people could touch and on great problems for the organization. So our job, in my opinion, is to solve those problems is to say, Look, you know, you need to move towards the edge to analyze your data, to make decisions. We're here to solve that problem and and allow you to do this without making a significant significant trade off, you know, versus doing it in your own data center or in the cloud. >>Yeah, I was talking to one of Dell Technologies customers the other day who has tens of thousands of sensors and cameras all over the world, or maybe great work there. And I'm thinking all of the challenges with respect to the environmental implications or right physical implications. And I was thinking, you know, the business is doing edge in California. The last month would have been very challenged with things like the smoke. How do you help organizations to enable that infrastructure to be reliable under different physical and environmental conditions? >>That's a great question, and I will just say before before I have said specifically that while the physical constraints are something that we usually talk about when we talk about EJ, I actually think that the bigger problem is management. Um, but we're not unaware for the physical requirements. So we are busy delivering recognized short depth. You know, servers we just launched recently. The extra to a platform, Highly ragged eyes, short depth will speak server that can go from minus, you know, sells you some to 55 cents you saw in temperature. Um, or you know, the ability to connect those through, you know, software defined networking. Or if I talk about a little bit of my heritage taking the same extra, too, with the VM or Visa V X range stack and said, you know, putting it out there as a ruggedized but also remotely managed in full stack solution. Um, So you will see us putting out and have bean different form factors front and serviceability, different temperature ranges, a different kind of CPS, all of those. But I will also tell you that we're gonna focus heavily on the way to manage those and secure them and update them because I think that's where the simplification comes, not just from the form factor of themselves. >>Yeah, that has been the heterogeneous and and very widely distributed nature of the H has been a barrier for businesses for quite a while. Can you unpack that a little bit? Mawr In terms of the simplification of the management, How is Dele? Technology is going to enable a business to achieve that. >>Well, let's start with what? What? What we have out there in the market today. Somebody could have a cloud native application developed, you know, maybe even all containerized. And they could run it on tansy t k g on the VX rail, and they could run it in thousands of locations around the world. I'm centrally managing all of those Andre the phone factors being, you know, regular server or ragged, A server. Um, the ability to run your edge application as an extension off your cloud model is also very important getting to consistent operation. So, for example, somebody is using VM, or Cloud Foundation in their data center. Could leverage that recently large capability off multiple multi classroom manager. So now you have a central VM or club foundation managing multiple classes out there on DSO, we bring together the physical attributes and the management attributes on at the same time. Um, if you expand on it I also think the Dell will have to meet customers where they are with, you know, the the ability to get simplifying and automate solutions for their choice off applications where they are today. And so that's what we're going to be working towards. >>So when you're talking with customers who are either looking to expand their edge operations, simplify them like you were just talking about, or even those businesses that are looking to explore and exploit the edge for operational improvement and maybe being able to deliver a better customer experience. I'd love to know how you approach those different customers. For example, I know that Dell says Don't consider the edge of separate problem. >>That's true the and I don't think customers look at the edges a separate problem either. In other words, the most conversations today would would look at in architecture that has some cloud and some edge. That cloud could be in their own hybrid cloud solution in the data center or a hyper scaler solution that they're running on. Um, if you think about the most generic problem at the edge, it's an analytics problem, right? So we know. So we know the data is created at the edge, it's going to be analyzed by definition. If you talk about machine learning, for example, parts would happen at the edge. What would happen in the data center or in the cloud? Um, if you look at any other type of analytics, you'll make some real time decisions. But save some of the information back in the cloud. So it's not a separate decision anymore. It's got to be somehow connected to your infrastructure. And I think that also learns toe. More and more organizations are putting together the O. T. What we call it operational technology in the i t. Um, when they're trying to leverage I t best practices in the OT space, and I think that's how they're coming together, right, you have to transform. You need to do something with the data. You look at a new architectures. I t brings that cloud or hybrid cloud or distributed computer architectures er into those more traditional environments. >>A little bit about that we've tried and we've talked about the I T. O T. Convergence and relationships in the past many times on the queue. But that's an essential component here, so that not only can a business really face those barriers, confront them and eliminate them, but it's also sometimes a bit culturally challenging. What do you see when you talk with customers and you recognize that's one of the things that they need to do with the line? I t n ot what? Your recommendations there, >>Um, first of all is I always wonder if ot people now we're calling them ot people. I certainly know that I t people are identified as I d. I think multi people are head of engineering head of production. You know, they run their businesses and and they've been doing things they you know, it's not like they haven't been doing even the analysis. Even nothing really is New Year. But they would use the, you know, the machine manufacturer on prem solution or a cloud solution to many specific so solutions worm or bespoke or specific specific machine specific problems. Oh, the advent off edge computing and those environments moving closer to the edge and the architecture unable to consolidate, by the way one of the strength until technology has. And so instead of just solving a you know, a A I don't know. Machine maintenance schedule or improvement in a plan. We can have an environment that's all that and possibly the video surveillance and maybe the plan. TRP. There is no need anymore to solve any problems specifically with a specific solution. That's where I t comes in, because that's what I T has been doing for a long time. So that conversation that bridge between solving specific problem and putting together an architectural ER that could consolidate multiple use cases and be part of an overall cloud our data center to its strategy. It's very, very helpful for both sides because because it's it's very effective. Um, I think more and more customers are realizing that that was conversations are happening and I t is being put into recommend a solution. So Andi, I think in fact, there's some research that shows that that is happening, Andi, that sets us up to have the right conversation with right, um, owners in those accounts. >>That's excellent. That brings up another question. I had you mentioned the word bespoke a minute or so ago, and I thought, you know so many of the of the edge deployments. There's complexity there. There might be unique requirements depending on business, depending on vertical. What's Dell Technologies approach to tackling the edge? Consistently like like the top three things that you go to with every opportunity every day appointment that you know, these three things fundamentally must be and part of the foundation. >>I think we touched on those. I think the recognition that it's part of a larger strategy is one. And so it's gonna be playing along in that you know that strategy, that data center to edge or cloud strategy. Um, the other one is the management that you put in place. And so, by the way, even even a few things that we we are gap today, which is why we are investing in the edge. Um, like the ability to provision with zero touch simplifying that experience, though we are very good at life cycle management, for example, which is the next thing. So it's that consistent operation between core and edge, which is very important. It's the physical constraints that have to be addressed in, I think, more important than anything is the ability to get support because you can't be everywhere that is considered for us and that you need somebody to be there in Tel. Um, you know, his people almost everywhere around the world that can be there on on a short notice to take care of problems. Moreover, many of our technologies dial home, and so we know when things happen even before they do. Um so I think sometimes people mention enterprise. Great. You know, it's It's a very important consideration to look at those edge. Sometimes people think that edge is small and possibly not as, um um, requiring as a Davis and replication. In my opinion, the workloads that are now going to the head require enterprise grade treatment and to end. And so you know, it's it's the management. It's the physical environment in the support that you may require that are very common. >>Excellent. Thank you. So last question for you. Since we don't get to do a physical Dell Technologies world this year, hopefully we will again one day soon. I want to know in this new role what are you you're excited about with respect to edge when you're engaging with customers, presumably over video conferencing. What are some of the things that you see that you're really excited about safe for the next sector. 12 months? >>Well, look, from a business perspective. Clearly, um, the the pendulum is swinging our way in a sense of customer need. What we have, which is very nice, because you can solve customer problems with a lot of experience and a amazing portfolio, though it has some gaps that we're gonna work on, Which is why you know what we're investing from a personal standpoint, it's It's kind of a rare opportunity to touch real life things. If that makes any sense, Every conversation is about tangible things that people do. They manufacturer, they save lives. They are growing plants. Um, it is. It has a very physical element that makes makes it so much more interesting. It also the edges. You know, it's the one area that we deal with. It has a paan almost in every sentence, so you can go for a conversation without anybody or anybody can >>Ugo. Now let's let's end it with a great panel for the edge. >>I know So what? No, I'm just saying, maybe I'm living on the edge. Who knows? >>Oh, nice living on the edge. I think that's what we're all doing during this coven. 19. Well, Gil, it's been so great to have you back on the Cube. Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you. Hopefully the next event in person. >>I hope so too. Lisa. Good to see you. >>Likewise. Bar Guillotine Arnson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020. A digital experience.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld, 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, we're in Moscone North lobby, I'm John Furrier. My cohost Stu Miniman. We're here with two great guests, David Appel, Vice President C2 Space and Intelligence and Defense, Civil Solutions at Raytheon, and Gil Shneorson, who's the senior vice president general manager of VxRail, of Dell EMC, great to have Raytheon, anything with space Stu and I get jacked up for that. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah I appreciate it, thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Gil, VxRail, got a customer here, impressive role out. Talk about the story. >> Well I think it starts with the fact that we have recently announced our support for Pivotal community services over VMware Cloud Foundation over VxRail which has actually the only Q-rated automated stacking industry that allows people to leverage containers and infrastructure as a service on one stack and we've been doing this for about three years now in a different way called Pivotal Ready Architecture and Raytheon has actually adopted that architecture to help their customer, the air force. And that's why we're here today together to talk about you know. >> Seriously modernization couldn't be a more important conversation in government solutions, you guys are a big provider, Raytheon, known for the tech chops, known for having good engineering. Talk about the solution, what you guys did, what's the use case, talk about the deployment. >> Yes with what's going on with the federal government for a while is the acquisition processes and what's taking sometimes years or decades to get software in the field is causing a lot of unmet requirements and needs of the ultimate user, the war fighters out in the field, to be met. So we've been on a journey for the last two years with Pivotal and Dell of how to help the air force, modernize the air force has gone under a transformation and a program called Kessel Run which is where we've deployed the Pivotal Ready Architecture to allow us to quickly deploy an infrastructure and allow us to focus on the end users and develop the capabilities that they need worldwide. And what took years and to now months and days so it's been a fantastic journey. >> Tell us what that means for the folks that might not know the pace of the procurement process. I mean some of this stuff is like 1995 procurement rules. I mean modernization these days is such an important part of it because the impact is significantly relevant. Share some color into the process. >> If you think about in the commercial world today where hundreds of applications be deployed overnight and updates on the what, hourly basis. In the government space it can literally take years to define a requirement, then you have to go through a budgeting cycle all the way up through congress and then you have to go through an acquisition cycle that could take a year to complete and so by the time you're actually fielding capability it is literally five years or more by the time the need was actually identified. And in that five years the technology probably changed which means your solution has probably changed from what's currently available. So shortening the cycles is what it's all about. >> And that's really about having the right product at the right time, not the old product five years ago. How fast things change, it's pretty important to have that nailed down. >> It's pretty amazing and you know I think you look at transformation and there's usually a trade off. What we have been working on and what we're announcing but really what we've been leaving over the last four years is a way to transform but stay close to your core. In other words transformation without trade offs. And so if you can get your VMware stack now running containers in a fully managed automated stack you don't have to change your skill set and you can do all of that and start innovating while staying very close to your core competency. You know you transform but you don't have to go too far and I think the story what Raytheon did is fairly amazing because they turned, you know, what did you tell me, a 50-year-old process, you know in like in less than half a year you turned automated systems that you know saves the US air force a lot of money. >> And lives too, are saved. I mean you're talking about people in the field, this is about people's lives too, I mean this is the money making. >> And it's been about transforming the culture of the way the DoD does software and the first example that Gil is mentioning was tanker planning which was the ability for the air force to refuel flight missions in the air, would typically take over eight hours to plan. And it was done by a white board. It was done manually. And in order to automate that and shrink the time, again that would have gone to that five year procurement cycle. We were able to deploy new applications using the Pivotal-ready architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field. That's done two things. It's from a financial perspective it's saving over $200,000 a day in just fuel costs from optimizing the tanker planning. But more importantly it's actually more efficient and protecting the safety of those flight crews. They're not in the air as long, they might not be in a hostile environment as long, so the security of the air force is even more important. >> As Pivotal always says they're outcome driven and that's pretty good outcome. I mean talk about the impact that you've had on everyone else around you because I'm sure there's some blockers in your way, people's feathers got ruffled, but then people see success they want to come copy it, right? So that's a pattern you see in a lot of government work. Hey there's a new way to do it, modern way. >> Yeah so our hindsight we're seeing it in two ways. One from a broader DoD perspective. The air force was out front here. They established this and from a DoD perspective what they're calling their Kessel Run initiative is really taking off. You're seeing other Kessel Run like programs being stood up like a program called Kobayashi Maru and Rogue Blue and a few others across DoD. So it's proliferating out across the DoD from a customer perspective, DoD customer perspective. From an industry perspective you know our competitors are quickly trying to catch up to us and they're trying to, you know, copy our playbook but we're continuing to innovate and continue on this journey so we're moving ahead with Pivotal and Dell. >> First of all David I think Pat Gelsinger must have been talking to your team because you're mashing up Star Wars and Star Trek with Kessel Run and Kobayashi there. But talk about mashing up, the stack that you're putting together, VxRail was really built around simplicity. It delivers that, that's what hyperconverged infrastructure does. You start talking about VCF and containers and PKS on that, Kubernetes nobody says is simple, but you know help us walk through, you know, how simple is it for you to leverage and deploy this. You've got organizational challenges and other things, so, you know, where is the solution, it sounds like you use the ready node, and where directionally is it headed? >> Yeah let me answer from this perspective. So we started this journey with Pivotal and the air force about two years ago. And at that time we started with a group of probably a dozen or less folks that actually even understood the technology or the products and the solutions that Dell and Pivotal bring forward. In those two years we're now up to over 100 people. Fully embracing the technology. It's creating an environment where it's easier for us to recruit and retain people because it's modern, it's not the old ways we used to do business. And we're finding that it's been very easy to deploy, very easy to train people up and very easy to operate. So from that perspective it's just been fantastic from not just the technology perspective but also the cultural transformation perspective. >> Yeah Gil I'd love you to comment on that because you know remember gosh when CI and HCI first rolled out you know the people that had those jobs were worried we were going to take their jobs away. Now when I hear your customer talking about, you know, it's easy to train them and even easier for me to recruit and retain, a powerful story. Are you hearing that across your customer base? >> Yeah I'll tell you what's a little different. In the past we have simplified things and we've made work somewhat go away but there was no alternative work. Today every developer, every IT person, they can't wait to go and be a dev ops person, right? So for IT when we come in and we say we're going to take this off your plate so you can free up your time, it really means something now, 'cause they know exactly what they want to do. They want to go and they want to be dev ops, they want to develop new apps, they want to move forward. And so it's very syngergistic in a way that we offload some of the burden from them and they actually do free up to do cooler stuff and then they like it. >> And they get to keep their traditional apps, with containers, gives them great capabilities. Not the throwaway. >> And that's a great point I think as I said before and it's really important to convey this, the transformation without trade offs is a big deal because they can keep the application. They can run the same environment. Right in our case they can do it you know at ease and in remote locations all over the world with less management. And at the same time they can innovate and manage those environments. And I think as long as we can keep that up we'll make a lot of people productive. >> Well I got to ask David the security question because one of the things that comes up all the time obviously Department of Defense, security's top of mind. Industrial IOT are now not just malware getting in for credit card information, you're talking about actual equipment, you're talking about flights in the air, hacking with physical things is a concern and it's a big IOT kind of conversation. You're in the middle of that, this is your world. What's your thoughts on the security? >> You know so we've obviously had to go through that in order to get authority to operate to push things into theater and one of the strongest benefits we've seen is the dev ops process and the platforms has all that security built in and all the testing as we're going through it. So the thousands of tests that are running as new threats are identified, the platform is updating with the latest patches or whatever it may be, so. >> John: On the automation stuff? >> On the automation side of it. So we're actually seeing a lot of the security, I don't want to call it risks go away, but our ability to mitigate them is being built into the software itself. So we haven't seen an issue yet where we haven't been able to get things authority to operate and push it out to the field, so. >> There's a high bar there too, obviously. >> It's a very high bar, very high bar, and that was part of the also the challenge of getting systems fielded in months and days versus years because of the ability to get that operations. >> Now this is a really big story I think. First of all Raytheon's a well-known brand, but, the modernization of getting stuff into theater and or into your production theater, military operations, that's a big deal, I mean, I think people don't really understand that aren't in government how fast this happens. I think that's a real testament to the solution, so I mean. >> Well the powerful thing to it is the national defense strategy is all about capability at the speed of relevance, and that's all about technology. Future wars aren't going to be decided by the size of your army or the size of your arsenal. It's going to be about how do you get data to decision makers faster and how do they can act faster. And that's where software and this infrastructure we're putting in place and putting capabilities in the hands of people that need it faster. That's what it's all about. >> And you know Secretary Matthis who was former Secretary of Defense said 48% of all the casualties are usually frontline war fighters. And that's where the technology edges so to speak. So again this is such a cutting edge topic, talk about it for days. How do you feel about this? This is pretty exciting. >> I'm just happy that every time I come into theCUBE, this is the second time I do it with a customer, you give me the opportunity to learn, you know, have a deeper relationship with one of my of probably now 7,000 customers. Which you know is really hard to keep up with these days and so you know we make technologies for people to use and when you see it in the field doing good it's a great thing. >> Well it's a transformation story. It's really a great transformation story. They have to, making a difference. >> Great, David, would love to hear, you know, what's on your ask for your partners that are deploying. Kind of give us a look forward roadmap that you can share. >> Yeah again I go back to everything we're about right now is speed and and getting capability faster. Currently in our marketplace right now we're fully embracing agile dev ops and everything it takes to deploy software from that perspective. Moving into things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and autonomy are the big things that are on our horizon from a technology perspective. And as our partners are in those areas and can help us bring more capability in that, that's going to help our end customer, the DoD, faster as well, so. >> What's the big takeaway from VMworld this year for you guys? What's the big observation? >> I'll be honest this is my first time at VMware. I'm amazed, I was at Dell Technology World a few months ago, I've really enjoyed it, I think it's a great event. And I'm just enjoying learning all the technologies so, it's, I've enjoyed the day. >> Gil what's your big takeaway? >> Well I'm part of the family. So I'm a little more familiar and even for me-- >> Whoever: You were briefed. >> No, no, even for me the rate of innovation that Vmworld puts out there is amazing. Right and you see how everything plugs together and you see how the vision keeps being, you know, completed, right, and we're in a good spot in the sense that we actually have what people need right now. And we do it better than everybody else. And you'd think that being number one in almost every category you'd be sitting there complacent and no, you know, we keep pushing the envelope, doing more innovating, more integrating more, so it's very exciting to see what's happening. >> Well great story here, Raytheon congratulations for your success I think it's super important to have a prepared military, certaintly, and saving lives and doing it in a modern way is kind of of a miracle these days in government, so congratulations. >> And I thank our partners for continuing to innovate 'cause that's helping us so. >> All right, great story, CUBE coverage here, Vmworld 2019, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live day three of theCUBE's double set coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 I am with Stu Miniman. We've got one alumni back. We've got Gil Schneorson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vxrail. Gil welcome back. >> Thank you nice to be back. >> And it's show and tell you brought Niv Raz CTO of Harel Insurance one of your successful customers, Niv it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you and great to be here. >> So Niv let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Harel Insurance where you're located, what it is that you do and then we'll get into why think Dell EMC is so fantastic. >> Harel Insurance is a insurance company doing a life, now life insurances very wide portfolio of business products in the insurance and investments in Israel. More than 5000 employees and three million customers managing around 240 billion shekels in 2018. So it's very innovative company to work in. >> So Niv interesting. Dell has a podcast and I'm just given a little plug here 'cause at the gym this morning the latest episode by Walter Issacson talks about transformation going on in the insurance business. Some people think, oh insurance has been around a long time, I mean heck to the Roman Era when they had some of this but today Insurance is changing fast. Can you give us at a macro level, give us what are some the changes and stresses on the company and how's that impact your job. >> It's funny you mentioning that. In 2015 our CEO has declared innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program the strategic plan was to take a role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform, data transform. We Israel has the brokers. The brokers are our sales person but once the customer and the sales part, the onboarding part, you want a more innovative service after that. The post service part is very hard in insurance and we investing a lot to make the post service customer experience very advantaged. >> We talk a lot about customer insurance at every, oh sorry, customer insurance, well that's important too, customer experience is the word I was going for. It's essential right because in 2019 customers of any type of product or service have so much choice. So talk to us Niv from looking through that lens of delivering an outstanding customer experience obviously your sales folks need to have innovative technology to deliver that outstanding customer experience. But when a company says we've got to transform digitally we've got to stay ahead of the market, delight our customers Where do you start? Talk to us about maybe a phased approach that you're taking to digital transformation. >> Digital transformation is all about how customer experience feel like in your environment. So if a person entering your website and trying to do some post service and running into some old fashionable process that is very hard to him and its really frustrating to do that. And actually if I look about what our approach about it, we're thinking about the digital transformation, we're thinking about how to take the onboarding part for our brokers, the post service for our customers, to make the process, the services we are offering to our customers easy as possible to just can submit. >> All right so Gil let's bring you into the discussion here. And I think back Converge Infrastructure, Hyper-converge Infrastructure you've been riding the rocket ship that is Vxrail, digital transformation wasn't the leading use for that when we started. It was simplification driving that wave of virtualization, we've heard Vxrail everywhere in the discussion this week. It was like all of these different cloud pieces, what's underneath them, VxRail. Help us connect the dots, the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable your customers. >> Yeah thanks Stu. We talk about a digital transformation a lot. Reality is that many of the customers, not all of them are transformative like Harel Insurance right. Many of them look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility, they see the economical benefit but there's a growing majority of customers who look to this is as transformational. And so that's where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to be an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multi cloud environment. So what is so exciting about this show is because we've been very successful we're growing very fast, but by putting this building block in many of our customers' data centers they've made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy. And I think we demonstrated in the last two days that hybrid cloud is here and it's sellable, operational and with VxRail and the integration with VML cloud foundation and the ability to add and burst into a cloud move workloads It's here and its now, I thinks that's what's nice about this whole thing. >> All right so Gil it's great for you to say it even as an analyst as a media organization for us to say it but what we love is that you brought a customer here to tell us the reality as to where cloud fits into your overall discussion. And I would love your feedback as to what Gil's saying. What's the reality in your world and the impact on your work >> I would connect the previous question this one because it's like a very rolling on questions about it. So you as the customers your expectations about the company is to do every operation from everywhere very easy way and the mobility and the digital transformation itself all the mobile applications, all the things that's taking the customer experience to the next level will took the organization to a phase that I need understand how to scalable the systems. So in this journey when you're looking about digital transformation you must have a infrastructure that support the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that the customer demands. You don't think to yourself that you are enter some E-commerce customer and they will send you on application. sorry Sir, we currently offline the management reasons or maintenance reasons. That thing in 2019 you will not think about and it's not be acceptable. So to do a scalability our multi cloud strategy in Harel is to have infrastructure free environment to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part. That's the big concerns of our IT teams was how to care about support and matrix's and compatibility and maintenance and when you go into the private cloud environment, the private cloud environment, that's VxRail on the bottom and VML cloud foundation on the top allow Harel is to start the journey to a phase that said okay we're going to our infrastructure free road map. >> Tell us about the outcomes that for example go back to, what we were talking about your brokers who need to be able to deliver any service. I imagine they're out in the field sometimes with customers depending on the types of services that they need to deliver. What has been some of the feedback or maybe the outcomes for the brokers. Are they able to do their jobs faster, deliver quotes faster to customers. What are some of the exciting outcomes that you're seeing as a result of the infrastructure that Dell EMC is helping you to establish. >> Part of digital transformation we're talking about micro servicing a lot of old virtual machines I'm saying that. So service applications on the password virtual machine now your micro services, why you micro servicing it because in 8:00 a.m, perhaps there is 20 persons that's selling your policies but perhaps on the 11:00 after some TV show said something about Harel you can have thousands of customers entering to your website. So how you can support that? So again brokers need the tools to support the operation, the sales operations and the customers need the tools to support the post service for themselves, how to claim, how to do claims how to do more preventives aspects of insurances. So basically again when you're looking about what exciting is, is the reality that I'm seeing a process of a customer and is saying, wow that was easy. So taking the digital transformation to make our customer experience better. >> All right Gil help us zoom out a little bit. We talked to one customer here but the business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational and helped accelerate the HTI growth. What are some the big drivers what's changed in the business. Give us the overall update. >> Yeah look, I think that when we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value and any value transfer to finances and there's a very strong interest in so this recent innovation we've introduced with integration with cloud foundation, people don't realize how much work goes into integrating two products regardless, even between 1 company you're talking about engineers co-location, you're talking about joint sprints you're talking about test fests, design workshop, customers interaction and so, but you know what I mean, it pays off. You deliver a new outcome that didn't exist before now with VCF and VxRail you can have a full life cycle management of the entire VMX stack and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework everything life cycled together, it's a very, very impressive outcome and it's ready now and I'm really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI, people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can, because we're simplifying it. In addition to that Stu I think it's important to understand or I'd like the people to know that the other way we're taking the ATI stack and the full stack is into much more intelligence so machine learning and predictability all the way eventually to remediation and so in this show we introduced the analytical consulting engine for VxRail and we put it out there as a field trial, as an early access. The thought process is we have a very large amount of intelligent customers that could tell us where they need this to take them. What's exciting about it is that every product these days is trying to be intelligent because we have a full stack we have a lot of context, a lot of things we could correlate. So we're very excited about this and we're hoping that our customers will participate in that design, I'm sure Harel will as soon as we can give it to them, the access and, not only full stack but make it much more intelligent, I think it's going to be very exciting year til next time we speak. >> Harel you have? >> Something to say about it. We are customers, us as an organization understand the public cloud allowed us to be infrastructure free and now they said okay some workloads are good for public cloud some workloads are good for private cloud and the multi cloud approach that VMcloud Foundation gives us the infrastructure free to just focus on the services. You need to understand the manageability of traditional infrastructure is very costly. Why? You need to manage it, you need to support it, you need to upgrade the frameworks, the buyers, the drivers and all the time to be concerned about if everything is supportable, how you do that all the job and again once you taking the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMcloud foundation the software you getting a complete life cycle that assist you to just focusing about to be a service broker just add new services to the exist environment. >> Well Niv, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with Stu and me where you guys are on this digital transformation journey, the successes you've achieved so far with Dell EMC, Gil again always great to have you on the program and we can't wait to hear more next year maybe Ace is going to give us some really insightful insights that will be groundbreaking. >> I believe so. Thank you very much. >> For Stu Minneman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE, live from day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll go back to San Francisco next year, but here in Vegas, third year in a row, and I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is John Troyer. Welcome back to the program Gil Shneorson, who's the SVP and VxRail general manager with Dell EMC. Gil, great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's still great to see you, John. >> All right, so I caught up with you at Dell World just a few months ago, down the strip. At that point, we couldn't take an autonomous vehicle. But since then, that Lyft now has like autonomous vehicles, so we know things can change pretty fast in the area. Why don't you give us, what's the update on your end? What's changed since last we talked? >> Thanks for asking. As you know, we're moving very fast. We're moving very fast, picking up many, many new customers every quarter, but the reason for that is because we keep innovating. So for example, in the show we announced a new G Series, a new 560 which is a new two-by-four Dell-based model, with more memory, more CPU, more capacity. Very popular form factor by our customers. We announced that we are now doing a simship with VMware, we're calling it synchronous releases. Our customers told us that they don't want to wait between a vSAN release and a VxRail release. We announced VxRail participation in Dell's customer loyalty program, which is a lot of features for future proof. We just included VxRail in the network fabric design center, which is kind of a sign for things to come, as where do we need the whole solution to be with networking inclusion. More configurability for VxRack SDDC, in other words, we keep moving forward very quickly. >> Gil, we've had the chance to document this since day one. So vSAN, I said when it was first announced, this was the rising tide that will really raise all the ships in what we launched as the hyperconverged environment. VxRail was, at the time, EMC and VMware creating a team together, took the product people, took some various components and made a product that really accelerated the marketplace and was very successful, thousands of customers. vSAN's got 15,000 customers, you've got to be one of the top deployments out. You're all under the Dell family, but is it still made up of those people and how does that teamwork and innovation between various groups work today? >> Look, when we did this there was no runbook. How do you take two teams from two companies? But we discovered all the time that what we've created is extremely powerful. We were growing three times the market. And usually that's not a simple thing and so on both of our sides we're doubling down. On the roadmap, the integration between the companies. And as I said, synchronous shipping is an investment, because what you really have to do is move more things towards the VMware side so testing are done quickly because you don't want to forego quality. So we're very happy with this model, and I think customers are happy with this model. You take the software, you put it with a specific configuration, you automate it to match, and you get something that's very resilient, and I think both of us know that and both of us keep investing it because it's working. >> That's great. Gil, I wanted to kind of follow on with what you said about the VMware and the Dell teams coming together. So my tribe is on the VMware side, right? And the VMware admins have always been very involved with storage. And for the last couple years they had been very involved cross-training on vSAN. So I'm kind of curious about the demand for VxRail and where it's coming from. Is it the VMware folks that are saying, "Hey, let's look at this"? Is it the C-level, is it the old storage team, is it the business unit? What's driving this transformation? >> Yeah, I'll tell you. Two years ago you needed to talk to people about why HCI. More and more, the conversation is why you're HCI. And we have a very unique position because we are part of the VMware stack. And in fact, maybe we'll touch on it later but HCI has its place, but we're already looking at what multiclouds means from infrastructure standpoint, right? And so, if it's a transformative conversation it would be some sort of an architect in that environment that's transforming. And they'd have a cloud project and they'll have a name for me, Cloud One, My Cloud, one of those. But most of the cases it's still a tech refresh, they're moving from a three-tier architecture, to a consolidated hyperconverge. And vAdmins have a lot to say. The server admins have a lot to say. And the reason they buy an appliance or basically buy our automation, because they realize that it saves them time, and it takes away risk. And many of them, by the way, choose to deploy vSAN on their own with servers which we call ReadyNodes, and they're also very successful. In other words, it's how much value you want on top of vSAN that you're willing to pay for and they're voting with their wallets. >> Yeah, Gil, I'm really glad you brought up multicloud because it's one of the big themes of the show. And it's funny, because we know that vSAN is a critical component of the VMware Cloud Foundation, the VCF stuff. But I hadn't really thought about, VxRail is just built with vSAN. So I still, even though I know it's a software thing, I think of it as an appliance and something coming from Dell. Talk to us about how VxRail fits into the multicloud world for customers. >> So VxRail, today we have VxRail and we have VxRack. They differ only in parts of the management stack on top of them. There's VxRail manager, there is an SDDC manager that comes from VCF. And by the way, those over time will find their way into somewhere of a consolidated stack. And the reason I'm talking about multicloud today is because we have not, we keep innovating with the vSAN team. We keep benefiting from their innovation, we keep adding on top of it. But more and more you'll see us integrate with other parts of the VMware stack. So for example, I think Pat touched on our future or upcoming integration with our Cloud Assembly services. So you can take a software-based management vRealize and manage VxRails that you own as a service. So our current roadmap in investments are not only to invest in being the most resilient, robust, vSAN-based infrastructure, but tying to every part of the VMware stack so we can really be that infrastructure for multicloud. So between VxRail and VxRack and the different touchpoints across the stack, we're really weaving it into the entire stack. That's our strength, we are a VMware product essentially. And so we realize that we need to take the whole breadth of the VMware stack and integrate as appropriate at every level, so this choice becomes a no-brainer for customers. >> Gil, since VxRail is an appliance, how often does it get updated and are people capable of taking those updates since it's an engineered system like that? >> Yeah, look, in the past, when people wanted a lot of things to work together, they'd qualify them, they'd test them and then they'd go upgrade them manually. Piece by piece through a recipe, if you will. What we've done in the appliance model, we've added our own IP which basically takes all of that and automates it. So what our customers get is a downloadable package from Dell EMC that includes the entire VMware stack update, all of the drivers, all of the firmware involved, and does a one-boot update for each node in the cluster and cycles through it automatically. So, because we now are synchronously shipping with VMware, and by the way, customers are concerned with express patches. Those we do within seven days, or even faster. So every time VMware moves forward, every time we move forward, we package it all up and we make it downloadable and upgradeable automatically. So it happens as fast as they need it to be, you know what I mean? There's no limitation because it's an appliance, it's the same thing as having a stack. >> Gil, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit up the stack. The early customers that I've talked to, we know that modernizing your applications can be really challenging. A pattern that I've seen from a number of customers is step one, modernize the platform, step two, start modernizing the applications. What are you seeing from your rack and rail customers as they go through that kind of transition? >> That's a good question. (chuckles) I think most of the customers we're talking to today are still modernizing the infrastructure. That's the reality. They need a more agile environment because they need to take care of things up the stack and go into development models of all sorts. You can also see that there's a lot of success with our joint work with Pivotal on Pivotal Ready Architecture. And so Pivotal and us have created the Ready Architecture, based on VxRail. The value in that is really Cloud Foundry and what it brings to the table, and the design. And we see a lot of adoption for that, so people are adopting Cloud Foundry as a development model and a deployment model. They're using VxRail as an infrastructure, and obviously because of its ability to migrate across environments, that infrastructure transcends, it makes sense. So there are two angles, but I think a lot of people are still modernizing their base infrastructure to be ready for greater things. >> Absolutely. All right, Gil, want to give you the final word. What should we be looking for from your group as we go through the rest of 2018? >> We're going to keep moving, we're going to keep innovating. We're going to make sure that the solutions fit into the existing VMware environments in a more seamless way every time we work on it. And I got to say, if there are customers watching this Cube interview, I keep reaching out to customers saying, look, we have many, many thousands of customers now. We do not want to lose the intimate relationship with them. So if anybody's watching and they're interested in a conversation telling us what they wish to see on the roadmap, voicing their opinions directly to the product group, I know my title and Twitter handle are going to be here at the bottom, I invite people to reach out and talk to us. >> All right, great closing point. Gil, we're always loving fostering conversations and feedback. So, Gil Shneorson, his Twitter handle's on a screen in case Shneorson doesn't come off your keyboard nice and easy. John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we're also, always love the feedback when you send it on Twitter. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018, thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back everyone We are wrapping up three days of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Keith Townsend. We are joined by Gil Shneorson. He is the Senior Vice President at VxRail Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Gil. >> Thank you for having me. >> Keith: Good seeing you again Gil. >> Yeah, good to see you again. >> A CUBE veteran. We are always happy to have repeat guys on the show. >> Yeah >> So, talk to me about VxRail. It's a massive success story. What is the secret? What is the secret of your success? >> Well, it's a combination of a few things. First of all, it's an HCI appliance, hyper-converged appliance And, as you may know, and I'm sure it's been discussed before we are seeing a massive transition from traditional architectures to HCI and that's basically driven because the economics of HCI are so enticing, that people really can't resist at least looking at them. And we know that 60% of them either have it or will have it soon. And within that HCI transition and within those economical benefits we focus on VMware, which is a larger portion of the market. And, we have a product that's solely focused on VMware, it automates the deployment and lifecycle management of, essentially, a VCR cluster. So, it's a very simple message. If you are a VMware customer, instead of going and changing every three years to your traditional three tier architecture, what if we could give you the economical benefits of hyper-convergence, which is start small, grow in very small increments, and never migrate data, but without ever leaving your VMware ecosystem. And so, if I ask you as a VMware user, you'd always say yes. Because it's so focused on that user and so optimized to them, we're seeing a great success with the product these days. >> Before the cameras were rolling, you made a comment, you said hyper-convergence is not really about the tech. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, that's an insight (laughing) >> That's actually very true. We can do things today that could not be done in a three tier architecture. But there are many hyper-converged products and all of them are doing very well. In fact, even in our portfolio, we at VxRail, we also have the Dell XC, which is a Nutanix-based technology. So, why they are all doing well is because when I buy hyper-converged, I can start small. Which means that essentially, I do not need to plan. And planning is dangerous because with traditional storage, you either buy too much or you buy too little. And even if you plan properly, you use only part of it until you migrate that data in and then, you use all of it, and then when you have the new one, you also use part of it until you finish. >> Rebecca: Right, right. >> And so, you are never really using what you're buying. And so, now you have this technology where you buy small. You don't have to plan at all. You can automatically increment and you don't have to migrate. And you know that migrate is a very traumatic experience (laughing) In large environments. And so those benefits are what's driving all of this. It's now enabled by technology, but it's not about that. But what I also think that is happening, is that we've combined the skillset, or the technology for storage and server, and we deploy it within a customer's network so we've made it much simpler, but it's not ultimate simplicity. People have to remember that they still bought a data-centered solution and so now, troubleshooting your hyper-converged solution means that you have to know storage principles and network principles and hypervergence principles. >> So, let's explode that out a little bit. Because this is really an exciting topic for me. When you take that load off of your customers, The planning, the pre-engineering, the test, the integration work, that frees up a lot of opex hours for customers to redirect their energies to do something else. Let's talk about those something else. What has been the transformation within customers once they're freed up from that responsibility? >> I don't know. Look, if you look at hyper-converge, while it's growing dramatically it hasn't taken a massive share of the industry yet. We have to be humble at the same time. We see growth. So I don't know that people free up a lot of time, but what they can do is they can focus on the higher level outcomes, Which is ultimately what they want. People want a cloud experience. Either it's completely private or it's a hybrid cloud. They want the ability to deliver by self-service to their own internal users. They want a cloud outcome and regardless of HCI, you still need to do that work. And so now they can forget about the infrastructure, because it's mostly automated, and focus at the next level of outcome. And, as you know, within CPSD, we also do that. So if a customer wanted the full experience, we would actually put the infrastructure aside, we would talk about that hybrid cloud experience end-to-end, we would consult or deliver, but if they want to do it on their own, which many of them want, we would then provide them the infrastructure, but I think that's where they are going. They are looking at the next level of outcomes beyond what the infrastructure brings. >> But you also said, which is also an astute comment, about how it is actually a traumatic experience for these customers to do the migration. Do you face a lot of resistance? I mean, how do you get the organizational buy-in to initiate this change? >> Yeah, when I said traumatic, I mean that in a three tier architecture that migration happens every three years. So I think people are pretty much willing to do it one last time. (laughing) Because they know it's not going to happen again. And so, migration into hyper-convergence is certainly not resistance. Where we see resistance, is not even customers objecting, but some customers are unable. For example, if my storage buying cycle and my network buying cycle and my server buying cycle are not aligned, I will always have some access capacity somewhere, so even though I could have a much better solution going forward, I can't afford it because I have capacity somewhere. For that reason, by the way, we introduced Cloud Flex, because if you could buy VxRail or Dell XC with zero down payment and pay month by month by month, and have no commitment which means you can return all of it in 12 months, we are trying to break that cycle and allow people to get into it because they want to do this. Sometimes they simply can't. >> So day three of Dell EMC World, you've talked to what something like 30 customers? Give us a snapshot of the range of conversations. Is there a dominating theme or are customers just on, are all 30 customers on 30 different phases of this journey? >> So I talked to a lot of customers, but I also talked to a lot of partners. Partners are still figuring out how much they need to go into hyper-converged. Most of those conversations, both with customers and partners were about, not the technology so much, but rather is it time to consolidate practice?. Is it really still the time to keep a storage practice separate? And that's both for the seller, us and the partners, and for the end-users, right? Is it really true that you need to all budget for storage, budget for network, budget, and do you have the right people that know all of those disciplines that could, you know, then you might need fewer of them, because others will be focusing on other things. But, those that support this and understand this must have a broader skillset than they did before. So, most of the conversation were around, you know, around that. People were interested whether hyper-converged is ready for primetime. They don't know if it's ready for mission-critical, and I tell them that VxRail today is used for radiology, and unified communication phone and email, and SMS traffic between carriers, and trading applications, believe it or not, already. >> Keith: Wow! >> And so, I think as I said, because it's not so much about technology, because we assume that technology from any large vendor will work, and if it doesn't any large vendor will make it work, and stand by the customer. But those economical benefits are driving everybody to go there very, very fast. So, most of the conversations about can it be done, is it ready for it, should we do it right now, should we wait. I think those are the themes right now. >> And that's what we will be talking about at next year's Dell EMC. >> I think by next year we will talk less about hyper-converged because it's almost going to be. >> It will be the reality. >> Keith: Yeah, table steaks. >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's going to be table steaks at that point. I actually don't know what we are going to be talking about. (laughing) >> Well, we will just have to wait and see. >> Yes. >> Gil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> It's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much. >> That wraps it up for theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm Rebecca Knight along with Keith Townsend. Thanks for joining us and we will see you next time. (upbeat techno music)