>> Commentator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE's conversation with Dell Technologies. I'm Lisa Martin and today I'm talking with Mark Sanders, the VP of Global Presales from the Data Protection Division at Dell Technologies. Mark, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa. >> Great to meet you virtually in this new world that we're all operating in. So I want to understand a couple of things, when you were in the field talking with customers, as I'm sure you are on a daily basis, now virtually. But, in terms of value, I think nowadays for businesses to understand the value that technology decisions and longterm benefits can make to their environments is critical as budgets are changing, they're shrinking, et cetera. Validate the Value or VTV is a methodology that Dell EMC has pioneered. Tell me about that and what does it actually mean? >> Yeah, I mean, when was the last time a customer said, "Hey, I need to do more with less", right? It just doesn't happen. So, the reality is customers are under extreme pressure when they make us an investment, to validate that what they planned it to solve, like, what's the outcome they're looking for actually came true. And, you know, we pioneered this process where we go back in after a solution has been implemented, and it's, you know, been installed for a little bit of time and go in and pull a bunch of stats from the system so we can objectively provide data to the customer that says, this is the actual performance, this is the actual outcome that you receive for the solution that you invested in. And then, you know, what's really transpired once we created that process is customer really loved seeing this information, so they wanted to see it on a frequent basis and it kind of evolved into a process where we can quickly identify key KPIs with a dashboard view, DU proficiency, time to back up, time to restore, success, failure rates and as systems evolve continually provide an update to the customer on the value of the system that they have from us is providing to them and keep in front of mind and then, you know, nowadays we not only show them the stats of the system, but also then validate the actual Cost to Serve, meaning the amount of data they're holding versus the investment they've made, you do the math, you can come up with a cost per Gigabyte to that store on the system, which are key metrics that customers like to see. >> Well, that quantification is critical, right? Because there's a lot of competitors in the market that do similar things, but being able to not just show metrics from a survey or an analyst report, but actual customer metrics. These are the numbers that we're generating for you on a weekly or a monthly basis. That sounds pretty differentiating. >> It sure is. The reality is, if you can show a customer not only the performance of their system and validate it to that level, that really puts a lot of the noise in the system from different competitors who are claiming other things, you know, puts it to rest when the real data, it's really performing, the cost of service is exceptional. When they compare that to another solution that they're looking at, it's a no brainer that why they continue to invest in and stay with Dell EMC. The other point of this is you can show an Automatized B2B to potential customer to show, hey, this is a customer, the same vertical you are, who's doing the same things that you're talking about doing with us. Here are the stats that they're seeing, it's a real proof points and what I've found in the market is those who can truly show the value that their system can do and validate it do, and those who just rely on Marchitecture and PowerPoint slides and handshakes, they don't talk about these things and, you know, if you scan the market, I don't hear any other vendor talking about validate the value or showing objective stats after implementation and actually doing the cost and serve math for them. And you should be asking yourself as a customer who's considering us, why aren't the other guys talking about this? It's because their numbers aren't as good as ours. If you had better stats than us, I guarantee you'd be talking about it all day long, twice on Sunday. >> So validate the value, how does that synergize with TCO and ROI some of the other metrics that we're often used to hearing? Is this a kind of like a trifecta where you can really show customers a number of significant statistics to show what they're in real time achieving with your technologies? >> Yeah, so there's a number of stats that are covered in a value to value, the amount of data that's protected and mandated your storing, how long it takes to back data up, how many systems are being protected and then, you know, we factor that into the original investment that you made, come up with your cost to serve. So those key metrics then validate the ROI or the return on investment that you're looking for, you know, are you able to meet the current demand need that you sized the system for? Therefore you don't have to invest more and so the actual projection on that TCO is true. You can continually validate that along the way and a normal customer will look at a B2B and their stats on a quarterly or six month basis, a rolling basis just to make sure that ROI, TCO, that they were, you know, that you modeled in the beginning is actually coming through. See what happens is a lot of times people think they have ROI, but then the reality is whoever sold them something didn't sell them enough, and then they have to invest more in, and so that ROI gets thrown out of whack and they don't go back and validate that they actually did meet the ROI. So one of the things we really pride ourselves on is sizing, being able to deliver a solution that performs as designed, you stand behind it and then we continually validate that we're being able to meet those milestones to hit that ROI. >> Can you give me a customer example in any industry that you think really, highlights and underscores the hallmark of what VTV actually means and delivers? >> Yeah, so we've done so many of these last year, just to give you an example, we did something like 33,000 Value to Values across all the different customers that we have. And so you see some very common statistics when you look at these as many of them as I do. So a common statistic will be, you know, 99% success rate, that means that 99% of the time, all the backups complete and finish a hundred percent, there's no issues. And then another common statistic is that, you know, about 80 to 90% of the backups finish in less than an hour. That means that out of all the thousands of clients that you have, almost, you know, almost all of your backups are actually happening in less than an hour, showing the performance of our system. And then the typical stats we see on a deduplication are anywhere from 20 to 100 to 1, it just depends on how many backups you're doing a day and what your intention is, but we see significant value on the deduplication of timeline. And then the last bit I'll tell you that's pretty typical is the actual, you know, replication window, how much data you have to replicate, right? There's three stats that show up here, the daily DD Break, the weekly DD Break and the overall. We typically show the overall, and that gives you your cost to serve, which is typically pennies a gig but what's very interesting is that daily DD Break is the amount of data you have to replicate. And that is consistently super low due to a high DD Break which drives that TCO that you were talking about before, who said drives ROI, right? If you have to invest in more bandwidth because the solution you have does not perform and you constantly are sending way more data than was advertised to you, you know, pipes are expensive, dedicated connections become costly, and it is opening up a new link becomes a real burden to an enterprise. >> So as organizations are evolving every day and especially in the COVID situation, when there's so much acceleration going on at the same time as there's budgets that are shrinking or being depleted or being eliminated, customers are also in this multi-cloud hybrid world in which they live, where they're trying to manage pretty much every organization that a suite of traditional technologies and they're taking on emerging technologies, whether it's Cloud Native, SaaS, 5G or Kubernetes. So how does Dell EMC help customers manage and protect this critical data across traditional technologies and those emerging and really be able to manage all of that, from a single pane of glass, ensuring that everything is protected from any type of accidental or malicious incident? >> Well, that's a lot, but let's go kind of unpack that real fast, right? So there's a couple of things that Dell does, which makes us unique in this current market that we live in where Multicloud you have both proven workloads that have been around for a while that still need protecting, plus you're looking at modern workloads, whether it's containers, Kubernetes or you can have stuff in Azure, Amazon, Google, you know, multiple clouds or you have your own private cloud. The reality is most customers have multiple applications in a life cycle management situation where they may have some older applications they're going to be around for several years while they're still doing modern apps at the same time. And so Dell's really got, you know, what we categorize is, you know, proven in modern and then coexistence. And the reality is, is that we have both proven technology that delivers a fantastic performance, fantastic ROI, fantastic cost to serve, and really protects that application tool set that's been out there in the market for a long time that customers still have. At the same time we now have modern capabilities that address things like Kubernetes and Multicloud and the ability to manage that all from a single pane of glass, click and launch, single sign on, everything's HTML5, simple and easy to do, the same time delivering full API transparency. A lot of customers have both the need for UI and full automation through an API and so it's this value that we unlock by allowing the customer to have a single vendor that protects both proven in modern capabilities and proven in modern workloads across all the different cloud environments that they need. So they don't need another vendor and I know we were talking earlier about the study that we've done at Dell, the Global Data Protection Index, done it multiple years in a row and it consistently shows that companies who have multiple data protection vendors to protect their workloads, tend to lose more data when they have a data loss, those data loss events take longer to recover and they cost more than a customer who's running a single vendor to protect all their workloads. Now, what happens when you partner with somebody who doesn't have that proven and modern coexistence capability for you to tap into? You're forced to then have another vendor in your mix to help you protect that modern workload or another vendor to stay with you, to help protect it, a proven workload that's not going anywhere for anytime soon. Plus entering more risks, more costs into your environment. Dell's really in a unique position with our proven and modern coexistence strategy, allowing our customers to remove that risk and have all the value unlocked so that they don't really have to worry about, hey, I got another use case. I'm going to Azure, I'm going to Amazon, I'm going to Google, I want it to back up on Chrome and want to replicate to the cloud. All that's covered with our solutions. There's no other vendors required. >> In that 2020 Global Data Protection Index research survey that you mentioned, an interesting stat that popped out to me is that about 80% of the respondents and I think there was about a thousand IT decision makers who have responded, over 80% said, we are using multiple data protection solutions. So presumably a big market opportunity for you guys. How do you go in, walk me through the strategy of helping a customer, either extract existing data protection solutions or maybe even coexist? >> Yeah. >> I'll use that word in a different route, What is that typical scenario like? If I can ask you to take something, I'm sure that's very broad, but maybe standardize it a bit? >> Yeah, so there are, you know, Dell's, in addition to this coexistence proven and modern strategy that we offer our customers, we have multiple ways for them to consume that strategy. One is software defined, another is integrated with our integrated data protection appliance and then we also have purpose-built technology. And so our ability to walk into a customer's environment and immediately add value by replacing one of the things that they use for data protection and our ability to support third-party allows them to easily transition off of something that they've been using for a while and onto our single vendor strategy. So we have, you know, the ability to deliver that capability right out of the gate, give them some value and then transition them over to a single vendor across all their work use cases. The other thing that you pointed out, is the opportunity is huge, you know, we have a number one share, according to IDC's recent poll for last year, but you know, the percentage of market share is, you know, we still have a lot of room to grow. So there's a lot of customers for us to continue to go help. And because of that, you know, it's all about getting to the customer with the message that, hey, I can help you now, I can help you remove risk and I can help you transition off of these multiple solutions to a single vendor. Some customers want to go really quickly, some want to go over time, and we are in a position to give them multiple options to make that journey happen. >> In this very interesting 2020 year that's unfolding, are you seeing more customers with the need to accelerate? As they have now, an expanding multi-cloud organization with, you know, traditional and emerging technologies. Are they coming to you saying help me actually get off of these multiple solutions? I understand the stats about the risks and the POS, is that acceleration point to me that you're seeing it as a trend? >> For sure, there's several things that happen in when you have a stress factor like we're dealing with now where, you know, the need to do more with less and to save money is more paramount now than it's ever been and so kind of some of the old things that stopped IT professionals from really transforming to get true cost savings if they go down this journey, you know, all those blockers are now kind of off the table and people are seriously looking at how do I reduce risks? How do I get myself in a situation where I'm partnered with a quality vendor? And then, how do I save money at the same time? And so we've done several things to help our customers with that process. One is we released a new a cloud subscription model that allows our customers to consume all of our functionality for much less than if they paid for all those individual piece parts, allowing them to take advantage of prepaying it upfront or paying on an annual basis so they can get some more cash to spend on other investments. And then our efficiencies have increased this year as well so systems that used to take up multiple racks can now be fit into a single rack and actually can store more data. So we're finding more value in the data center, while continuing to evolve that Cost to Serve strategy, then try to drive costs out of the environment and what we tend to find is when you consolidate multiple platforms, there's a lot of inefficiency in that. So there is a lot of savings initially if you go to one vendor, but then you know, when we go to our existing customers already done that, how do we then continue to save them more money, right? And, that's really the value that we're doing here. Now, the other thing I will tell you is in this pandemic, we're also seeing a real fight to security. And some of the value that we've unlocked for our customers with our cyber recovery solutions is also another key technology wave they've really gripped onto, with less physical people on site to help solve, you know, cyber recovery issue where they've maybe got impacted. They're really looking for vendor solutions that have that full coverage that can easily be implemented to allow them to quickly recover from an event. So, you know, when you combine those things together, we're really delivering some value and helping our customers both save money, transition and remove risk from their environments, which are key in this current market that we're in. >> Absolutely and I think the theme of this interview, Mark would be quantification. It really sounds like what Dell is able to do is show customers the hard numbers about significant benefits to their environment. So we thank you so much for walking us through that. There's a lot to unpack there, but this has been a great conversation. We appreciate your time, Mark. >> Thank you for having me. >> From Mark Sanders, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE with Dell technologies. Thanks for watching. (upbeat acoustic music)