>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change, just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I'll bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment and how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, We'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role work, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I, >>You were, were talking, that's >>What we, you were talking before about myths and you know, the, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance. We looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where >>You work. And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders, we've probably been thinking about a decision or a transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, We're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we sent out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. Culture. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model and doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one of the lists is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool. Top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it and how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important and then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power a positive thinking, do want to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the see you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>That you might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and you know, paying it forward. But, but so it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our CEOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. It's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>Hello everyone, This is Dave Lanta and you're watching The Cube's coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget, it's Cyber Security Awareness Month. Sam Groot is here. He's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud. What's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look, Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design, where essentially organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multi-cloud by by default, rather it's multi-cloud by design, where you're very intentional in how you do multi-cloud. >>And how we deliver multi-cloud by design is through Apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, they've like, we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced Project Alpine, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SA providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce a strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer, we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell, we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware, of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new. Speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type That's right. Ecosystem's, telcos, what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about clouds and multi clouds. We've talked about private and hybrid clouds, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and application securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name. It is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure, orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em. You know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or IOT frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have that IT expertise. And we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust, so we have Mother's Day, you, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's Kids' day? And we, of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cyber security awareness day. So, but we have cyber security awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent top of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cyber security and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cybersecurity and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain in the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud, you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay. Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio. We are the trusted partner of choice to help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So, Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell Tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was, was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and cult culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022.

>>Welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante. We're going inside with Dell Execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you. And thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, >>It's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. They're our motivation, They're top of mind, everything we do. My leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we want to get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data. So no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in its everywhere, right? And so as it is, the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations. That's OnPrem and off, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multicloud actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed, it's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multicloud by design. If you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I'm talking to 'EM all the time. >>You think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about the security complexity that that drives with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from, also what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The mediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and align versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT in a more agile it, and they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell, that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today. Just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience will go back to that complexity. And it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries in hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big new knowing little Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near and data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all their businesses that created more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA patron fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we've talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this >>Year, right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech Group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well. Connecting to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places. And customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software defined common storage layer. That common storage layer, You can think about this, Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types of locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you, just to be, just to be clear, we made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announced us back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Broco in the very near future. So I won't give up more, too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, you know, well shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on there as a service transitions by modernize the con consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it in a, unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your ISAs. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would assert no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges that customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourage this interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We Dell, I guess, have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first investment alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at. We announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data in their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and know with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multicloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very longstanding and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multi-cloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics in data management, using your Supercloud analogy data, the sa right? This is our SAS layer. We've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like Equinox and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and it was obviously strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first? You've mentioned the Edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discuss, we're working in a very fast paced, ever changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multi-cloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching Exclusive Inside Insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell. Technologies's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business unit, who's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam GrowCo is the senior vice President of marketing. He's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the >>David, It's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me. >>Yeah, you bet. So Tom, it's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin. Pinky as kidding. And, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, the scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enable their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then in the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly, shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies, Let me put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, $50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from, from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, But we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a result of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, you, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting current local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I, I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation in infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will, We're continuing to invest. And you Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so. You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think, value creation opportunity in a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking. That gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the gr the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client and in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share, gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in, in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well, Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cube's exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there.

>>The transformation of Dell into Dell emc. And now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company to a Midling enterprise player, forced to go private to a debt laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i e VMware, and now is a hundred billion dollar giant with a low margin business. A strong balance sheet in the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry and financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book Play Nice But Win in a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. >>If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program. Now today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're gonna hear from four of Dell's senior executives, Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's gonna answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business. >>That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Groot, who is the senior vice president of marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering, and then the new Edge platform called Project Frontier. Now it's also cyber security Awareness month that we're gonna see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Vera, who's Dell's chief Human Resource Resource Officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I wanna share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. >>Now, as you know, we love data here at the cube and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ET R'S proprietary net score methodology in the vertical access. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the X axis, his overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample, this is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot, that represents Dell's ISG business that we're gonna talk to Jeff Boudro about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is, it's, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. >>It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut had we done. So Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis that represents a highly elevated net score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. >>The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software defined high margin offerings in this, in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spinout did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials. To give you a sense of where the company stands today, Dell is a company with over a hundred billion in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. >>But because it's a hardware company, primarily its margins are low with operating income, 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin with VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins. Were in the low thirties. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on r and d because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12 month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12 month revenue. Dell's Apex, and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of service now's total revenue. Of course, service now is 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than 5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion market cap. >>That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing. Thanks to VMware's cash flow, Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake at all, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of 46 billion. It added to the, to the balance sheet debt. Now Dell's debt, the core debt net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. >>But Dell a hundred billion company is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar H HP's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc. Dell's, you know, laptop and PC competitor is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than 50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over three x, about 3.3 x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine, but it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads. One to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. >>So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market and it can provide infrastructure for pr pretty much any application in any use case and pretty much any industry and pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely hp, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. And hp E and ibm, which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? >>Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder led company, which makes a cultural difference in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software, light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, is a much better chance of doing well at a hundred billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're gonna try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as a service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. >>And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as a service and reduce risk for for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board as Matt Baker Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say it's not a zero sum game. What it means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge that's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and Coco, Jeff Clark, explain this vision, please play the clip. >>You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. That's if, if you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want, They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day there's, they have to differentiate what they do. Well that, that's >>Exactly right. If I take that and what, what Dave was saying and and I, and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to delivery a distributed platform, game over, >>Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over? As Jeff Clark said, if Dell can do that, I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course it's gotta be funded and now it's gonna take time. And in this industry it tends to move. Companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's gonna come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and of course edge at telco slash 5G opportunities. >>All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through Tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges. At the same time, in my view, it's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but in a, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. >>The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, like to see that inside of Apex, like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is with Dell's go to market advantage, which which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem hybrid edge super cloud player that I wanna partner with to drive more business. You'd be crazy not to, but Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable infrastructure as a service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And of course we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vte. We hope you enjoy the rest of the program.

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC, and now Dell Technologies, has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocketship PC company, to a middling enterprise player, forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech, i.e., VMware. And now is a $100 billion dollar giant with a low-margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. The financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book "Play Nice But Win," in a captivating chapter called "Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue." Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number-one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin-out of VMware from Dell, and a massive wealth-creation milestone, pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell, and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the President of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle, and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott, who's the Senior Vice President of Marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on APEX, which is Dell's as-a-Service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, that we're going to see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jenn Saavedra, who's Dell's Chief Human Resource Officer, about hybrid work, and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company, and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE, and one of our partners, ETR, has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary Net Score methodology on the vertical axis, that's a measure of spending velocity, and on the x-axis is overlap or pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell's CSG products, laptops in particular, are dominant on both the x and the y dimensions. CSG is the Client Solutions Group, and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue, and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business, that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the Infrastructure Solutions Group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is its, as I said, its most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business, as well as the Dell server business, and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server, and its storage sectors. But the nuance is, look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated Net Score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business, in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is, we put a box around VMware, and it's prominently present on both the x and y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high-margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been, had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives for Michael Dell were just too attractive, and it's unlikely that a spin-in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials, to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over $100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue, and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate, for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company, primarily, its margins are low, with operating income 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D, but because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash-flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's APEX, and of course its hardware maintenance business, is recurring revenue, and that is only about 5 billion in revenue, and it's growing at 8% annually. Now, having said that, it's the equivalent of ServiceNow's total revenue. Of course, ServiceNow has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash-flow margin, and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and an $85 billion market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment, with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story. And hence it's conservative, and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing, thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al., they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction, to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation, is now down to 16 billion, and it has $7 billion in cash on the balance sheet. So a dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So, pretty good picture. But Dell, a $100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion, or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc., Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple that's over 3x, about 3.3x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes, and no. Dell's performance, relative to its peers in the market, is very strong. It's winning, and has an extremely adept go-to-market machine, but its lack of software content and its margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers, and what might that look like, going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world. And it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely HP, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. and HPE, and IBM, which has had an abysmal decade from a performance standpoint, and has had to shrink to grow again, and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company, which makes a cultural difference, in our view. And it's actually comfortable with a low-margin software-light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that, and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, has a much better chance of doing well at 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. APEX is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now, remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-Service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers, and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing, because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-Service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead. Specifically, Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, likes to say, it's not a zero-sum game. What he means by that is, just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds. What we call supercloud. And that's Dell's strategy, to take advantage of public cloud capex, and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds, and out to the edge. That's ambitious, and technically it's nontrivial. But listen to Dell's Vice Chairman and Co-COO, Jeff Clarke, explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also, technology and business models are tied together, and an enabler. >> That's right. >> If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying, and I summarize it the following way: if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Furrier called it a "business operating system." Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system, or cloud operating environment, to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale capex. Now, is it really game over, as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? Uh, (sucks in breath) I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course, it's got to be funded. And that's going to take time, and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So, as often is the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cybersecurity as an adjacency, and of course, edge and telco/5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher-margin software content, it can thrive with a lower-margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers, and maybe through tuck-in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here, "Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem," because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if APEX is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And its ecosystem today is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The Snowflake deal is an example of up-the-stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship, and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live in a data-heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of APEX. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today, in its early days. The point is, with Dell's go-to-market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, supercloud player that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate, and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable Infrastructure-as-a-Service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly evolve. And of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>Welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante. We're going inside with Dell Execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now is friend of the Cube, Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the key. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. They're our motivation. They're top of mind in everything we do. My leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions. Both turn and future offerings really ensured that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those is driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in its everywhere, right? And so as it is, the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations. That's on-prem and off, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multicloud actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed, it's been a lot more of multicloud by default versus multicloud by design. Really think about customers, I I, I'm talking to 'EM all the time. You think about the data complexity, that's the growth in the graph. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity, shifting from central to decentralized it, you think of a multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about the security complexity that that drives with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from, also what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and align versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT in a more agile it, and they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries in hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data, my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all their businesses that created more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for realtime insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a pare fan like I am Dave, they truly are meeting us where we are in, in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. But bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech Group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security models, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software defined common storage layer. That common storage layer, You can think about this, Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types of locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you, just to be, just to be clear, we made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce us back in, in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds, really delivering the best of both world, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. >>But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Cru in Frontier here with Sam Broco in the very near future. So I won't give up more, too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, you know, well shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multicloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your ISAs. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own. Not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of each of our teams. We del I guess, have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. >>We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at. We announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud. Specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and know with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multicloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multi-cloud space. Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? >>As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics in data management, using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our SAS layer. We've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like Equinox and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility, take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the I isg. And so you had to dig in and it was obviously strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we mo modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first? You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we've discussed, we're working in a very fast paced, ever changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multi-cloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multicloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change and just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, so, so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kinda strange new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>Mean, you talking, So that's >>What we do. You were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture, We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cuz the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is honest change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you know, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who worked for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists like go, yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really b been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make this, you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a, values >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but, so I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You'd always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program. Today, in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we'll hear from four of Dell senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question why is Dell a good long term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's going to talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Groccot is the senior vice President of marketing. He's going to come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as-a-service offering. And a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month and we're going to see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jen Saavedra who's Dell's Chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're going to geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and Edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet, CFO, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to "theCUBE." >> Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you, so thanks for having me today. >> Yeah, you bet. Tom, it's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin. You had to give up your gross margin pinky, just kidding, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro. But putting that aside for a moment what's really remarkable is that for a company of your size, you've had some success at the top line which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >> Well Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey if you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there. But stepping into the last 18 months, it's, I think I remember talking with you and saying, "Hey, the scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did," which was a pretty incredible growth story. As we think about how we helped customers, drive workforce productivity, enable their business model during the all remote work environment that was the pandemic created. And couple that with the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the pandemic coupled with the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade, which then unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Let me put it that way. >> Well, I was impressed with you Tom before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns but I've never seen anything quite like this with Fed tightening, and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming. There's a bear market. You got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But IT spending is, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >> Yeah look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, we should start there as a grounding. The total market, the core market that we think about is roughly $750 billion or so, if you think about our core IT services capability. If you couple that with some of the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity total addressable market. And so from that perspective we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. We have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, number one share in some of these, our highest share position may be low 30s and maybe in the high end of storage or at the upper end of 30s or 40%. But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So if you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been really great performance through the pandemic as you highlighted. We actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year '23 with revenue up 12% operating income, up 12% for the first half. What we talked about if you might recall in our second quarter earnings was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our total revenue stream. But we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was holding quite frankly. And so we gave a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a result of what we were seeing. The macro environment as you highlighted continues to be challenging. If you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe through interest rate rise to press down and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. But I'm confident, I'm confident in the long term. But I do think that there is, there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters. Who knows quite how long. To make sure the business is properly positioned and we've got a great portfolio and you're going to talk to some of the team later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving, what we're seeing around technology trends. So the opportunity is there. There's some short term navigation that we're going to need to do just to make sure that we address some of the environmental things that we're seeing right now. >> Yeah, and as a global company of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but the best companies not only weather their storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to come out the other side stronger. So I want to talk about that longer term opportunity the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the TAM. I mean, even as a lower margin business, if you can penetrate that big of a TAM, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. But so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >> Yeah look, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term. Digital transformation continues. I am on numerous customer and CIO conference calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation, in infrastructure, to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's going to slow or pause, or maybe they're not going to invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their what previous been closed ecosystems to open architecture. You think about, what we're doing around the EDGE and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data, gravity, and latency matters. And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us. Yes, we will, and we're continuing to invest. And you hear Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, we are in in normal times a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so. We've got a negative CCC in terms of how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our capital allocation strategy which has now returned somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity in a over the long term. That the long term trends are with us and I expect them to continue to be so. >> Yeah, and you guys, you do what you say you're going to do. I mean, I said in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put $46 billion on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core which that's quite remarking. That gives you some other opportunities. Give us your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >> Hey Dave, yeah look, I just think if you look at the grid, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we can, if you look at say we're a hundred billion dollar revenue company which we were last year as we reported. Roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client in PC space, roughly 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space. Those markets are going to continue. The opportunity to grow share, grow at a premium to the market, drive cash flow, drive share gain is clearly there. And couple that with what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the EDGE, what we're thinking around data services, data management, we, and you put that together with the long term trends around data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain. Our services footprint. Well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >> Well Tom I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >> Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >> All right, you're watching theCUBE's exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So, where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be hosting the program. Today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell a good long term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business unit, who's going to talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott is the Senior Vice President of Marketing is going to come in the program and give us the update on APEX which is Dell's as-a-service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're going to see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jen Saavedra, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're going to geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet CFO, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to The Cube. >> Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So, thanks for having me today. >> Yeah, you bet. Tom, it's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness but the VMware spin. You had to give up your gross margin binky just kidding, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size you've had some success at the top line which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >> Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey you know, the scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know drive workforce productivity, enable their business model during the all remote work environment, that was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the rise then in the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade, we still unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's never dull at Dell Technologies Let me put it that way. >> Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got but you got zero unemployment you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But IT spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >> Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, $50 billion or so if you think about our core IT services capability. You couple that with some of the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity total addressable market. And so from, from that perspective we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan but yet when you look at that, you know number one share in some of these, you know our highest share position may be, you know low 30s and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of 30 or 40%. But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, if you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted. We actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about is you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream. But we started to see commercial PC soften, and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. And so, we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a result of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters who knows quite how long, you know, to make sure the business is properly positioned then. You know we've got a great portfolio and you're going to talk to some of the team later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're going to need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right now. >> Yeah and as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know the best companies not only weather their storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out come out the other side stronger. So, I want to talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the business growth. You mentioned the TAM, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if you can penetrate that big of a TAM, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >> Yeah, look, I think it comes down to, we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term, digital transformation continues. I am on numerous customer and CIO conference calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation in infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's going to slow or, or pause or maybe they're not going to invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our the telecom providers across the globe open up their what previous been closed ecosystems, you know to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us. You know, yes, we will, we're continuing to invest. And you'll hear Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So, I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in normal times a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so. You know, we've got a negative, you know CCC in terms of, you know how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know our capital allocation strategy which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity in a over the long term that the long term trends are with us and I expect them to continue to be so. >> Yeah, and you guys, you do what you say you're going to do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion dollars on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core which that's quite remarking. That gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >> Hey, Dave yeah look, I just think if you look at the grin, the market opportunity the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we come you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion dollar revenue company which we were year, you know, last year that as we reported, roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are going to continue. The opportunity to grow share, grow at a premium to the market, drive cash flow, drive share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management you know, we, and you've cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >> Well, Tom really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >> Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >> All right. You're watching The Cube's exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell and we're excited to get his thoughts. Keep it right there. (upbeat jingle)

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with Jenn Saavedra, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell and we're going to discuss people culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jenn, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time. So I'm excited to share some of our learnings with you. >> I mean, I bet there has, I mean post pandemic companies, they're trying everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and what it looks like. Last May there was really a theme of flexibility but depending, and we talked about, well, millennial or not, young, old, and it's just really was mixed. So how have you approached the topic? What are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? What's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to... Over to you. >> Yeah, well, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. In March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is we're such a data-driven company. There's so many headlines out there, about all these things that people think could happen will happen but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, how do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while, we asked them, do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were which is great, but we always know there's nuance behind that macro level. So we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things we're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive, and to have a really healthy business. >> Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. But there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get promoted. And so I'm curious, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you want to work. But then I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office week so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange new ever changing world? >> Yeah, well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. They tell us time and time again one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really want to meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. So, for us it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid. But just like if you, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, work out with your leader what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >> I mean, you talk- >> So that's what we do. >> You were talking before about myths and I want talk about team member performance 'cause there's, a lot of people believe that if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage 'cause they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? Is there some truth to that? What do you think about that? >> Well, for us, we look, again we just looked at the data. So we said we don't want to create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really want to have an inclusive culture, we want to be outcome-driven. We're a meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment. Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >> And it's personal too, I think I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office 'cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to you Jenn and folks at Dell is, whatever works for you we're going to support. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and very specifically, empathic leadership has been said to have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study, it was like two thirds of the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing with our folks? So especially as it relates to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >> I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the value that you bring to the company then you're not going to get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward. Empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible and confident that you can take us forward, but also that you know and understand me as a human being. And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders we've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point because we've been talking about it for so long we send out the email, we have the all hands, and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am, let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >> Jenn, in the spirit of myth busting I mean, I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is going to have a harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they could pre-COVID. But I notice there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation, satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top 100. But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model, and in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. Number one on the list is Dell, SAP. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, I go, Yeah, okay that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in an industry where there's only two in the top is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations. How'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in this new world? >> Well, thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a culture, and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices that whole ecosystem, from recognition rewards, to performance evaluation, to interviewee, to development. We build it into everything so it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, "The most special thing about Dell "is our culture and our people." And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >> I don't you think too that repetition and, well, first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah it's not just a poster on the wall. But I remember like, when we're kids your parents tell you, okay, power of positive thinking, do unto others as you have others do it to you. You're going to do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were- >> They might have had a point, right? >> Values were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and paying it forward. But I guess my point is, and it's kind of a point observation but I'll turn it into a question. Isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >> I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time. And as an HR professional, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture. It's our business leaders, it's our CEO, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're going to get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed into everything that we do. And I think it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done 'cause that's not how things really work. >> Well, and it's a culture of respect, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time, Jenn. Again, congratulations on being number one. >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of theCUBE inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand at thecube.net and you can check out siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of Breaking Analysis. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company, to a middling enterprise player forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i.e VMware. And now is a 100 billion dollar giant with a low margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. Financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC, of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book, "Play Nice But Win." In a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue, Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And, of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell in a massive wealth creation milestone. Pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau who's the president of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott who is the senior vice president of marketing will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as-a-service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cyber Security Awareness month that we're going to see if Sam has anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jennifer Saavedra who's Dell's chief human resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that will introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary net score methodology in the vertical axis. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the x-axis is overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business and it is, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, SISCO would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business is an industry-leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated net score and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a 100 mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over a 100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company primarily, its margins are low with operating income 10% of revenue and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement, before the spin its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive, Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's Apex and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of Service now's total revenue. Of course, Service now has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion dollar market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now, Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story, and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for $67 billion and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. But Dell, a 100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc, Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over 3X, about 3.3X currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine. But it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component, since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application, in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures. Namely HP which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc and HPE, and IBM which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company which makes a cultural difference, in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion is a much better chance of doing well at a 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake. But Dell has a larger portfolio so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say, it's not a zero sum game. What he means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge. That's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and co-COO Jeff Clarke explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> No, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way. If we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Yeah, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition but this vision will take years to play out, and of course it's got to be funded. And now it's going to take time and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and, of course, edge at Telco slash 5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution. But I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of Apex. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is, with Dell's go to market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, super cloud player, that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform. Its programmable infrastructure as-a-service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And, of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and you're watching The Cube's coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022, with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're going to explore Apex, which is Dell's As-a-Service offering, Dell's multi-cloud and Edge strategies, and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its Edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget, it's Cyber Security Awareness Month. Sam Grocott is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >> Always great to be here, Dave. >> All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud. What's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >> Yeah, yeah. Look, Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges in a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally, the cloud costs are growing unchecked, as well. So we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design, where essentially organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multi-cloud by default, rather it's multi-cloud by design, where you're very intentional in how you do multi-cloud. And how we deliver multi-cloud by design is through Apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave like, we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS-based backup service. We've introduced, or announced, Project Alpine which is bringing our storage software intellectual property from on-prem, and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run in Amazon, Azure, AW I'm sorry, Amazon, AWS, Azure, or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announced key partnerships with SAS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information, or our data, from on-prem through the Snowflake cloud. Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud, if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SAS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announced a strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know VMware is going to always continue to be a key partner of ours. At the more recent VMware explorer, we announced new Tansu integration. So Dave, I think in a nutshell, we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >> Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies World. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus to the default, which is great. Alpine, which is sort of our, what we call, "super cloud in the making." And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner. But the Snowflake announcement was very interesting. Red Hat, so seeing that expand. Now let's go out to the Edge. How's it going with the Edge expansion? There's got to be new, speaking of ecosystem, the Edge is like a whole different you know, OT type of ecosystem, >> That's right. Telcos. And what's this new Frontier platform all about? >> Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi-clouds. We've talked about private and hybrid clouds. We've talked about public clouds, clouds and Kronos, Telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the Edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives, and that's at the Edge. We see the Edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We've seen upwards of 300% year-of-year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the Edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the Edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering Edge solutions. 81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell Solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge Solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries in things like manufacturing, retail, Edge, healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge Solutions. Say, the bottom line is the game has got to change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to unlock this new Frontier for customers to take advantage of the Edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And with Project Frontier in its most simplest form is a software platform that's going to help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really going to be able to manage, and operate their edge infrastructure and application securely, efficiently, and at scale. >> Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name. It is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. >> That's right. >> Integration. Is there hardware involved? >> Yeah, so of course you'll run it on a Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of them. You know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or IoT frameworks, operational technology, or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their Edge applications, from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by a secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with a centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the Frontier, is really IT resources and being able to have that IT expertise. And we built in an enormous amount of automation to help streamline the Edge deployments where you might be deploying a single-edge solution which is highly unlikely, or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right Edge platform for customers to build their Edge applications on now, and certain, excuse me, certainly and into the future. >> Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. (laughing) And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, you know, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask, "When's Kids' day?" And we of course we say, "Every day is Kids' Day," and every day should be Cybersecurity Awareness Day. So, (laughs) but we have Cybersecurity Awareness Month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and how are you responding? >> Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent top-of-mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments, or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cyber security and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes, impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it, as well. So, data security is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time. But there are really three core elements to cybersecurity and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system and having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that. It's kind of the foundation in step one. Second, you need to, of course, go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are going to potentially create risk for your environment, we are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've got to be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >> Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation. Now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you got that multi-cloud, you got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their R&D and their, you mentioned, supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay. Sam, put a bow- >> That's right. >> on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >> Yeah, look, I think we're at a transformative point in IT. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume IT in different ways, such as as a service. A lot of customers, Edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy we've got the right portfolio. We are the trusted partner of choice to help them lead their future transformations into the future. So, Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in IT, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >> Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right. At Dell Tech World in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work, and the protocols associated with that, and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jenn Saavedra, and we're going to speak to Jenn about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching The Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. (bright music)

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube at ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The reverse momentum in tech stocks caused by rising interest rates, less attractive discounted cash flow models, and more tepid forward guidance, can be easily measured by public market valuations. And while there's lots of discussion about the impact on private companies and cash runway and 409A valuations, measuring the performance of non-public companies isn't as easy. IPOs have dried up and public statements by private companies, of course, they accentuate the good and they kind of hide the bad. Real data, unless you're an insider, is hard to find. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we unlock some of the secrets that non-public, emerging tech companies may or may not be sharing. And we do this by introducing you to a capability from ETR that we've not exposed you to over the past couple of years, it's called the Emerging Technologies Survey, and it is packed with sentiment data and performance data based on surveys of more than a thousand CIOs and IT buyers covering more than 400 companies. And we've invited back our colleague, Erik Bradley of ETR to help explain the survey and the data that we're going to cover today. Erik, this survey is something that I've not personally spent much time on, but I'm blown away at the data. It's really unique and detailed. First of all, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Great to see you too, Dave, and I'm really happy to be talking about the ETS or the Emerging Technology Survey. Even our own clients of constituents probably don't spend as much time in here as they should. >> Yeah, because there's so much in the mainstream, but let's pull up a slide to bring out the survey composition. Tell us about the study. How often do you run it? What's the background and the methodology? >> Yeah, you were just spot on the way you were talking about the private tech companies out there. So what we did is we decided to take all the vendors that we track that are not yet public and move 'em over to the ETS. And there isn't a lot of information out there. If you're not in Silicon (indistinct), you're not going to get this stuff. So PitchBook and Tech Crunch are two out there that gives some data on these guys. But what we really wanted to do was go out to our community. We have 6,000, ITDMs in our community. We wanted to ask them, "Are you aware of these companies? And if so, are you allocating any resources to them? Are you planning to evaluate them," and really just kind of figure out what we can do. So this particular survey, as you can see, 1000 plus responses, over 450 vendors that we track. And essentially what we're trying to do here is talk about your evaluation and awareness of these companies and also your utilization. And also if you're not utilizing 'em, then we can also figure out your sales conversion or churn. So this is interesting, not only for the ITDMs themselves to figure out what their peers are evaluating and what they should put in POCs against the big guys when contracts come up. But it's also really interesting for the tech vendors themselves to see how they're performing. >> And you can see 2/3 of the respondents are director level of above. You got 28% is C-suite. There is of course a North America bias, 70, 75% is North America. But these smaller companies, you know, that's when they start doing business. So, okay. We're going to do a couple of things here today. First, we're going to give you the big picture across the sectors that ETR covers within the ETS survey. And then we're going to look at the high and low sentiment for the larger private companies. And then we're going to do the same for the smaller private companies, the ones that don't have as much mindshare. And then I'm going to put those two groups together and we're going to look at two dimensions, actually three dimensions, which companies are being evaluated the most. Second, companies are getting the most usage and adoption of their offerings. And then third, which companies are seeing the highest churn rates, which of course is a silent killer of companies. And then finally, we're going to look at the sentiment and mindshare for two key areas that we like to cover often here on "Breaking Analysis", security and data. And data comprises database, including data warehousing, and then big data analytics is the second part of data. And then machine learning and AI is the third section within data that we're going to look at. Now, one other thing before we get into it, ETR very often will include open source offerings in the mix, even though they're not companies like TensorFlow or Kubernetes, for example. And we'll call that out during this discussion. The reason this is done is for context, because everyone is using open source. It is the heart of innovation and many business models are super glued to an open source offering, like take MariaDB, for example. There's the foundation and then there's with the open source code and then there, of course, the company that sells services around the offering. Okay, so let's first look at the highest and lowest sentiment among these private firms, the ones that have the highest mindshare. So they're naturally going to be somewhat larger. And we do this on two dimensions, sentiment on the vertical axis and mindshare on the horizontal axis and note the open source tool, see Kubernetes, Postgres, Kafka, TensorFlow, Jenkins, Grafana, et cetera. So Erik, please explain what we're looking at here, how it's derived and what the data tells us. >> Certainly, so there is a lot here, so we're going to break it down first of all by explaining just what mindshare and net sentiment is. You explain the axis. We have so many evaluation metrics, but we need to aggregate them into one so that way we can rank against each other. Net sentiment is really the aggregation of all the positive and subtracting out the negative. So the net sentiment is a very quick way of looking at where these companies stand versus their peers in their sectors and sub sectors. Mindshare is basically the awareness of them, which is good for very early stage companies. And you'll see some names on here that are obviously been around for a very long time. And they're clearly be the bigger on the axis on the outside. Kubernetes, for instance, as you mentioned, is open source. This de facto standard for all container orchestration, and it should be that far up into the right, because that's what everyone's using. In fact, the open source leaders are so prevalent in the emerging technology survey that we break them out later in our analysis, 'cause it's really not fair to include them and compare them to the actual companies that are providing the support and the security around that open source technology. But no survey, no analysis, no research would be complete without including these open source tech. So what we're looking at here, if I can just get away from the open source names, we see other things like Databricks and OneTrust . They're repeating as top net sentiment performers here. And then also the design vendors. People don't spend a lot of time on 'em, but Miro and Figma. This is their third survey in a row where they're just dominating that sentiment overall. And Adobe should probably take note of that because they're really coming after them. But Databricks, we all know probably would've been a public company by now if the market hadn't turned, but you can see just how dominant they are in a survey of nothing but private companies. And we'll see that again when we talk about the database later. >> And I'll just add, so you see automation anywhere on there, the big UiPath competitor company that was not able to get to the public markets. They've been trying. Snyk, Peter McKay's company, they've raised a bunch of money, big security player. They're doing some really interesting things in developer security, helping developers secure the data flow, H2O.ai, Dataiku AI company. We saw them at the Snowflake Summit. Redis Labs, Netskope and security. So a lot of names that we know that ultimately we think are probably going to be hitting the public market. Okay, here's the same view for private companies with less mindshare, Erik. Take us through this one. >> On the previous slide too real quickly, I wanted to pull that security scorecard and we'll get back into it. But this is a newcomer, that I couldn't believe how strong their data was, but we'll bring that up in a second. Now, when we go to the ones of lower mindshare, it's interesting to talk about open source, right? Kubernetes was all the way on the top right. Everyone uses containers. Here we see Istio up there. Not everyone is using service mesh as much. And that's why Istio is in the smaller breakout. But still when you talk about net sentiment, it's about the leader, it's the highest one there is. So really interesting to point out. Then we see other names like Collibra in the data side really performing well. And again, as always security, very well represented here. We have Aqua, Wiz, Armis, which is a standout in this survey this time around. They do IoT security. I hadn't even heard of them until I started digging into the data here. And I couldn't believe how well they were doing. And then of course you have AnyScale, which is doing a second best in this and the best name in the survey Hugging Face, which is a machine learning AI tool. Also doing really well on a net sentiment, but they're not as far along on that access of mindshare just yet. So these are again, emerging companies that might not be as well represented in the enterprise as they will be in a couple of years. >> Hugging Face sounds like something you do with your two year old. Like you said, you see high performers, AnyScale do machine learning and you mentioned them. They came out of Berkeley. Collibra Governance, InfluxData is on there. InfluxDB's a time series database. And yeah, of course, Alex, if you bring that back up, you get a big group of red dots, right? That's the bad zone, I guess, which Sisense does vis, Yellowbrick Data is a NPP database. How should we interpret the red dots, Erik? I mean, is it necessarily a bad thing? Could it be misinterpreted? What's your take on that? >> Sure, well, let me just explain the definition of it first from a data science perspective, right? We're a data company first. So the gray dots that you're seeing that aren't named, that's the mean that's the average. So in order for you to be on this chart, you have to be at least one standard deviation above or below that average. So that gray is where we're saying, "Hey, this is where the lump of average comes in. This is where everyone normally stands." So you either have to be an outperformer or an underperformer to even show up in this analysis. So by definition, yes, the red dots are bad. You're at least one standard deviation below the average of your peers. It's not where you want to be. And if you're on the lower left, not only are you not performing well from a utilization or an actual usage rate, but people don't even know who you are. So that's a problem, obviously. And the VCs and the PEs out there that are backing these companies, they're the ones who mostly are interested in this data. >> Yeah. Oh, that's great explanation. Thank you for that. No, nice benchmarking there and yeah, you don't want to be in the red. All right, let's get into the next segment here. Here going to look at evaluation rates, adoption and the all important churn. First new evaluations. Let's bring up that slide. And Erik, take us through this. >> So essentially I just want to explain what evaluation means is that people will cite that they either plan to evaluate the company or they're currently evaluating. So that means we're aware of 'em and we are choosing to do a POC of them. And then we'll see later how that turns into utilization, which is what a company wants to see, awareness, evaluation, and then actually utilizing them. That's sort of the life cycle for these emerging companies. So what we're seeing here, again, with very high evaluation rates. H2O, we mentioned. SecurityScorecard jumped up again. Chargebee, Snyk, Salt Security, Armis. A lot of security names are up here, Aqua, Netskope, which God has been around forever. I still can't believe it's in an Emerging Technology Survey But so many of these names fall in data and security again, which is why we decided to pick those out Dave. And on the lower side, Vena, Acton, those unfortunately took the dubious award of the lowest evaluations in our survey, but I prefer to focus on the positive. So SecurityScorecard, again, real standout in this one, they're in a security assessment space, basically. They'll come in and assess for you how your security hygiene is. And it's an area of a real interest right now amongst our ITDM community. >> Yeah, I mean, I think those, and then Arctic Wolf is up there too. They're doing managed services. You had mentioned Netskope. Yeah, okay. All right, let's look at now adoption. These are the companies whose offerings are being used the most and are above that standard deviation in the green. Take us through this, Erik. >> Sure, yet again, what we're looking at is, okay, we went from awareness, we went to evaluation. Now it's about utilization, which means a survey respondent's going to state "Yes, we evaluated and we plan to utilize it" or "It's already in our enterprise and we're actually allocating further resources to it." Not surprising, again, a lot of open source, the reason why, it's free. So it's really easy to grow your utilization on something that's free. But as you and I both know, as Red Hat proved, there's a lot of money to be made once the open source is adopted, right? You need the governance, you need the security, you need the support wrapped around it. So here we're seeing Kubernetes, Postgres, Apache Kafka, Jenkins, Grafana. These are all open source based names. But if we're looking at names that are non open source, we're going to see Databricks, Automation Anywhere, Rubrik all have the highest mindshare. So these are the names, not surprisingly, all names that probably should have been public by now. Everyone's expecting an IPO imminently. These are the names that have the highest mindshare. If we talk about the highest utilization rates, again, Miro and Figma pop up, and I know they're not household names, but they are just dominant in this survey. These are applications that are meant for design software and, again, they're going after an Autodesk or a CAD or Adobe type of thing. It is just dominant how high the utilization rates are here, which again is something Adobe should be paying attention to. And then you'll see a little bit lower, but also interesting, we see Collibra again, we see Hugging Face again. And these are names that are obviously in the data governance, ML, AI side. So we're seeing a ton of data, a ton of security and Rubrik was interesting in this one, too, high utilization and high mindshare. We know how pervasive they are in the enterprise already. >> Erik, Alex, keep that up for a second, if you would. So yeah, you mentioned Rubrik. Cohesity's not on there. They're sort of the big one. We're going to talk about them in a moment. Puppet is interesting to me because you remember the early days of that sort of space, you had Puppet and Chef and then you had Ansible. Red Hat bought Ansible and then Ansible really took off. So it's interesting to see Puppet on there as well. Okay. So now let's look at the churn because this one is where you don't want to be. It's, of course, all red 'cause churn is bad. Take us through this, Erik. >> Yeah, definitely don't want to be here and I don't love to dwell on the negative. So we won't spend as much time. But to your point, there's one thing I want to point out that think it's important. So you see Rubrik in the same spot, but Rubrik has so many citations in our survey that it actually would make sense that they're both being high utilization and churn just because they're so well represented. They have such a high overall representation in our survey. And the reason I call that out is Cohesity. Cohesity has an extremely high churn rate here about 17% and unlike Rubrik, they were not on the utilization side. So Rubrik is seeing both, Cohesity is not. It's not being utilized, but it's seeing a high churn. So that's the way you can look at this data and say, "Hm." Same thing with Puppet. You noticed that it was on the other slide. It's also on this one. So basically what it means is a lot of people are giving Puppet a shot, but it's starting to churn, which means it's not as sticky as we would like. One that was surprising on here for me was Tanium. It's kind of jumbled in there. It's hard to see in the middle, but Tanium, I was very surprised to see as high of a churn because what I do hear from our end user community is that people that use it, like it. It really kind of spreads into not only vulnerability management, but also that endpoint detection and response side. So I was surprised by that one, mostly to see Tanium in here. Mural, again, was another one of those application design softwares that's seeing a very high churn as well. >> So you're saying if you're in both... Alex, bring that back up if you would. So if you're in both like MariaDB is for example, I think, yeah, they're in both. They're both green in the previous one and red here, that's not as bad. You mentioned Rubrik is going to be in both. Cohesity is a bit of a concern. Cohesity just brought on Sanjay Poonen. So this could be a go to market issue, right? I mean, 'cause Cohesity has got a great product and they got really happy customers. So they're just maybe having to figure out, okay, what's the right ideal customer profile and Sanjay Poonen, I guarantee, is going to have that company cranking. I mean they had been doing very well on the surveys and had fallen off of a bit. The other interesting things wondering the previous survey I saw Cvent, which is an event platform. My only reason I pay attention to that is 'cause we actually have an event platform. We don't sell it separately. We bundle it as part of our offerings. And you see Hopin on here. Hopin raised a billion dollars during the pandemic. And we were like, "Wow, that's going to blow up." And so you see Hopin on the churn and you didn't see 'em in the previous chart, but that's sort of interesting. Like you said, let's not kind of dwell on the negative, but you really don't. You know, churn is a real big concern. Okay, now we're going to drill down into two sectors, security and data. Where data comprises three areas, database and data warehousing, machine learning and AI and big data analytics. So first let's take a look at the security sector. Now this is interesting because not only is it a sector drill down, but also gives an indicator of how much money the firm has raised, which is the size of that bubble. And to tell us if a company is punching above its weight and efficiently using its venture capital. Erik, take us through this slide. Explain the dots, the size of the dots. Set this up please. >> Yeah. So again, the axis is still the same, net sentiment and mindshare, but what we've done this time is we've taken publicly available information on how much capital company is raised and that'll be the size of the circle you see around the name. And then whether it's green or red is basically saying relative to the amount of money they've raised, how are they doing in our data? So when you see a Netskope, which has been around forever, raised a lot of money, that's why you're going to see them more leading towards red, 'cause it's just been around forever and kind of would expect it. Versus a name like SecurityScorecard, which is only raised a little bit of money and it's actually performing just as well, if not better than a name, like a Netskope. OneTrust doing absolutely incredible right now. BeyondTrust. We've seen the issues with Okta, right. So those are two names that play in that space that obviously are probably getting some looks about what's going on right now. Wiz, we've all heard about right? So raised a ton of money. It's doing well on net sentiment, but the mindshare isn't as well as you'd want, which is why you're going to see a little bit of that red versus a name like Aqua, which is doing container and application security. And hasn't raised as much money, but is really neck and neck with a name like Wiz. So that is why on a relative basis, you'll see that more green. As we all know, information security is never going away. But as we'll get to later in the program, Dave, I'm not sure in this current market environment, if people are as willing to do POCs and switch away from their security provider, right. There's a little bit of tepidness out there, a little trepidation. So right now we're seeing overall a slight pause, a slight cooling in overall evaluations on the security side versus historical levels a year ago. >> Now let's stay on here for a second. So a couple things I want to point out. So it's interesting. Now Snyk has raised over, I think $800 million but you can see them, they're high on the vertical and the horizontal, but now compare that to Lacework. It's hard to see, but they're kind of buried in the middle there. That's the biggest dot in this whole thing. I think I'm interpreting this correctly. They've raised over a billion dollars. It's a Mike Speiser company. He was the founding investor in Snowflake. So people watch that very closely, but that's an example of where they're not punching above their weight. They recently had a layoff and they got to fine tune things, but I'm still confident they they're going to do well. 'Cause they're approaching security as a data problem, which is probably people having trouble getting their arms around that. And then again, I see Arctic Wolf. They're not red, they're not green, but they've raised fair amount of money, but it's showing up to the right and decent level there. And a couple of the other ones that you mentioned, Netskope. Yeah, they've raised a lot of money, but they're actually performing where you want. What you don't want is where Lacework is, right. They've got some work to do to really take advantage of the money that they raised last November and prior to that. >> Yeah, if you're seeing that more neutral color, like you're calling out with an Arctic Wolf, like that means relative to their peers, this is where they should be. It's when you're seeing that red on a Lacework where we all know, wow, you raised a ton of money and your mindshare isn't where it should be. Your net sentiment is not where it should be comparatively. And then you see these great standouts, like Salt Security and SecurityScorecard and Abnormal. You know they haven't raised that much money yet, but their net sentiment's higher and their mindshare's doing well. So those basically in a nutshell, if you're a PE or a VC and you see a small green circle, then you're doing well, then it means you made a good investment. >> Some of these guys, I don't know, but you see these small green circles. Those are the ones you want to start digging into and maybe help them catch a wave. Okay, let's get into the data discussion. And again, three areas, database slash data warehousing, big data analytics and ML AI. First, we're going to look at the database sector. So Alex, thank you for bringing that up. Alright, take us through this, Erik. Actually, let me just say Postgres SQL. I got to ask you about this. It shows some funding, but that actually could be a mix of EDB, the company that commercializes Postgres and Postgres the open source database, which is a transaction system and kind of an open source Oracle. You see MariaDB is a database, but open source database. But the companies they've raised over $200 million and they filed an S-4. So Erik looks like this might be a little bit of mashup of companies and open source products. Help us understand this. >> Yeah, it's tough when you start dealing with the open source side and I'll be honest with you, there is a little bit of a mashup here. There are certain names here that are a hundred percent for profit companies. And then there are others that are obviously open source based like Redis is open source, but Redis Labs is the one trying to monetize the support around it. So you're a hundred percent accurate on this slide. I think one of the things here that's important to note though, is just how important open source is to data. If you're going to be going to any of these areas, it's going to be open source based to begin with. And Neo4j is one I want to call out here. It's not one everyone's familiar with, but it's basically geographical charting database, which is a name that we're seeing on a net sentiment side actually really, really high. When you think about it's the third overall net sentiment for a niche database play. It's not as big on the mindshare 'cause it's use cases aren't as often, but third biggest play on net sentiment. I found really interesting on this slide. >> And again, so MariaDB, as I said, they filed an S-4 I think $50 million in revenue, that might even be ARR. So they're not huge, but they're getting there. And by the way, MariaDB, if you don't know, was the company that was formed the day that Oracle bought Sun in which they got MySQL and MariaDB has done a really good job of replacing a lot of MySQL instances. Oracle has responded with MySQL HeatWave, which was kind of the Oracle version of MySQL. So there's some interesting battles going on there. If you think about the LAMP stack, the M in the LAMP stack was MySQL. And so now it's all MariaDB replacing that MySQL for a large part. And then you see again, the red, you know, you got to have some concerns about there. Aerospike's been around for a long time. SingleStore changed their name a couple years ago, last year. Yellowbrick Data, Fire Bolt was kind of going after Snowflake for a while, but yeah, you want to get out of that red zone. So they got some work to do. >> And Dave, real quick for the people that aren't aware, I just want to let them know that we can cut this data with the public company data as well. So we can cross over this with that because some of these names are competing with the larger public company names as well. So we can go ahead and cross reference like a MariaDB with a Mongo, for instance, or of something of that nature. So it's not in this slide, but at another point we can certainly explain on a relative basis how these private names are doing compared to the other ones as well. >> All right, let's take a quick look at analytics. Alex, bring that up if you would. Go ahead, Erik. >> Yeah, I mean, essentially here, I can't see it on my screen, my apologies. I just kind of went to blank on that. So gimme one second to catch up. >> So I could set it up while you're doing that. You got Grafana up and to the right. I mean, this is huge right. >> Got it thank you. I lost my screen there for a second. Yep. Again, open source name Grafana, absolutely up and to the right. But as we know, Grafana Labs is actually picking up a lot of speed based on Grafana, of course. And I think we might actually hear some noise from them coming this year. The names that are actually a little bit more disappointing than I want to call out are names like ThoughtSpot. It's been around forever. Their mindshare of course is second best here but based on the amount of time they've been around and the amount of money they've raised, it's not actually outperforming the way it should be. We're seeing Moogsoft obviously make some waves. That's very high net sentiment for that company. It's, you know, what, third, fourth position overall in this entire area, Another name like Fivetran, Matillion is doing well. Fivetran, even though it's got a high net sentiment, again, it's raised so much money that we would've expected a little bit more at this point. I know you know this space extremely well, but basically what we're looking at here and to the bottom left, you're going to see some names with a lot of red, large circles that really just aren't performing that well. InfluxData, however, second highest net sentiment. And it's really pretty early on in this stage and the feedback we're getting on this name is the use cases are great, the efficacy's great. And I think it's one to watch out for. >> InfluxData, time series database. The other interesting things I just noticed here, you got Tamer on here, which is that little small green. Those are the ones we were saying before, look for those guys. They might be some of the interesting companies out there and then observe Jeremy Burton's company. They do observability on top of Snowflake, not green, but kind of in that gray. So that's kind of cool. Monte Carlo is another one, they're sort of slightly green. They are doing some really interesting things in data and data mesh. So yeah, okay. So I can spend all day on this stuff, Erik, phenomenal data. I got to get back and really dig in. Let's end with machine learning and AI. Now this chart it's similar in its dimensions, of course, except for the money raised. We're not showing that size of the bubble, but AI is so hot. We wanted to cover that here, Erik, explain this please. Why TensorFlow is highlighted and walk us through this chart. >> Yeah, it's funny yet again, right? Another open source name, TensorFlow being up there. And I just want to explain, we do break out machine learning, AI is its own sector. A lot of this of course really is intertwined with the data side, but it is on its own area. And one of the things I think that's most important here to break out is Databricks. We started to cover Databricks in machine learning, AI. That company has grown into much, much more than that. So I do want to state to you Dave, and also the audience out there that moving forward, we're going to be moving Databricks out of only the MA/AI into other sectors. So we can kind of value them against their peers a little bit better. But in this instance, you could just see how dominant they are in this area. And one thing that's not here, but I do want to point out is that we have the ability to break this down by industry vertical, organization size. And when I break this down into Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000, both Databricks and Tensorflow are even better than you see here. So it's quite interesting to see that the names that are succeeding are also succeeding with the largest organizations in the world. And as we know, large organizations means large budgets. So this is one area that I just thought was really interesting to point out that as we break it down, the data by vertical, these two names still are the outstanding players. >> I just also want to call it H2O.ai. They're getting a lot of buzz in the marketplace and I'm seeing them a lot more. Anaconda, another one. Dataiku consistently popping up. DataRobot is also interesting because all the kerfuffle that's going on there. The Cube guy, Cube alum, Chris Lynch stepped down as executive chairman. All this stuff came out about how the executives were taking money off the table and didn't allow the employees to participate in that money raising deal. So that's pissed a lot of people off. And so they're now going through some kind of uncomfortable things, which is unfortunate because DataRobot, I noticed, we haven't covered them that much in "Breaking Analysis", but I've noticed them oftentimes, Erik, in the surveys doing really well. So you would think that company has a lot of potential. But yeah, it's an important space that we're going to continue to watch. Let me ask you Erik, can you contextualize this from a time series standpoint? I mean, how is this changed over time? >> Yeah, again, not show here, but in the data. I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, I'm sorry. What I meant, I should have interjected. In other words, you would think in a downturn that these emerging companies would be less interesting to buyers 'cause they're more risky. What have you seen? >> Yeah, and it was interesting before we went live, you and I were having this conversation about "Is the downturn stopping people from evaluating these private companies or not," right. In a larger sense, that's really what we're doing here. How are these private companies doing when it comes down to the actual practitioners? The people with the budget, the people with the decision making. And so what I did is, we have historical data as you know, I went back to the Emerging Technology Survey we did in November of 21, right at the crest right before the market started to really fall and everything kind of started to fall apart there. And what I noticed is on the security side, very much so, we're seeing less evaluations than we were in November 21. So I broke it down. On cloud security, net sentiment went from 21% to 16% from November '21. That's a pretty big drop. And again, that sentiment is our one aggregate metric for overall positivity, meaning utilization and actual evaluation of the name. Again in database, we saw it drop a little bit from 19% to 13%. However, in analytics we actually saw it stay steady. So it's pretty interesting that yes, cloud security and security in general is always going to be important. But right now we're seeing less overall net sentiment in that space. But within analytics, we're seeing steady with growing mindshare. And also to your point earlier in machine learning, AI, we're seeing steady net sentiment and mindshare has grown a whopping 25% to 30%. So despite the downturn, we're seeing more awareness of these companies in analytics and machine learning and a steady, actual utilization of them. I can't say the same in security and database. They're actually shrinking a little bit since the end of last year. >> You know it's interesting, we were on a round table, Erik does these round tables with CISOs and CIOs, and I remember one time you had asked the question, "How do you think about some of these emerging tech companies?" And one of the executives said, "I always include somebody in the bottom left of the Gartner Magic Quadrant in my RFPs. I think he said, "That's how I found," I don't know, it was Zscaler or something like that years before anybody ever knew of them "Because they're going to help me get to the next level." So it's interesting to see Erik in these sectors, how they're holding up in many cases. >> Yeah. It's a very important part for the actual IT practitioners themselves. There's always contracts coming up and you always have to worry about your next round of negotiations. And that's one of the roles these guys play. You have to do a POC when contracts come up, but it's also their job to stay on top of the new technology. You can't fall behind. Like everyone's a software company. Now everyone's a tech company, no matter what you're doing. So these guys have to stay in on top of it. And that's what this ETS can do. You can go in here and look and say, "All right, I'm going to evaluate their technology," and it could be twofold. It might be that you're ready to upgrade your technology and they're actually pushing the envelope or it simply might be I'm using them as a negotiation ploy. So when I go back to the big guy who I have full intentions of writing that contract to, at least I have some negotiation leverage. >> Erik, we got to leave it there. I could spend all day. I'm going to definitely dig into this on my own time. Thank you for introducing this, really appreciate your time today. >> I always enjoy it, Dave and I hope everyone out there has a great holiday weekend. Enjoy the rest of the summer. And, you know, I love to talk data. So anytime you want, just point the camera on me and I'll start talking data. >> You got it. I also want to thank the team at ETR, not only Erik, but Darren Bramen who's a data scientist, really helped prepare this data, the entire team over at ETR. I cannot tell you how much additional data there is. We are just scratching the surface in this "Breaking Analysis". So great job guys. I want to thank Alex Myerson. Who's on production and he manages the podcast. Ken Shifman as well, who's just coming back from VMware Explore. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some great editing for us. Thank you. All of you guys. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is just search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

welcome back to thecube's live coverage coming to you from the big apple in new york city we're talking all things aws summit but right now i've got two powerhouses you know them you love them john furrier dave vellante going to be talking about super cloud guys we've been talking a lot about this there's a big event coming up on the cube august 9th and i gotta start dave with you because we talk about it pretty much in every interview where it's relevant why super cloud yeah so john furrier years ago started a tradition lisa prior to aws which was to lay down the expectation for our audiences what they should be looking for at aws reinvent okay john when did that start 2012 2013. actually 2013 was our first but 2015 was the first time when we get access to andy jassy who wasn't doing any briefings and we realized that the whole industry started looking at amazon web services as a structural forcing function of massive change uh some say inflection point we were saying complete redefinition so you wrote the trillion dollar baby yeah right which actually turns into probably multi-trillion dollars we got it right on that one surprisingly it was pretty obvious so every year since then john has published the seminal article prior to reinvent so this year we were talking we're coming out of the isolation economy and john hedwig also also adam silevski was the new ceo so we had a one-on-one with adam that's right and then that's where the convergence between andy jassy and adam celebski kicked in which is essentially those guys work together even though they he went off and boomerang back in as they say in aws but what's interesting was is that adam zluski's point of view piggyback jassy but he had a different twist yeah some so you know low you know people who didn't have really a lot of thought into it said oh he's copying microsoft moving up the stack we're like no no no no no something structural is happening again and so john wrote the piece and he started sharing it we're collaborating he said hey dave take a take a look add your perspectives and then jerry chen had just written castles in the cloud and he talked about sub-markets and we were sort of noodling and one of the other things was in 2018 2019 around that time at aws re invent there was this friction between like snowflake and aws because redshift separated compute from storage which was snowflake's whole thing now fast forward to 2021 after we're leaving you know the covert economy by the way everyone was complaining they are asking jassy are you competing with your ecosystem the classic right trope and then in in remember jason used to use cloudera as the example i would like to maybe pick a better example snowflake became that example and what the transition was it went from hey we're kind of competitive for sure there's a lot of examples but it went from we're competitive they're stealing our stuff to you know what we're making so much money building on top of aws specifically but also the clouds and cross clouds so we said there's something new happening in the ecosystem and then just it popped up this term super cloud came up to connote a layer that floats above the hyperscale capex not is it's not pass it's not sas it's the combination of the of those things on top of a new digital infrastructure and we chose the term super cloud we liked it better than multi-cloud because multiplayer at least one other point too i think four or five years earlier dave and i across not just aws reinvent all of our other events we were speculating that there might be a tier two cloud service provider models and we've talked with intel about this and others just kind of like evaluating it staring at it and we met by tier two like maybe competing against amazon but what happened was it wasn't a tier two cloud it was a super cloud built on the capex of aws which means initially was a company didn't have to build aws to be like aws and everybody wanted to be like aws so we saw the emergence of the smart companies saying hey let's refactor our business model in the category or industry scope and to dominate with cloud scale and they did it that then continued that was the premise of chen's post which was kind of rift on the cube initially which is you can have a moat in a castle in the cloud and have a competitive advantage and a sustainable differentiation model and that's exactly what's happening and then you introduce the edge and hybrid you now have a cloud operating model that that super cloud extends as a substrate across all environments so it's not multi-cloud which sounds broken and like put it distance jointed joint barriers hybrid cloud which is the hybrid operating model at scale and you don't have to be amazon to take advantage of all the value creation since they took care of the capex now they win too on the other side because because they're selling ec2 and storage and ml and ai and this is new and this is information that people don't might not know about internally at aws there was a debate dave okay i heard this from sources do we go all in and compete and just own the whole category or open the ecosystem and coexist with [ __ ] why do we have these other companies or snowflake and guess what the decision was let's make it open ecosystem and let's have our own offerings as well and let the winner take off smart because they can't hire enough people and we just had aws and snowflake on the cube a few weeks ago talking about the partnership the co-op petition the value in it but what's been driving it is the voice of the customer but i want to ask you paint the picture for the audience of the critical key components of super cloud what are those yeah so i think first and foremost super cloud as john was saying it's not multi-cloud chuck whitten had a great phrase at dell tech world he said multi-cloud by default right versus multi-cloud by design and multi-cloud has been by default it's been this sort of i run in aws and i run my stack in azure or i run my stack in gcp and it works or i wrap my stack in a container and host it in the cloud that's what multi-cloud has been so the first sort of concept is it's a layer that that abstracts the underlying complexity of all the clouds all the primitives uh it takes advantage of maybe graviton or microsoft tooling hides all that and builds new value on top of that the other piece of of super cloud is it's ecosystem driven really interesting story you just told because literally amazon can't hire everybody right so they have to rely on the ecosystem for feature acceleration so it's it also includes a path layer a super pass layer we call it because you need to develop applications that are specific to the problem that the super cloud is solving so it's not a generic path like openshift it's specific to whether it's snowflake or [ __ ] or aviatrix so that developers can actually build on top of and not have to worry about that underlying and also there's some people that are criticizing um what we're doing in a good way because we want to have an open concept sure but here's the thing that a lot of people don't understand they're criticizing or trying to kind of shoot holes in our new structural change that we're identifying to comparing it to old that's like saying mainframe and mini computers it's like saying well the mainframe does it this way therefore there's no way that's going to be legitimate so the old thinking dave is from people that have no real foresight in the new model right and so they don't really get it right so what i'm saying is that we look at structural change structural change is structural change it either happens or it doesn't so what we're observing is the fact that a snowflake didn't design their solution to be multi-cloud they did it all on aws and then said hey why would we why are we going to stop there let's go to azure because microsoft's got a boatload of customers because they have a vertically stacking integration for their install base so if i'm snowflake why wouldn't i be on azure and the same for gcp and the same for other things so this idea that you can get the value of an amp what amazon did leverage and all that value without paying for it up front is a huge dynamic and that's not just saying oh that's cloud that's saying i have a cloud-like scale cloud-like value proposition which which will look like an ecosystem so to me the acid test is if i build on top of say [ __ ] or say snowflake or super cloud by default i'm either a category leader i own the data at scale or i'm sharing data at scale and i have an ecosystem people are building on top of me so that's a platform so that's really difficult so what's happening is these ecosystem partners are taking advantage as john said of all the hyperscale capex and they're building out their version of a distributed global system and then the other attribute of super cloud is it's got metadata management capability in other words it knows if i'm optimizing for latency where in the super cloud to get the data or how to protect privacy or sovereignty or how many copies to make to have the proper data protection or where the air gap should be for ransomware so these are examples of very specific purpose-built super clouds that are filling gaps that the hyperscalers aren't going after what's a good example of a specific super cloud that you think really articulates what you guys are talking about i think there are a lot of them i think snowflake is a really good example i think vmware is building a multi-cloud management system i think aviatrix and virtual you know private cloud networking and for high performance networking i think to a certain extent what oracle is doing with azure is is is definitely looks like a super cloud i think what capital one is doing by building on to taking their own tools and and and moving that to snowflake now that they're not cross-cloud yet but i predict that they will be of i think uh what veeam is doing in data protection uh dell what they showed at dell tech world with project alpine these are all early examples of super well here's an indicator here's how you look at the example so to me if you're just lifting and shifting that was the first gen cloud that's not changing the business model so i think the number one thing to look at is is the company whether they're in a vertical like insurance or fintech or financial are they refactoring their spend not as an i.t cost but as a refactoring of their business model yes like what snowflake did dave or they say okay i'm gonna change how i operate not change my business model per se or not my business identity if i'm gonna provide financial services i don't have to spend capex it's operating expenses i get the capex leverage i redefine i get the data at scale and now i become a service provider to everybody else because scale will determine the power law of who wins in the verticals and in the industry so we believe that snowflake is a data warehouse in the cloud they call it a data cloud now i don't think snowflake would like that dave i call them a data warehouse no a super data cloud but but so the other key here is you know the old saying that andreessen came up with i guess with every company's a software company well what does that mean it means every company software company every company is going digital well how are they going to do that they're going to do that by taking their business their data their tooling their proprietary you know moat and moving that to the cloud so they can compete at scale every company should be if they're not thinking about doing a super cloud well walmart i think i think andreessen's wrong i think i would revise and say that andreessen and the brain trust at andreas and horowitz is that that's no longer irrelevant every company isn't a software company the software industry is called open source everybody is an open source company and every company will be at super cloud that survives yeah to me to me if you're not looking at super cloud as a strategy to get value and refactor your business model take advantage of what you're paying it for but you're paying now in a new way you're building out value so that's you're either going to be a super cloud or get services from a super cloud so if you're not it's like the old joke dave if you're at the table and you don't know who the sucker is it's probably you right so if you're looking at the marketplace you're saying if i'm not a super cloud i'm probably gonna have to work with one because they're gonna have the data they're gonna have the insights they're gonna have the scale they're going to have the castle in the cloud and they will be called a super cloud so in customer conversations helping customers identify workloads to move to the cloud what are the ideal workloads and services to run in super cloud so i honestly think virtually any workload could be a candidate and i think that it's really the business that they're in that's going to define the workload i'll say what i mean so there's certain businesses where low latency high performance transactions are going to matter that's you know kind of the oracle's business there's certain businesses like snowflake where data sharing is the objective how do i share data in a governed way in a secure way in any location across the world that i can monetize so that's their objective you take a data protection company like veeam their objective is to protect data so they have very specific objectives that ultimately dictate what the workload looks like couchbase is another one they they in my opinion are doing some of the most interesting things at the edge because this is where when you when you really push companies in the cloud including the hyperscalers when they get out to the far edge it starts to get a little squishy couchbase actually is developing capabilities to do that and that's to me that's the big wild card john i think you described it accurately the cloud is expanding you've got public clouds no longer just remote services you're including on-prem and now expanding out to the near edge and the deep what do you call it deep edge or far edge lower sousa called the tiny edge right deep edge well i mean look at look at amazon's outpost announcement to me hp e is opportunity dell has opportunities the hardware box guys companies they have an opportunity to be that gear to be an outpost to be their own output they get better stacks they have better gear they just got to run cloud on it yeah right that's an edge node right so so that's that would be part of the super cloud so this is where i think people that are looking at the old models like operating systems or systems mindsets from the 80s they look they're not understanding the new architecture what i would say to them is yeah i hear what you're saying but the structural change is the nodes on the network distributed computing if you will is going to run hybrid cloud all the way across the fact that it's multiple clouds is just coincidence on who's got the best capex value that people build on for their super cloud capability so why wouldn't i be on azure if microsoft's going to give me all their customers that are running office 365 and teams great if i want to be on amazon's kind of sweet which is their ecosystem why wouldn't i want to tap into that so again you can patch it all together in the super cloud so i think the future will be distributed computing cloud architecture end to end and and we felt that was different from multi-cloud you know if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0 that's fine but you know frankly you know sometimes we get criticized for not defining it tightly enough but we continue to evolve that definition i've never really seen a great definition from multi-cloud i think multi-cloud by default was the definition i run in multiple clouds you know it works in azure it's not a strategy it's a broken name it's a symptom right it's a symptom of multi-vendor is really what multi-cloud has been and so we felt like it was a new term of examples look what we're talking about snowflake data bricks databricks another good one these are these are examples goldman sachs and we felt like the term immediately connotes something bigger something that sits above the clouds and is part of a digital platform you know the people poo poo the metaverse because it's really you know not well defined but every 15 or 20 years this industry goes through dave let me ask you a question so uh lisa you too if i'm in the insurance vertical uh and i'm a i'm an insurance company i have competitors my customers can go there and and do business with that company and you know and they all know that they go to the same conferences but in that sector now you have new dynamics your i.t spend isn't going to keep the lights on and make your apps work your back-end systems and your mobile app to get your whatever now it's like i have cloud scale so what if i refactored my business model become a super cloud and become the major primary service provider to all the competitors and the people that are the the the channel partners of the of the ecosystem that means that company could change the category totally okay and become the dominant category leader literally in two three years if i'm geico okay i i got business in the cloud because i got the app and i'm doing transactions on geico but with all the data that they're collecting there's adjacent businesses that they can get into maybe they're in the safety business maybe they can sell data to governments maybe they can inform logistics and highway you know patterns roll up all the people that don't have the same scale they have and service them with that data and they get subscription revenue and they can build on top of the geico super insurance cloud right yes it's it's unlimited opportunity that's why it's but the multi-trillion dollar baby so talk to us you've done an amazing job of talking which i know you would of why super cloud what it is the critical components the key workloads great examples talk to us in our last few minutes about the event the cube on super cloud august 9th what's the audience going to who are they going to hear from what are they going to learn yeah so august 9th live out of our palo alto studio we're going to have a program that's going to run from 9 a.m to 1 p.m and we're going to have a number of industry luminaries in there uh kit colbert from from vmware is going to talk about you know their strategy uh benoit de javille uh from snowflake is going to is going to be there of g written house of sky-high security um i i i don't want to give it away but i think steve mullaney is going to come on adrian uh cockroft is coming on the panel keith townsend sanjeev mohan will be on so we'll be running that live and also we'll be bringing in pre-recorded interviews that we'll have prior to the show that will run post the live event it's really a pilot virtual event we want to do a physical event we're thinking but the pilot is to bring our trusted friends together they're credible that have industry experience to try to understand the scope of what we're talking about and open it up and help flesh out the definition make it an open model where we can it's not just our opinion we're observing identifying the structural changes but bringing in smart people our smart friends and companies are saying yeah we get behind this because it has it has legs for a reason so we're gonna zoom out and let people participate and let the conversation and the community drive the content and that is super important to the cube as you know dave but i think that's what's going on lisa is that it's a pilot if it has legs we'll do a physical event certainly we're getting phones to bring it off the hook for sponsors so we don't want to go and go all in on sponsorships right now because it's not about money making it's about getting that super cloud clarity around to help companies yeah we want to evolve the concept and and bring in outside perspectives well the community is one of the best places to do that absolutely organic it's an organic community where i mean people want to find out what's going on with the best practices of how to transform a business and right now digital transformation is not just getting digitized it's taking advantage of the technology to leapfrog the competition so all the successful people we talked to at least have the same common theme i'm changing my game but not changing my game to the customer i'm just going to do it differently better faster cheaper more efficient and have higher margins and beat the competition that's the company doesn't want to beat the competition go to thecube.net if you're not all they're all ready to register for the cube on supercloud august 9th 9am pacific you won't want to miss it for john furrier and dave vellante i'm lisa martin we're all coming at you from new york city at aws summit 22. i'll be right back with our next guest [Music] you