>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. It was last week, we're going to have some continued conversations here. I've got a couple of guests joining me. One is an alumni. That's Jen Felch, the Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell Technologies. Jen, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thank you. And joining Jen is Deepak Patil the SVP and GM of Dell Technologies Cloud. Deepak, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much Lisa. Excited to be here. >> So the event was last week. It was huge. We know that. And, of course, challenging in the fact that we're also used to being surrounded by thousands and thousands of people in Las Vegas and thousands and thousands of partners, but it's still a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to engage its customers and its partners in the ecosystem. We heard a lot, Deepak, last week about this shift from Dell to deliver as a service. This is what Project APEX powered by Cloud Console. What can you tell us about that? >> Absolutely, Lisa, and what an exciting week it was. We did announce Project APEX at the Dell Technologies World. We are very excited about it. Project APEX marks a strategic milestone for us and our company in three specific areas. Number one is we are on a path to significantly accelerate our transformation into an as a service world. Number two, we are investing in radically simplify the way our customers engage with us. Discover, purchase, manage offers from us. And number three is we are continuing our commitment to provide more flexibility, more choice to our customers. And to make it happen, Project APEX essentially brings all the efforts across the entire Dell Technologies from product development to services, to go to market motions, marketing, finance under the Project APEX umbrella. It's a significant endeavor and we are really excited about it. Of course- >> Companies, oh go ahead, sorry. >> I'm sorry. Of course the Cloud Console that you mentioned is a key component of realizing the Project APEX Division and taking Project APEX to our customers. We are in the public preview of the Cloud Console. Using the Cloud Console with a few clicks, our customers can browse through a catalog of cloud services from us, as well as our partners using a self-serve immersive experience, they can then purchase products like the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription. IT professionals then can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid solutions like VMware Tanzu. Our customers can then manage and monitor workloads, and using real time insights and data, they can take actions like extending and expanding the system when the capacity is running low. As you know, we also announced storage as a service offering, but an offering like storage as a service using Cloud Console, our customers can see real time insights and cost breakdowns by the teams or cost centers. So, in many ways, the cloud Console really brings the power of Project APEX and the entire cloud operating model to our customer's fingertips. We're very excited about it. >> Lot of work there. So one the things I remember talking Dell Technologies World 2019 about the big digital transformation that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Deepak, you mentioned from a Project APEX perspective, this acceleration of transformation. Jen, over to you, as the Chief Digital Officer and the CIO, how has your team been able to enable this shift to the as a service model to facilitate the self-service and all of the capabilities that Deepak talked about? What's that been like? >> Well, it's been pretty exciting from a couple fronts is, you know, we've always had some aspect of as a service in our offering, whether that is software, our DFS organization, or, you know, as funny as it might sound, our actual services organization is certainly as a service. But as Deepak mentioned, and what our customers tell us, is that let's do more of that. Let's take the broad portfolio of technical solutions and services that we have today and make them simple, consistent, give IT leaders and organizations choice. And so, as the internal team, internal IT team, we play two roles. One is to, we're an internal customer. We're a very large customer of all of the Dell technology products and solutions. And so, we get to offer a lot of feedback about how we would like to work, what we've been doing to really innovate in terms of how we bring things together. And mostly we get to be those early adopters for our product groups in groups like, like Deepak's, which is wonderful to be able to give that early feedback and contribute to great solutions. The second part of it is actually doing the enablement of as a service of how, what are the underlying components that go into the engagement platform that Deepak mentioned, the Cloud Console. How does that leverage the scale of Dell, yet create those really simple consistent, transparent choices for our customers? So our teams get to sit side by side in terms of how we develop these solutions and how we're bringing Project APEX to life, both as a customer and as a development partner, so that we can really bring that together for our customers. And I'm pretty excited about using the solutions. We get to, you know, be involved with it every day. And I can't wait until it's running even more of our infrastructure internally. >> Big, big effort. Deepak, let's come back to you and talk about the market. As we know, this is a very competitive market, congested. You talked about some of the other things that we talked about on theCUBE as well for Dell technologies, world storage as a service. With this landscape that is highly competitive and has been for quite some time with this new strategy, Project APEX, what part of the market, or parts, is Dell going after? >> Absolutely. And just one comment on what Jen said. The work that Jen's team and my team are doing sitting side by side is an example, and just one of the many examples, but a shining example of how we are putting the power of unified Dell technologies behind this effort. Going back to your question, Lisa, we are in what we call it the fourth industrial revolution or whatever you want to call it. We are in a massive shift to a simple, flexible and an operating model full of choices with respect to this as a service cloud transformation, across the industry. Over the next few years, whoever essentially captures the market is going to have to deliver three core promises to our customers. Number one, is we know that we're in the middle of a multi-cloud hybrid cloud world. Any service provider, any cloud provider that eliminates the seams across different cloud environments and makes a multi-cloud experience truly consistent and simple and modern and seamless is going to have a massive advantage. Number two, customers' workforce are going to be all over the place. Good portion of their workforce are going to be in their data centers, good portions of workloads are going to be on Edge, And then are going to be good portions of workloads that are going to be in public cloud. Anybody who meets customers where they're at so that customers don't have to massively invest, invest massively in re-engineering and the VR protector and refactoring, but still enjoy the benefits of this new cloud operating model, from performance and reliability to scalability and efficiency, with the minimum possible efforts, is going to create a significant value proposition. And number three, anybody who essentially focuses on outcomes and experiences and workloads, rather than products and specific offers is going to have a significant benefit. And the work we're doing under the umbrella of Project APEX essentially delivers on all three of those promises. As I mentioned, we radically and massively simplify and eliminate the seams across different cloud environments. We focus on outcome based conversation and with the work that we're doing on with VMware on our massive 4,200 plus people partner, 4,200 plus partner ecosystem, we are working to meet customers where they're at instead of forcing them to re-engineer and re-architect and move to cloud instead of the cloud coming to meet them wherever they're at. So we do believe that the strengths that we traditionally have always had with respect to the broad technology and product and services portfolio, 30 plus thousand sales force, 4,200 plus people partner ecosystem, and a massive asset through the partner, just the best 20 plus year old partnership we have with NEOM brand, and the broad product, as well as partner portfolio at NEOM. We even like a chances in terms of helping each and every customer we work with fundamentally modernize their own portfolio, help their customers and make significant progress on their digital transformation journey. >> We definitely know that there was a big engine, a lot of momentum behind the size and the scale of Dell itself. So going back to you, Jen, if we think about some of the things that we heard again at Dell Technologies World, when we spoke with Jeff Clark, who's the COO and Vice Chairman of Dell technologies. Just in the last couple of weeks, he talked about six areas and IT innovation that Dell is focusing on. and I wanted to get your thoughts on these. Pirate Cloud, Edge, 5G, AI and ML, data management and security. In your opinion, Jen, what of this suite of six areas of IT innovation sets Dell up for success? >> That's a good question. And you know, I would say these six areas are not foreign to us. They're not necessarily brand new. They're all sit kind of right next to areas where we have very deep expertise. And so I think about the fact that, you know, we design, manufacturer, service and manage IT solutions all over the world. Large customers, small customers, consumers. We have an incredible breadth and reach of what we're doing today both from the solutions that we provide and the experiences that our customers are driving. Whether that is, you know, extending work from home or learn from home or they're, you know, going through a digital transformation as Deepak talked about, trying to really simplify their ecosystem. Oftentimes it's Dell, that's sitting right there with them. So we have an opportunity, I think unlike many others, to bring the technical expertise from the products and services that we offer, along with the experience from really working with the best and brightest of customers, as well as this ecosystem of partners 42,000, I mean, Deepak, that's a really big number, but that creates a real opportunity for innovation as things like 5G really emerge. And we have the power behind the data management analytics to support ML and AI. So, you know, when I step back and, and look at kind of what sets us up for success, it's not something that just happened yesterday. It's something that's been happening at Dell for a very long time, which is the deep technical expertise and really close engagements with our customers so that we can focus on bringing technology to solve the problems of today and set us up for the future. I know, as an IT leader, I appreciate the fact that solutions from Dell are very open. So they give us a lot of flexibility to not only provide a solution for today, but solutions that will last over time, that we have some flexibility. We don't have an incredible lock that we can never get out of it. So I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to these innovations and really, we have solutions in most, all of these areas today. I know they'll just continue to get better and better. >> Jen, last question for you before we wrap, because of course, Project APEX that Deepak talked about and kind of dug into, massive undertaking, of course, during the time of a massive change to the entire world, where suddenly, this shift to work from home was a rapid pivot. I can imagine as your teams, you talked about both of your teams really kind of not co-locating physically anymore but being able to work together. How did you manage that, and to enable the team to stay on track, to deliver this for Dell Technologies World? That's a big, it's a big task. >> It is a big task, but we have great teams. And, you know, I think as we've, we've kind of, the status quo has been disrupted, not necessarily by us, right, but by the environment that we're in. And so Deepak and I, and several other leaders, we keep our teams close and focused on where we're aiming, what we're, you know, what our mission is so that we can continue to innovate. And I will tell you, I feel like we have an incredible focus. The vision is clear as to where we want to go. And it probably just sounds simple but it's just engaged leadership. That's how we keep people focused. That's how we're keeping our eye on the ball of where we're headed. >> That's, couldn't be more important. You know, you talked about simplicity, about that engaged leadership is so key. You guys, thank you so much. There's so much more we could dig into. I wish we had more time. Thank you for sharing what's going on with Project APEX, Dell technologies, how it's helping customers transform, because we know right now, that digital transformation is only accelerating. So we'll have to have you back to talk about what's going on. Deepak, Jen, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, Jen Felch and Deepak Patil, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual experience. (digitized music)

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience this year. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined by two CUBE alumni from Dell EMC. Please welcome Joe Caradonna, the VP of Cloud Storage CTO. Joe, good to see you again, even though quite socially distant. >> Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. >> And Devon Reed is also joining us, the Senior Director of Product Management. Devon, how are you? >> I'm good, how are you doing? >> Good. >> Nice to be here, thank you. >> Nice to be chatting with you guys, although very, very socially distant, following rules. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World without having you guys on theCUBE, so we appreciate you joining us. So let's dig in. So much has happened in the world since we last spoke with you. But one of the things that happened last year, around a year ago, was the Dell On Demand program was launched. And now here we are nearly a year later when Michael Dell was just talking about, "Hey, Dell's plan is to go "and deliver everything as a service." We've heard some of your competitors kind of going the same route, some kind of spurned by COVID. Talk to us, Devon, we'll start with you, about what this direction is shift to as-a-service means and what it means specifically for storage. >> Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, what we talked about last year with respect to On Demand, Dell Technologies On Demand, we've had great success with that program. But before I get into what we're doing with as-a-service, I really want to talk about why we're doing the as-a-service. And when we talk to customers and partners, and when we look at the trends in the market, what we're seeing is that customers are more and more wanting to consume technology infrastructure as a service in an OPEX manner. And analysts are revising those estimates up almost daily. And what we're seeing is one of the things that's driving that is actually why we're here in this remote session as opposed to being in Vegas, doing this. And it's really the global uncertainty around the pandemic. So it's driving the need to free up cash and consume these infrastructure more as a service. Now, as Michael said... Yeah, as Michael said, we have the broadest set of infrastructure offerings in the market and we are number one in most categories. And we're in the process of building out an offer structure that cuts across all the different infrastructure components. But to get real specific on what we're doing with a storage as a service, we are in the process of building out the first true storage or as a service offering for our infrastructure starting with storage. It'll be a private preview as of Q4, by the end of this fiscal year and generally available in the first half of next year. And what we're doing is taking the infrastructure, the Dell Technology's storage and where we're flipping the business model as opposed to buying it outright, the customers actually just consume it as a service. So they have a very simple consumption model where they just pick their outcome, they pick their restored service, they pick their performance, they pick their capacity, and we deliver that service to their on-premise site. >> Let me unpack outcomes of it, 'cause I saw that in some of the information online, outcome driven. What do you mean by that, and can you give us some examples of those outcomes that customers are looking to achieve? >> Yeah, so in today's world, the way people mostly consume infrastructure is, or at least storage, is that they say, "I need a storage product." And what the customers do is they work with our sales representatives and say, "I need a XYZ product. "Maybe it's a PowerStore and I need this much capacity. "I can pick all of the components, "I can pick the number of drives, "the type of drives there are." And that's really from a product perspective. And what we're doing with the, as-a-service, is we're trying to flip the model and really drive to what the business outcome is. So the business outcome here is really, I need block storage, I need this performance level, I need this much capacity. And then we basically ship the infrastructure, we think, that better suits those outcomes. And we're making changes across our entire infrastructure value chain to really deliver these service. So we try to deliver these much quicker for the customer. We actually manage the infrastructure. So it enables customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time actually operating the service, paying attention to their business outcomes. >> Got it, and that's what every customer wants more of is more time to actually deliver this business outcomes and make those course corrections as they need to. Joe, let's talk to you for a bit. Let's talk, what's going on with cloud? The last time we saw you, a lot of change as we talked about, but give us a picture of Dell's cloud strategy. From what you guys are doing on-prem to what you are doing with cloud partners. What is this multi-pronged cloud strategy actually mean? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, our customers want hybrid cloud solutions and we believe that to be the model going forward. And so actually what we're doing is, if you think about it, we're taking the best of public cloud and bringing it on-prem, and we're also taking the best of on-prem and bringing it to the public cloud. So, you know, Devon just talked to you about how we're bringing that public cloud operation model to the data center. But what we've also done is bring our storage arrays to the cloud as a service. And we've done that with PowerStore, we've done that with PowerMax, and we've done that with PowerScale. And in the case of PowerScale for Google cloud, I mean, you get the same performance and capacity scale out in the cloud as you do on-prem. And the systems inter-operate between on-prem and cloud so it makes it easy for fluid data mobility across these environments. And for the first time it enables our customers to get their data to the cloud in a way that they can bring their high performance file workloads to the cloud. >> So talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned PowerScale for Google cloud service, is that a Dell hardware based solution? How does that work? >> Yeah, the adoptions have been great. I mean, we launched back in May and since then we brought on customers in oil and gas and eCommerce and in health as well. And we're growing out the regions, we're going to be announcing a new region in North America soon and we're going to be building out in APJ and EMEA as well. So, customer response has been fantastic, looking forward to growing up. >> Excellent, Devon back to you, let's talk about some of the things that are going on with PowerProtect DD, some new cloud services there too. Can you unpack that for us? >> So Joe, was talking about how we were taking our storage systems and putting them in the cloud. So I just back up in, and kind of introduce real quickly or reintroduce our Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. And that's really, we have our primary storage systems from Unity XT, the PowerStore, to PowerScale, to ECS, and that's housed in a co-locations facility right next to hyperscalers. And then that enables us to provide a fully managed service offering to our customers to a multi-cloud. So what we're doing is we're extending the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services to include PowerProtect DD. So we're bringing PowerProtect DD into this managed services offering so customers can use it for cloud, longterm retention, backup, archiving, and direct backup from a multicloud environment. So extending what we've already done with the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. >> So is that almost kind of like a cloud based data protection solution for those workloads that are running in the cloud VMs, SaaS applications, physical servers, spiral data, things like that? >> Yeah, there's several use cases. So you could have a primary block storage system on your premises and you could actually be providing direct backup into the cloud. You could have backups that you have on-premise that you could be then replicating with PowerProtect data, data domain replication to cloud. And you could also have data in AWS, or Azure, or Google that you could be backing up directly to the PowerProtect domain into this service. So there's multiple use cases. >> Got it, all right. Joe, let's talk about some of the extensions of cloud you guys have both been talking about the last few minutes. One of the recent announcements was about PowerMax being cloud enabled and that's a big deal to cloudify something like that. Help us understand the nature of that, the impetus, and what that means now and what customers are able to actually use today. >> Yeah sure, I mean, we've launched the PowerMax as a cloud service about a year and a half ago with our partner, Faction. And that's for those customers that want that tier zero enterprise grade data capabilities in the cloud. And not just a cloud, it also offers multicloud capabilities for both file and block. Now, in addition, the Dell Tech World, we're launching additional cloud mobility capabilities for PowerMax, where let's say you have a PowerMax on-prem, you could actually do snapshot shipping to an object repository. And that could be in AWS, that can be in Azure, or it could be locally to our local ECS object store. In addition, in the case of Amazon we go a step further where if you do snapshot shipping into Amazon S3, you can then rehydrate those snapshots directly into EBS. And that way you can do processing on that data in the cloud as well. >> Give us an idea, Joe, the last few months or so what some of your customer conversations have been like? I know you're normally in front of customers all the time. Dell Tech World is a great example. I think last year there was about 14,000 folks there, was huge. And we're all so used to that three dimensional engagement, more challenging to do remotely, but talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you've had, and how they've helped influence some of the recent announcements. >> Yeah sure, customers... It might sound a little cliche, but cloud is a journey. It's a journey for our customers. It's a journey for us too, as we build out our capabilities to best serve them. But their questions are, "I want to take advantage "of that elastic compute in the cloud." But maybe the data storage doesn't keep up with it. In the case of when we go to PowerScale for Google, the reason why we brought that platform to the cloud is 'cause you can get hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput through that. And for our customers that are doing things like processing genomic sequencing data, they need that level of throughput, and they want to move those workloads into the cloud. The computer's there but the storage systems to keep up with it, were not. So by us bringing a solution like this to the cloud, now they can do that. So we see that with PowerScale, we see a lot of that with file in the cloud because the file services in the cloud aren't as mature as some of the other ones like with block and object. So we're helping filling some of those gaps and getting them to those higher performance tiers. And as I was mentioning, with things like PowerMax and PowerStore, it's extending their on-prem presence into the public cloud. So they can start to make decisions not based on a capability, but more based on the requirements for where they want to run their workloads. >> And let's switch gears to talking about partners now. Dell has a huge partner ecosystem. We always talk with those folks on theCUBE as well, every year. Devon, from a product management perspective, tell me about some of the things that are interesting to partners and what the advantages are for partners with this shift in what, how Dell is going to be delivering, from PCs, to storage, to HCI, for example. >> Yeah exactly, so, Joe mentioned that it's really a journey and Joe talked a lot about how customers aren't maybe not (indistinct) completely going to a hyperscale or to a complete public cloud. And what we're hearing is there's a lot of customers that are actually wanting the cloud-like experience, but wanting it on-prem. And we're hearing from our partners almost on a daily basis. I have a lot of partner customer conversations where they want to be involved in delivering this as a service. Through their customers, they want to maintain that relationship, derive that value, and in some cases even provide the services for them. And that's what we're looking do as the largest infrastructure provider with the broadest base of partnership we have an advantage there. >> Is there any specific partner certification programs that partners can get into to help start rolling this out? >> At this point, we are trying to build it, but at this point we had nothing to announce here but that's something that we're actively working on and stay tuned for that. >> I imagine there will be a lot of virtual conversations at the digital tech world this year, between the partner community when all of these things are announced. And you get those brains collectively together although obviously virtually, to start iterating on ideas and developing things that might be great to programmatize down the road. And, Joe, last question for you, second to last question actually, is this, this year as we talked about a number of times, everyone's remote, everyone's virtual. It's challenging to get that level of engagement. We're all so used to being in-person and all of the hallway conversations even that you have when you're walking around the massive show floor for example, what can participants and attendees expect from your perspective this year at Dell Technologies World? Will they be able to get the education and that engagement that Dell really wants to deliver? >> Yeah, well, clearly we had to scale things back quite, there's no way around that. But we have a lot of sessions that were designed to inform them with a new capabilities we've been building out. And not just for cloud, but across the portfolio. So I hope they get a lot out of that. We have some interactive sessions in there as well, for some interactive Q and A. And you're right, I mean, a challenge for us is connecting with the customer in this virtual reality. We're all at home, right? The customers are at home. So we've been on Zoom, like never before, reaching out to customers to better understand where they want to go, what their challenges are and how we can help them. So I would say we are connecting, it's a little different and requires a little more effort on everyone's part. We just can't all do it in the same day anymore. It is just a little more spread out. >> Well, then it kind of shows the opportunity to consume things on demand. And as consumers, we sort of have this expectation that we can get anything we want on demand. But you mentioned, Joe, in the second to last question, this is the last one. But you mentioned, everybody's at home. You have to tell us about that fantastic guitar behind you. What's the story? >> Every guitar has a story. I'll just say for today, look, this is my tribute to Eddie Van Halen. We're going to miss him for sure. >> And I'll have the audience know, I did ask Joe to play us out. He declined, but I'm going to hold them to that for next time, 'cause we're not sure when we're going to get to see you guys in person again. Joe and Devon, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. It's been great talking to you. Lots of things coming, lots of iterations, lots of influence from the customers, influence from COVID and we're excited to see what is to come. Thanks for your time. >> Both: Thank you so much. >> From my guests, Joe Caradonna and Devon Reed, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, actually, CUBE virtual coverage of Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE. We're not in person this year. Normally we're on the floor, we're talking to all the guests. This year, obviously, because of the pandemic we're going to be doing remote and of course, I'm proud to have a CUBE alumni back on the program. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing for Dell Technologies. Cheryl, great to see you remotely, bummer we couldn't be in person, thanks for coming on. >> I know, thank you John. It's great to be with you virtually again. >> You know, I just want to just point out that obviously we're not face to face. Normally Dell Technology World is a real celebration. It's the, it's a culmination of all the announcements, all the community, all the partners, it's, it's actually a huge partner event as well as a customer event. You're running global partners. How has this pandemic changed your world? People still got to do business. More pressure for modern apps, programmable infrastructure Hybrid Cloud. The world's not stopping. What is your take on this? Because it's been a real challenge but it's an also an opportunity for the folks who can get through it. What's your take? >> Yeah, it's just been remarkable. You know, I tell people in some ways I find this the great equalizer because it has all of us around the world in the exact same place but our partners have just been remarkable. You know, we see inspirational work all over the place. They're so resilient and they have just been focused on the customer. And so together we have just been really focused on helping all of our customers as we know, in the early weeks and months of this now, you know, it was pivoting to support business continuity and enabling their employees to work remotely. And our partners just rallied to the cause. You know, they bring their expertise and their capabilities and their services. And you know, we've all been talking about digital transformation and the need to modernize all of our infrastructures. And I think we're all seeing it just accelerate. So in so many ways, it's just pushed it to the forefront and a lot of us, because we don't have an alternative, we're all engaging in modalities like this, but we're getting business done, right? We're helping our customers really respond to the needs of the business. And I think in the early stages of this, you know, we've been characterizing it as there was a lot of go fast, go light. Now we're seeing, you know, that we're all recognizing we're going to be in this circumstance for the foreseeable future, a little longer than maybe we all intended and now it's do it right. So we see a lot of just good work around hardening infrastructure, working on security vulnerabilities. How do we harden a VPN environment? So to be candid, you know, the breadth of our portfolio and a lot of the infrastructure solutions, our partnership with VMware has never been more relevant. And a lot of those capabilities our partners are leveraging to be able to support their customers needs and demands. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the VMware and I want to bring that up because I've been doing a lot of interviews and one of the themes for Dell Tech World Digital Experience this year has been the VMware integration. And what's interesting is is that that investment of being tightly coupled with VMware and your other partners is paying off now because as people need to be truly agile and flexible because of the disruption, the way the work environment, the workforce, workloads and the workplace has been changed they really need to lean on Dell. And you guys have that slogan, the power of partnering with Dell Technologies. I want to dig into what that means because the customers, your partners, end user customer there's kind of two spectrums. There's the, this is a tailwind, I have to go faster and put this modern app, I'm going to double down and solve problems. Whether it's a call center is getting stuff built quickly to solve needs. Two, well, this is a pandemic that's integral. So we're going to retool while we're kind of downtime. I won't say downtime, but like, while they're not truly active, whether you're in airlines or whatever, there's different spectrums and everything in between. You guys are bringing a lot to the table through these partnerships and the integrations. Can you talk about how that's paying off and two, how you guys are helping your partners and give some examples? >> Yeah, well, thank you John. And, you know, we have been saying for some time that we really do think the cross sell up, sell opportunity is a differentiated opportunity for our partners teaming with Dell Technologies. You know, even in the last several months while we've all been kind of working from home, our innovation engine hasn't stopped. I mean, we've launched nine new products in nine weeks all of which are just innovations that continue to represent areas where partners can team with us to bring those modernized applications to bear. And to your point, many of our partners and our customers are using this time when we're all remote and you can't go onsite, they're doubling down on their training. You know, we've seen an unbelievable demand in our competency training and our certification capabilities, clearly with the product launches. I just mentioned, there's new training to enable them around the new offerings. Our PowerStore product was just launched. So unbelievable opportunities. And as you said with VMware, you know, we have been for some time, when we talk about cross sell our partners that sell two and three lines of business, their revenues are multiples higher than partners that don't and candidly partners that sell three lines of business and sell VMware are selling like 148 times the revenue and I think it's a reflection of their engaging in strategic sticky services, rich deployments of hybrid cloud implementations with their customers, and the customers need their help and expertise like never before. So I think the results are showing true. And I also think in this dynamic of everything's gone digital, everything's pivoted to digital, you know, our partners have been asking how can we help them be more effective and successful in their digital marketing efforts and activities? How can we assist them in virtual selling? You know, everybody's accustomed to face to face sales contacts and we've all learned how to use your platform and Zoom and teams and all these other modalities that allow us to frankly be highly effective and efficient. And our partners candidly are leaning into some of our services and tools and capabilities that honestly have been there for some time, but like remote diagnostics, for example, remote capabilities so that you don't have to go on the data center floor and you can still be doing assessments and provisioning and orchestration and deployment for your customers in this time. And you're right, some customers and partners are using this as an opportunity to invest so that, you know, when the world opens up, this will end at some point, they are incredibly well positioned to move forward and take advantage of what's already been a fast moving market. And I just think this environment it's accelerated, the move and adoption, like never before. >> Yeah, and to your point, I think the thing we're seeing is that the vendors and the customers that have been prepared, suppliers and customers that have been thinking about it, you can see them having performance. Even in the challenging handcuffed environment that they're in with the whole, you know, disruption working at home to the data center because the edge and the data center are now connecting and you've got hybrid public, multi-cloud developing and everyone's got to learn and build out at the same time. So it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because you know, the word virtual event has been kicked around. We have our own virtual event thing and everyone's doing it. This is theCUBE virtual but they don't use the word digital, but we say digital transformation. Is it digital, virtual transformation? So you've got virtual, I guess, reality virtual spaces, digital as digital, explain this from your perspective, how you see digital and virtual marketing and, or learning as a critical part of your program offerings because people still got to get the new things, they got to learn. >> I honestly, I think it's gone from a nice to have, and we all acknowledge that it's a transformation in the world of marketing to a, now it's a must have, right? I mean, when you no longer can do in person events, and many of our partners would have looked at that as a demand generation activity, they'd be capturing the leads from all the conversations we'd be having on a solution expo floor. We'd be having our in person events to now, we're going to convey our information and knowledge and maybe a virtual setting but that pivot to digital marketing, your online presence, the personalization at scale, making sure we acknowledged and understand that we have to meet our buyers and acknowledge the buyer journey has changed. And I think it's a must have now. So it's no longer a nice to have and we've all been describing the pace of change. But I think when you couple some of the trends in the industry with just the reality of this pandemic, that's making each of us be more resourceful than ever. You know, we, for example, I've seen our partners pivot the utilization of their MDF dollars into digital alternatives. They are certainly doing these Zoom experiences but they're also investing in their web properties and their search and making sure that as we pivot to digital we, for example, on the marketing side, we pivoted quickly to kind of stand up what we're calling an agile pod and it was a digital first agile pod that was frankly all aimed at training, enablement, social media guides, webinars on expertise on how we as a company were responding. What was our internal communication strategy, our external communication strategy. And I just think this appetite for training, knowledge. Some of it was necessity and some of it is we're all home and we have time and we want to hone our skills to ensure that we're ready. So I've never been busier as much as we're all working from home. We have never been busier on supporting the great and innovative work that our partners are doing but also really focused on the training, best practice sharing, enablement and webinars on how we're in it together, right? How can we help each other really respond in a sustaining way? Honestly, not just an interim way of our new digital capabilities, marketing capabilities. And I think we're experiencing, you know, what I think the opportunity of this digital trend in marketing is the handshake between marketing and sales has never been tighter. And I think really done well, we are going to provide a more personalized experience for our prospects and our customers. We're going to make our sellers more productive. We're going to be engaging along that continuum. We kind of it a digital heartbeat. We're going to be responding to where they are online and then we're also going to be meeting in person or over a virtual Zoom. And you're going to be accelerating in a highly relevant, much more personalized way to drive to the outcome of these solutions. It's a richer experience. So it's less about is marketing creating a bunch of leads that I can hand over to my sellers as much as what's the overall customer experience? And that experience needs to be a rich, personalized one that kind of transcends over marketing and sales. >> Yeah, Cheryl, you have an amazing vision, I think that is so spot on, you're on point. And I think you bring up a whole kind of sea change. It's really transformational just in the thinking, you mentioned, oh, just put out leads, also just, it's not about just standing up events either. You mentioned sustainability, how to have that heartbeat. This is a whole new level of thinking. I mean, every company the adage used to be, every company used to be a data company, every company will be a data company, true. Now you're seeing every company becoming a media company. Where you are probably doing more hosting of things. You're on camera more. So this new media API is developing where you want the command control, you want the truth, you want the community, you want the authenticity. This is the new, this is the new digital marketing, real time, agile and fast and relevant and cool too. What's your, expand more on your vision? >> And test and learn, you know, is a word we use a lot because instead of, you know, having to build something, go put it out, let's have some metrics and measures on how effective it was. The speed with which you can garner real time feedback. You know, everything needs to be more modular in natures, you know, snackable, if you will in nature, so that you can adapt and respond to what your customers are telling you, right? And I mean, I think we've been talking about consumerization of IT for some time. And I think this digital marketing is just the expression within marketing of how each of us come to work. And we're all at home as consumers engaging in this digital way as a consumer every day. So now when we bring it to work we bring our own preferences and in a B2B setting and a B2B context, we want to engage and it accelerates just the learning cycle. So I think it's a combination of the tools, the automation that exists now. So when you talk about leveraging AI and machine learning in the context of marketing automation, it's just putting to use all these technical trends that we've been discussing for some time in the context of customer experience. So I think this, like I said, the handshake between marketing and sales it's all about staying customer centric, listening to what the customers are telling you, their interests and preferences are. How do we respond in the most, highly relevant way around how we can help them, and done well, it's a positive experience but it's also an accelerated experience. You can get to the answer faster. And as long as we get to the answer faster, that's what the customer is looking for. Then it's a win, win for everybody. >> That's awesome, I love, I love that conversation because this brings up kind of the future for that, for your organization and your customers as you guys have this global partner network. Okay, and one of the things that the pandemic has shown is that with these digital technologies and virtual technologies, it's not a physical event, it's global. I mean, instantly Dell Technologies World you'd have to fly there, certainly from overseas, you could certainly do that. But now with one click of a button, you're in The programs that you have are global in nature. I'm sure there's some regional segmentation that's done with cloud and all that good stuff but you aren't going to have to recast your partner programs. Can you share how you're helping partners with their digital transformation? Didn't just give a couple examples of specifics of if I'm a partner what's in for me, Cheryl, what's going on? How is Dell helping me today? >> Yeah, well, I commented a little bit about this digital first kind of agile pod work we did. Some of that is selling guides, social media guides, how to actually do social selling, how to pivot some best practices around, you know, what activities can you put your MDF to good use that is showing really positive returns in the short term. So it's a lot of best practice sharing. And then candidly, we as a company, as we put campaigns in market, or we're giving marketing assets, collateral, social opportunities to our partners, it's all about how to help them get educated and use what we're already providing for them. So we recognize that, you know, partner's capabilities will vary across the board and certainly regionally, as you said but we definitely are helping them with, you know, here's what we're seeing around industry solutions. Here are certain industry verticals we know are responding or, you know, coming out of this environment faster than others. Here's campaigns that you can leverage both modularly or full-term key to be able to drive that. So to your point, the handshake, the support, the overall engagement of our partner community has never been higher. I mean, I'll give you a good example. You know, we talked about training and this opportunity to reach more people through these forums than in person. You know, we conduct trainings of presale technical teams around the world. We call it our heroes events, and these are in, you know, typically in person, but now they've gone virtual. We've trained over 18,000 presales technical engineers just in the first half alone to be able leverage our remote tools lean in and leverage the integration around VMware like we were just discussing. What are the new capabilities that have launched around, you know, VxRail with VCF Foundation and how they can go deploy. So in many ways we actually are touching and addressing the audience much wider than we might have otherwise. And I can put my subject matter experts, my best experts in the company on a Zoom forum like this. And I can have him in Sydney, Australia, Paris. I can have them in San Francisco on the same day and they never leave their home. So it's actually, we've all been very resilient, but are finding I think in the go-forward world, it'll be a hybrid model. We're going to leverage some of these best practices and tools. Even when the world reopens, we certainly will be doing in person events, again, that's going to come back but I do think it will be forever changed. And we're going to leverage this hybrid model with our partners and they're bringing their expertise to bear. And a lot of the vertical industry capabilities they bring, they're able to reach an audience broader over capabilities like this. >> You know, it's going to be a lot of fun too, all this new learning and all this headroom from asynchronous progressions that are nonlinear. As you mentioned training, people are getting trained faster to made for TV experiences. You're going to start to see, and then when hybrid events come back, they're going to be different. They may be more intimate. All new opportunities to learn and move fast and that's something that you guys have done. So congratulations, Cheryl, thanks for that great insight. My final question for you, this year for the partners watching who are there in person, 'cause we're not, we're remote. What should they take away from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience event this year? What's your, what's your, what's your summary here? >> Well, I hope they enjoy the couple of days and you certainly have heard, you know, Michael and Jeff and Pat and others talk about the innovation engine at Dell Technologies is not slowing down. You know, the tight partnership we have with VMware and the level of capabilities that we're bringing in this as a service, Hybrid Cloud, 5G, world of Hybrid Cloud deployments. We absolutely have our foot on the gas and are going to continue to be that partner to provide the world's best infrastructure and capabilities. And when you look at the power of partnership and to your point on what we're describing with our global alliance partners, the innovative and inspirational work, some of our OEM customers and partners have done is just remarkable. And like I said, we are growing faster than the competition, even in this environment. So we just really appreciate the partnership very much. And I want them to lean in with Dell Technologies because it's not going to slow down as we've just been discussing. I think it's going to continue to move fast and we absolutely are committed for the longterm to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to market. >> Well, certainly people who have good business performance in this environment certainly are relevant and have the right product mix, made the right moves and it's paying off, a lot more to do. Cheryl, congratulations for all the success and the you're a great leader heading up the global partner marketing group over there. Congratulations, you've got a great vision, we totally agree. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John, it's been a pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here with Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, theCUBE virtual covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell technologies world, digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Hey, welcome to the CUBE's coverage of Dell technologies, world 2020. The digital experience. I am Lisa Martin, and I've got a cube alum back with me talking about managed services. David Mensing is here the senior director of product management for Dell technology services. David it's great to see you. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> So here we are very, very socially distant since the whole event is socially distant this year. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on with managed services with (indistinct), you guys have been in managed services for a long time, but there's some new stuff coming out. Talk to us about that. >> Sure. Yeah. I mean, from a Dell technology services perspective, there's a lot that we do from consulting, support, deployment, education managed services has been one of those other areas that we've been working on for over 15 years. We've been managing a variety of different environments for many large enterprise customers. And so what we're trying to do right now is take a lot of that capability and start making it more widely available to more of our customers. And today what we're focusing on is in the data protection space and offering a standard managed service or data protection that's available with our flex on demand consumption model. >> So flux on demand consumption model was announced last year towards the end of calendar year 2019. Remind us what the flex on demand consumption program is. And then let's dig into why data protection was one of the first managed services launched through it. >> Yeah. So last year when we announced flex on demand, what we wanted to do is come up with a different consumption model where customers don't have to pay anything significant upfront as part of a CapEx investment. They pay for what they consume. And so we offering or offering that today on our power protect data, database products are Avamar networking software, as well as our integrated data protection appliances. And so customers can pay only for what they have to consume and then we'll charge them extra as they consume beyond that minimal commitment. And then now we have managed services. That's one of those options that we can provide as part of that solution. >> Tell me about some of the trends. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. >> No, but I think you asked the question though, as well as, you know, why did we choose managed services for data protection to start with versus doing something else? And, you know, it's an excellent question because you know, there's a lot of different environments that we do manage today. I mean, storage data protection, Hyper-converge, cloud, and we're doing that with a variety of different global customers around the world. Now, what we've seen though, is that these customers are running into a lot of common challenges, particularly around the complexity and growth in their environment. And so that's why we've been doing a lot of research with IDC and with others to focus on what specifically they're seeing in their environment. And so what they found particularly IDC came back and told us that, yeah, you know, one of the number one concerns that customers have with a flexible consumption model is backup and recovery. And so that's why we went with the service essentially from what we were already seeing from our existing customers, but also for what we were hearing from analysts. >> So since that survey that you did research with IDC, I'm curious in the COVID era, we've seen so much going on with respect to security. Ransomware is way up, I think a ransomware attack right now happens every 11 seconds. We're seeing hospitals as targets. The New Zealand stock exchange was targeted. The department of veterans affairs, social media, is there any additional or one additional data from IDC or others shows that backup and recovery is even more critical since so many people are working from home accessing networks from personal devices, what's the influence been on COVID on really accelerating this data production managed service? >> Well, I think there's two things to it. Number one with COVID we're hearing from a lot of our customers that their it staff are having to focus on more things than they did before. You know, that like you were saying, there's more security, there's more compliance, there's more other issues. And so by offering a managed service in a space like backup and recovery, we're able to reduce some of their workload free up their time so they can focus on other more critical projects. Now, furthermore, when we survey with these customers, you know, we found that most of them say You know, it was a 64% said, they lack the confidence that they can fully recover systems or data from all their platforms in the event of a data loss. And so that's one of the things that we can provide by being able to troubleshoot monitor it 24 by seven, you know, when a backup job fails, you know, there's a lot of different things that may be going on. And so we'll use the expertise that we have and our tools to go ahead and troubleshoot those so that our customers can spend their time in more important areas. >> So as we look at the multi-cloud world, in which so many businesses across industries live, we talk about multi-cloud, we talk about complex in IT, a lot of businesses have multiple data protection solutions within them, some maybe for on prem, some protecting cloud applications. Talk to me about how this managed service would enable a business in any industry to get that centralized management and that visibility into everything they're backing up from physical servers to SAS applications for example. >> That's a great question there. So, you know, going back to one of the things I mentioned earlier, I mean, we're number right now in the marketplace for data, project software and appliances. And so all of our products provide those different flexible options to whether you're managing an on prem environment that you need to do data protection for, or a hybrid or public cloud environment. And so with that, as part of the managed service, we'll run a series of different reports and monitoring, and we'll be able to unify all those different pieces into a couple of different dashboards and reports provide that visibility back to the customers about what's being backed up what they need to go ahead and restore that particular moment, as well as see some of the other trends that are going on with their environment. >> So let's talk about the actual consumption of this. You talked a little bit about when the flux on-demand program was launched towards the calendar end of 2019. So much has changed since then for many, many months, many businesses globally were really in this, how do we survive mode? The pivot were pivots were so quickly, there were a lot of them they're still happening. So talk to us about how this select on demand program I imagine of the facilitator of some businesses being able to get to survival and eventually to being able to thrive in this new era. >> It's a, it's a great point. You know, it'd be the great thing about the option that we now have with flux on demand is, you know, like I said before, customers don't have to pay everything upfront. You know, generally speaking, when we sell a product, you know, we're thinking about a multi-year commitment that a customer has, that they pay all upfront at that point with this they're only paying month to month, and that could be anywhere from 40% consumption of the box or 80% consumption of the box. And then they can pick and choose whether that's over a one year, two year, three year or even a five year term. And so we'll establish a rate so that, Hey, based off that commitment, you know, you'll know exactly what you pay for 40%. If you exceed that, you'll know exactly what you'll be charged for that as well. So that provides not only some predictability in what the customers need to budget for pay every month, but more importantly, they're saving a lot of money from the standpoint of, Hey, they're not having to pay for that all upfront anymore. They can actually spread that out overtime. And so that flexibility particularly in the economic space we are right now is really, really important. >> So no more risk of over provisioning and then having in three to five years to buy more, even if you haven't used that capacity. And that's one of the challenges that we hear often in that space. >> Correct, Correct. I mean, the great thing with data is we're generating more data every single day, but you know, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it in the fact that, Hey, you can make a commitment, 40% consumption. You can work with that. If you find a couple of months later that, Hey, we need to readjust that to another level. We can absolutely work with you to do that as well. >> So I'm curious what that the kind of split is between what the managed services group does and what the customers can do. Knowing that there's a lot of experts on the managed services team. What actions can customers take? For example, you talked about we'll determine what them, what percentage between 40 and 80 they've paid per month, when things change on their end, how can they adjust that. >> Now? it's a great point. When we talk about managed services, that's always the first question that comes up of, Hey, exactly what are you going to manage for me versus what does my staff need to continue to look at? And so we're going to go ahead and manage the jobs. We'll make sure that they run. And, you know, if there are issues where we need to go in there and troubleshoot and make changes, we'll go ahead and do that. And really what we're designing here is a process to where the customer doesn't have to call us, we're going to call the customer to let them know when, Hey, we see an issue. We need to make a change in their environment and notify them, but we still want to give the customers the flexibility of, Hey, if they need to make a change to their backup policy. Cause their environment has changed. Call us, submit a ticket. Let's talk through it. Let's make those changes together so that you got the right protection strategy. Furthermore, the customer, if they need to restore a file, they can submit a ticket and we'll go ahead and assist to make sure that we can get that data restored back for them with the right version and the right place as part of that. >> Had any interesting stories. I know we talked a minute ago about, you know, when the pandemic hit, there was this massive pivot to work from home. And suddenly you had people that were either taking a desktop. Out of, their physical location, bringing it home, or they were having to use one of their own devices connecting to a corporate network. We think about endpoints as being even absolutely critical. There's a lot of business, critical data on end points. What are some of the restorations that you've seen? For example, if someone deletes an entire mailbox or a calendar or there's corrupt data on a somebody gets hit with ransomware, how quickly can your data protection managing production service, recover data? >> You know, it's a great question. And, you know, we've got a variety of different ways to approach that, you know, depending on the customer environment, it may be something where it's acceptable to wait a few days or longer to restore files. It may not be critical, but certainly if it is very critical data and it is something that you need up and running right away, you know, you've got to look at not just the managed service approach, but you've also got to look at what is the software and the hardware approach to data protection? How many copies do you have? How closely, located is some of that equipment. And more importantly, have we looked at the networking latency impact of, Hey, if we did have to do a critical restore, how long would that take? And so that is part of what we can do for managed services is address. Hey, is the policy and the strategy we have in place is it actually meeting our customer needs? Is that the outcome that they're looking for? And so at that time, you know, we may find that, Hey, this may not be the right size solution. There may be some adjustments we need to make. Furthermore, it may be just simply making some changes in the configuration, in the policy to make sure that, Hey, we've got multiple copies that we're doing backups maybe a little bit more frequently, but that's always a really good discussion point with our customers to make sure do we have the right data protection strategy in place with not just the hardware and software, but with the service strategy we're applying against it. >> You mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that a survey that I forget if it was IDC or a different one you mentioned that 64% of the IT folks surveyed said, we don't have confidence that we can fully recover. Given what you are talking about here, data protection is a managed service offered through the flux on demand program. Ideal technologies world, those folks in the 64% of we don't have that confidence, what can they learn? What can they expect? and how can this new managed service help move them over the line to getting that confidence that they can recover anything they need? >> Yeah, the confidence that we can help them with on that is transparency. You know, like I'd mentioned, you know, we want to change the paradigm to where customers not having to call us, we're calling them. But even from that standpoint, you know, it's really important for us to be able to demonstrate through the reports through the other work that we're doing, that we are doing the backups that we are restoring and we're meeting the service level objectives that we defined with those customers. And so as part of that, we have a service delivery manager that will work with the customer on a scheduled meeting every month to go through those reports, check with them about their expectations to make sure that we're doing everything that they need us to answer any questions. And then if we need to meet with them more frequently than once a month, we absolutely can. But we want to ensure that the service is totally addressing what the customer is looking for and that they're seeing the right amount of information and data to give them confidence that we're delivering the services they need them to. >> Sounds to me like proactive support. Is that something that you think the customers in that majority who don't feel confident have they not had data protection services. that were proactively saying, Hey guys, here's what's going on in your environment? >> Yeah so, you know, certainly in the, in the industry, I mean, there's a lot that we provide from proactive services We' ll practically notify you when we see a hardware error in your environment. But in the absence of managed services, the customer is in charge, the customer is the one that is running the environment. They're having to monitor all the different events, have a backup job fails they need to figure out well, did it fail because I had a networking issue or because the system had too much IOPS at that point, or was it just, we had two conflicting jobs trying to ride, run at the same time, means the customer takes on all that complexity themselves when they go ahead and manage it. And for a lot of customers that may be the right solution. They may have the right expertise in house. They may have the right requirements or require that, but there's a lot of other customers we're finding, particularly in the state we are right now with COVID that they want to go ahead and move some of that complexity over another partner, which is what we're offering with the managed services. >> Last question at Dell technologies world, the digital experience this year. Tell me about what you're going to be talking about. what can folks expect to learn from you? (laughs) >> We're going to talk a lot more about the managed services for data protection. We're going to talk about how that aligns very, very cleanly with the flux on demand and talk about the benefits you get from both of those different models. >> Excellent. David, thanks so much for joining us on the cube today. Sharing what's going on with flux on demand program, managed services for data protection and how you can help customers navigate their complex data protection needs in a very strange world. We appreciate your time. (chuckles) >> Thank you >> For David Mensing, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage with Dell technologies world 2020. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies. World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our Cube alumni. John Shirley is with us. The vice president of unstructured storage product management. John. Welcome back to the Cube. >>Thank you for having me. It's great to be back. >>So so much has changed since we last saw you were very socially distant. But talk to me from from a storage and unstructured of data perspective, lot of changes in the year of 2020. >>Yeah, a lot of changes everywhere, but especially in our spaces. While we're seeing just a phenomenal amount of growth with storage. Still, that's continuing. But what we've really seen is things changing pretty pretty rapidly, actually, two new cloud based applications and it almost seems like everything that's happened during the pandemic has kind of been an accelerant to getting to that next level of technology. And so we're really excited to be working with our customers, really guide them in the journey to get into, you know, new cloud based applications, cloud native applications and really just helping them take advantage of all of this on structure data that's being generated. >>Yeah, we've heard about acceleration in so many facets this year and that it's, you know, we're accelerated by, you know, 24 to 36 months. Talk to me about, For example. I was talking Thio, Adele Technologies customer Earth down the other day. And, of course, the massive amount of video that they're generating 24 by seven by 3. 65 from all over the world. The edge, cloud core, So much growth there. How are you seeing customers be able to pivot quickly and adapt to how different things are? >>Yeah, you know, the interesting part two isn't just a collection of data anymore. It's how customers want to treat that data. And what we're seeing over and over again is that we get the video streams coming in. But there's also all of these sensors in the world and so marrying up the video streams with sensor information and keeping that in a repository so that you can do things like, uh, real Time analytics, but also be able to take that same data set and also get the historical view is becoming critically important. And that's the thing that's really changed, is how the data is being used yesterday that keeps coming in. But customers are really, really taking a different view in terms of how they want to go use that data. So we have a lot of tools that we've created over the last year or two that are helping our customers harness and really use that data, something that they just weren't able to do a couple years ago. >>Now we always talk about data as currency or data as gold or data equals trust and the most important factor for any businesses extracting value from that data. I think now, really time is even more important if you think of contact tracing, for example, or the accelerated work going on to develop a vaccine, so much access has to be now because data from yesterday isn't good enough. It's not gonna help solve some of these big use cases. What is she gonna key use cases that you're seeing accelerate in the last few months? >>You just hit it right on the head. So the way we look at it, it kind of two points within the timeline of data. That's the most valuable. And, of course, what you just said. Get the right away in the here. Now that's that's one of the times that is the most valuable toe have that data. But then if we kind of take a look at that data as it ages because it get less important, well, some of it might. But actually the data has a big scale data like data repository and be able to extract value out of that kind of holistically as a big set of data is extremely important as well. And so we we have tools, everything from our streaming data platform that talks about how we can extract value from that data, right as it's coming off the sensor of the videos video streams, we've got our power scale product, which provides very, very high performance storage so that customers 10 stream a bunch of data and get some of that AI and ml off of that data. And then we've got our PCs object storage based product what customers want exabytes of data, and they just want a really long term, robust storage repositories. So we've kind of got all the tools together that really helping our customers extract that value. >>Talk to me about doing a migration. That's always a big challenge, especially as many businesses live in a hybrid or multi cloud world where they've got or using public cloud services on from edge maybe, for example, but in terms of being able to get to the data and run algorithms on it to do a I. How can a customer give me, like a snapshot of a of an example infrastructure that, you see is common with customers that allows them to harness data wherever it is and be able to run a I on wherever it is without having to move it around and pale those charges and, of course, lose precious time? >>Yeah, that's a great question. What we're seeing a lot, too, is customers wanting to take advantage of things like the cloud, the power that compete in the cloud, and, uh, they don't necessarily want to move the data in and out of the cloud. But at the same time, you know, we want to make sure that the customers have the flexibility to choose which cloud that they want to go to. So we have multiple cloud offerings that were given to our customers, specifically the ability to take the data. We host the service for the customer so that it's all in all operated within the Dell EMC, uh, infrastructure team. And then we can map that data data up to the clouds. Whether they want to go to any of the Big three cloud providers, we could map that out. There's no egress fees, and they could go ahead and take advantage of the data very quickly, easily. >>So really, from a flexibility perspective, being able to meet them where they are, >>that's absolutely right. So whether the customers are in the edge or in their in their core or in the cloud will be there to help their needs. >>So this is the first Dell Technologies world that is digital, a lot of opportunity for folks. Thio learn and still be able to have as much engagement as possible. Talk to us about some of the things that you're excited about. The customers are gonna learn in terms of how you're helping them get more value out of the data faster in a time of such massive change. >>Yeah, so we're doing so much within the within the team. So earlier this year we introduced a new product called Power Scale which is taking our industry leading one FS software for scale out file. And we have put that in and really taken advantage of what we have within the Dell family and taking the best server hard work power edge. We've taken on one of one FS software married and together we're really extracting the best value of the data with those platforms. So again, the industry leading scale of file solution marrying that up with the industry leading server solution. And now we've got even though even more robust solution. On top of that, we have, uh, announced our objects scale solution. And so objects Scale is a knob decked store solution that's specifically targeted for customers running kubernetes. We've partnered up with our friends over at VM Ware and we've developed an object store specifically for developers on top of kubernetes environment, so that when customers want to go and start generating new applications with object store on new cloud native app they can really quickly spin up new object, store new buckets and start writing data. It's very simple and easy to use, and then when they want to grow at scale, we've got our PCs object store, too, into that petabytes scale. So it's it's very exciting. >>Can you give us an example of a customer that's that's already doing that That, you see, is really achieving some significant benefits? >>Yeah, yeah, So, uh, probably the one that's the most fun toe watches were working with a company that's doing amusement park rides and really taking a look at all the sensor information so that they can get predictive analytics in terms of the maintenance of the rides, making sure that if there is maintenance that needs to get done, they could get that fixed as quickly as possible so that customers going through those rights a. If, of course, they're going to be safety. Safety is always number one. But being able to make shape, make sure those rides are maintained so that the lines move quickly and they can keep customers going through. And you get us many people enjoying those rises. You can, and that's all coming from our streaming data platform, which is again taking that information. All of that sensors feet, and they need that that real time value that we talked about before to get that real time value. But they also get the historical view so they could see how the maintenance is kind of evolved over time. So that's that's one that's been, ah, lot of fun to work with here over the last couple. >>And hopefully we get to go back to amusement parks and calendar year 2021. Wouldn't that be nice? You mentioned safety and and that Yeah, that kind of makes me think about security. We've seen so much about increases like companies like Zoom, for example, with increased scrutiny on their data security, a more compliance requirements, Um, data protection being even mawr. Important as there was this massive pivot toe work from home seven months ago, and a lot of folks are still there are not going to be there. Tell me a little bit about some of the things that you're doing it to facilitate that this data, this massive increase in unstructured data, is managed securely so that if there's any sort of breach or incident, your customers air in good shape. >>We We have a lot of focus on security within the organization, and that's really across the board. That's really across all of Dell Technologies products. Eso We do a lot of things around encrypted drives to make sure that if the driver ever pulled out of the system, there's no way to go access that data. There's just no way to go do that without the original keys. You can't get those original kids when they're not in the system, so we make sure that we do a lot of hard enough the system at that level. We work very closely with the broader partner and ecosystem community to make sure that we provide things like ransom or protection, uh, isolated. So in case if something does happen a you identified as quickly as you can but be you make sure that you have a good data set, like a good golden copy of that data that you can always go back. Thio, >>you mentioned ransom where it's it's really been on the rise in 2020. I read a stat a couple days ago that every 11 seconds are Ransomware attack occurs when we think about how many new industries are exposed. I saw I read recently that the the New Zealand Stock Exchange was hit a couple of times. Carnival Cruise Line, the Department of veterans of There's a social media with Facebook Tick Toke Instagram on 235 million user profile straight from a unsecured cloud database. So not only is that threat landscape expanding, but we've got more people accessing. Um, you know, corporate networks with maybe personal devices for those phishing emails are probably even getting more sophisticated. >>Yeah, we spend. Like I said, we spend a lot of time. We have a whole security team within the storage group that does nothing but thanks about security and how we can harden the products to make sure they stay secure and robust. And we keep the bad, the bad people away. >>Now that's excellent. Alright, So any predictions what we might see in the next 6 to 9 months, who from Dell Technologies with respect to helping customers who are hopefully have pivoted from this survival mode to now being able to thrive, leverage data extract values from it to identify new revenue streams renew products are new innovation. What do you see on the horizon? >>Yeah, I see just the continued acceleration of the technology. I see Dell Technologies spending a lot of our time focused on solutions so that when we can go into a customer environment, we talk about solutions. We talk about how we can get time to value. So how quickly can we get up the customer up and running with a known good configuration? You know, supportable. It's enterprise grade on. We can have our customers spend time writing code and developing new applications and not worrying about how to go build that infrastructure. So you're gonna see a lot of things. A lot of partnerships across our entire infrastructure team, which internally we call I S G. And we're really working together is one SG team to make sure all of our networking, our storage and our compute and all of the software that goes around that we act as 111 overall family for our customers provide that solution. And we also partner very close with VM ware to provide that software layer. So that again when we go to our customers, uh, and they want to start a new project. We have all of the tools within our portfolio. Uh, we've been around for a very long time. We have very strong focus on both the horizontal, the various workloads that customers were running and also very specific vertical through the industry and teams that just are dedicated on that. So But I think you're going to see a lot more. Is the solution based approaches where we could go into customers? We can provide that solution, and it's up and running in the very, very short amount. All right, >>last question. You said you mentioned you guys have been doing this a long time. I know you've been with Dell for 10 years. What are the three things that you would say if you're in a customer situation and they're looking at Dell and maybe they're looking at HP, for example, or some other competitors? One of the three things that you think really differentiate what Dell Technologies can deliver with respect to extracting value from massive amounts of unstructured data. >>Absolutely. I mean, this is where I get really excited when I'm so proud to be at del, uh, because if I look at all of the advantages that we have that we could bring to our customers. We have just the knowledge. So I think first and foremost when it comes to on structure data, we have been the most prevalent player in the market. And again, if you take a look at different verticals, think about like media and entertainment. We've won an Emmy just because we've been around and we have the technology that's really met the needs. We, um but that's one. We have all of the deep knowledge, and that's really going to give a lot of benefit to our customers to we've got the breath of the portfolio. So not only do we have very specific knowledge in one area where actually cover all of the unstructured portfolio for our customers needs, whether that's file or object or streaming data might even be the data management data management. When we have data I Q. To help our customers understand that data. Our portfolio is really broad, so deep knowledge we have a broad portfolio and then we have the overall Dell Technologies family that that we go forward with. So again, it's not just about the unstructured data. It's everything that goes around that it's the servers. It's that computes all the infrastructure. But it's the software that's also our partners and that whole ecosystem that we built up across the technologies. That's what really makes us strong and really the best person to partner with >>excellent knowledge, bread and a large ecosystem. John, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube today, talking to us about all the exciting things that you're working on. What's to come? We appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much >>for John Shirley. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology. World 2020. The digital experience, Uh, not in person like nothing this year, 2020. But the digital experience allows to do a lot of things that you couldn't do in person. And we're excited to have our next guest. He is Deepak Prasad, the director of product management for Dell Technologies. Cloud deep. Uh, great to see you. >>Hello, Jeff. Nice to meet you as well. >>You too. So let's let's back up, like, 10,000 square feet, cause you know, Cloud came in with a big giant rage. I guess it's been a while now with AWS and Public Cloud. And people are putting their depth tests on there. And, you know, we've seen this explosion of public cloud, and then we have hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And then, you know, basically people figured out that not everything can go to a public cloud. A lot of stuff. Shouldn't some stuffs gonna stay in data centers? for all different reasons, >>but >>basically it's horses for courses. So we're a little ways into this. How are you guys, Adele, really thinking about Cloud and helping your customers think about what cloud is beyond, you know, kind of the hype. >>Well, that's a great question, Jeff. At Dell, we think of Cloud really as an operating model and as an operating experience rather than a destination. So it's interesting that you bring up Public Cloud and Private Cloud, but we take a step back and think of what does that experience really represent? So if you think off, uh, you know what defines that cloud operating model? It's, ah, democratization of technology. Access off resource is through a p. I s through self service portals ability to pay as you go in a very simplified commerce experience and the agility of cloud. You know, the promise off instant availability of infinite scalability. Now, if if you look at you know the landscape around this until now, that has only been delivered in a consistent way by public cloud vendors, which leads people to believe that really cloud is the destination, not an operating model. But we think that we are capable of bringing those experiences those tenets off the cloud operating model to the on premises experience and really taking location out of the conversation. So this really allows our customers to focus mawr on their workloads than visions. They want to drive, and then they can fit there, uh, requirements their application requirements to the location where those resource is our regardless of having toe worry about it. This is public or private. They will get the same operating experience. They will get the same scalability, the same simplified commerce, the same access Thio resource is >>right. Well, let's talk about some of some of those things because, as you said, there's a lot of behaviors that are involved in cloud and cloud operating. You know, one of the behaviors that I think gave the public cloud an early leg up was just simply provisioning, right? Simply, if somebody needs some capacity, they need some horsepower to get interesting. It would be tested in the early days. No, they didn't have to provision. They didn't have to put in an order with I t and wait for so long to get a box assigned to them or purchased or whatever, right? They just swipe the credit card and went, How have you kind of help People have that kind of ease of use ease of, uh, he's of spin up piece of creation on what the right verb is because I think that's a really core piece of what enabled early cloud adoption. >>No, absolutely, you're spot on. And that was a big part of it that if somebody needed resource is instead of waiting for weeks and months, they could go on and and sign up for those resource and get almost instantaneous access. And we believe that what we're doing in this area is really transforming the business. Today. We can deliver resource is to customers in their data center in 14 days and really are aggressively looking to cut that down further. So what this really means is not just shipping Resource is in 14 days, but actually delivering a cloud experience in the customer's data center or of cola location, whatever, you know, location of their choice in 14 days and making that available to the customers, not just through the traditional procurement process. But we're actually very proud to announce the cloud Council, the Dell Technologies Cloud Council, through which customers can, in a self service way, order those ordered those resource is and have it show up and be operational in their environment in 14 days. So we're really bringing that speed of cloud to the on premise experience, >>right? So how how does it actually work? Do you pre? Do you pre ship some amount of capacity beyond what you believe is currently needed just to kind of forward que you will, if you will capacity. How does it work from from both the implementation strategy in terms of the actual compute and storage capacity, as well as on kind of the purchasing peace? Because those air to kind of very >>different work flows? No, that's a That's a great question. So for us, our strength are really in supply chain management that allows us to build capabilities across the world in areas from where we can ship the customers almost on the on demand basis. So as soon as we get in order that the customer needs a probably probably cloud deployment in a certain location, were able to mobilize those resource is from those locations and have it instance she hated in customers environ. So it's really built a strength off over the years off optimizing supply chain, if you will, and just bring taking that to the next level off. >>Okay, so we don't, >>uh environment we said. Yeah, >>no problem. I was gonna say the another great characteristics of cloud right is is spinning up, which we hear about all the time versus spinning down and write. The easiest example is always use. If you're running, you know, some promotion. If your pizza hut you're running a promotion for the Super Bowl, obviously, right? Your demand for that thing is gonna be huge. You want to spin up to be able to take advantage of all the people cash in their coupon, and then when the Super Bowls over, >>you >>want to spend those resource is down because you're not going to necessarily need that capacity. How do you guys accomplish that type of flexibility in your solution? >>So in our subscription model, we have different ways to address customer environment. So we allow customers to start very small and then and then grow the subscription as the requirements growth and the key thing of our subscription, which is really unique, is the ability to quote Terminate. So, for example, if if a customer started off on the three year subscription with the, uh resource is for, say, 100 virtual machines and somewhere along the way they needed to add resource is for 50 more virtual machines, so they will pay for the 150 virtual machines. But that extra 50 virtual machines does not create an orphan or a child subscription. At the end of three years, everything terminates together, so it really gives them flexibility with, you know, ability to start small and not have to worry about vendor lock in. And now we started off with sort of a reserved instance type off subscription model. But we're definitely bringing usage based models as well, which allows more, even more flexibility with respect to speeding up and speeding down. Right. >>And then what are some of the real specific reasons that people go for this type of solution versus a public cloud where some of the rial inherent advantages of doing this within my own infrastructure, my own data center, my own, you know, kind of virtual four walls, if you will. >>Yeah, you know, we strongly believe that the decision should really be guided by workload requirements. There's certain workloads that work really well in on premises environment. For example, you could take virtual desktop environments V. D. I. That works really well from a performance standpoint in In on premise, environment versus a public cloud environment. Similarly, there are other workloads were not public cloud deniers that that are best suited for public cloud. But it's really it should be something that's that comes from understanding your application. Understanding the leighton see requirements, understanding the data requirements for those applications. You know, what are your egress? Uh, issues. Or, you know, uh, the profile off the workload that you're trying to implement That should really be the driving force in where the workload this place >>and then, uh, tell us a little bit about the partnership with VM Ware because that's a huge asset that you have, you know, now you know, basically side by side and you can leverage the technology as well as a lot of the assets that are envy. And where how does that change? The way you guys have taken the Dell Cloud platform to market >>it really is a a differentiating factor for us. From a technology standpoint, it allows us to bring the best of both worlds best off off the hardware infrastructure as well as the best off the cloud. Stack the cloud software infrastructure together in one cohesive and and well developed package. So, uh, the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform from a technology standpoint is implemented with our VX rail appliances, which is a hyper converge infrastructure as well as VM ware clad foundation from a software standpoint. Now the code developed and jointly engineered capabilities allow for unique, unique feature off. Remember Cloud Foundation, where it can do lifecycle management off the entire stack, both the hardware and the software from a single interface. So it understands Vieques rails and understands the different form where levels and the X, where manager software versions etcetera. And then it would automatically select what is the best and well tested and supported software bundle that could be deployed without causing, you know, typical issues with version mismatches and trying to chase down different hardware compatibility, matrices, etcetera. All of those are eliminated, so it's a integrated lifecycle management experience. That's great. E. I'm sorry I have >>a little bit, a little bit of a lot of here, so I I apologize. >>I >>was just gonna say you've been at this for a while. Your product, you know, product management. So you're really thinking about speeds and feeds and you're thinking about roadmap and futures? I wonder if you can share your perspective on this evolution from kind of this race of to pure public cloud to this. This big discussion I think we had packed Elson. You're talking about a hybrid cloud back at being where 2013. So then, you know kind of this hybrid cloud and multi cloud and really kind of this maturation of this space as we as we've progressed for Ah, while now probably 10 years. >>Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, majority of our customers live in a multi cloud world. They have resource is that they consumed from one or more multi hyper sorry, uh, public cloud vendors and they have one or more on premise vendors as well, For their resource is and managing that complex environment across multiple providers with different skill set different tools, different sls. While it sounds really interesting to, you know, have workload drive your your deployment and place the workloads where they're best suited. It does prevent. It does present a challenge off managing a complex and and getting even more complex by the day, multi cloud environment. And that's where we think we have an advantage. Uh, based on some of the work that we're doing with the Dell Technologies Cloud console to bring a true multi cloud experience to our customers. Not one of the benefits of not being a, you know, a public cloud provider is that we are agnostic toe. All public cloud providers were fully accepting that certain workloads need to live in those environments. And through our cloud council, we will make it easy for customers to manage not only their on premises, assets and on premises. Cloud resource is, but also cloud resource is that reside in multiple public cloud vendors? >>That's good. Yeah, because it helps, right, because they've got stuff everywhere. It's like that, you know, there is no del technology, right? There's a lot of there's a lot of people that work there. There's a lot of project. There's a lot of, you know, kind of pieces to that puzzle. I wonder too. If you could share your perspective on kind of application modernization, right, That's always another big, you know, kind of topic. You should You should you take those old legacy APS. And could you should you try to rebuild them in, um, or cloud native way using containers and and all this flexibility and deploy them or, you know, which one. Should you just leave alone right there, running fine. They've been running fine for a while. They've got some basic core functionality that may be do or don't need toe to kind of modernize if you will. And maybe those resources should be spent on building in a new applications and new kind of areas of competitive differentiation. When you're working with their clients, how do you tell them to think about at modernization? >>Yeah, we looked at it from a business requirement standpoint. Off how what end goals. A customer trying to achieve through that application. And in some cases, you know, on you cover the spectrum, right there. Some cases modernization just means swapping out the hardware and putting it, putting that application on a more modern, more powerful hardware. At the other end, it z you know, going toe assassin model off, you know, everything available through through a cloud application. And in between those two extremities, there's, you know, virtualization that is re factoring this continual ization and micro services based implementation. But it comes down to understanding why that application is meant to deliver for who and what business requirements and business objectives that fulfills. That's how we use as a guiding principle on how to position application modernization to customers. >>All right, that's super helpful, because I'm sure that's a big topic. And, you know, there's probably certain APS that you just should not. You just shouldn't touch. You should probably just even Malone. They're running just fine. Let them do their thing. All >>right, fine. I'm sorry. No. Is this interesting? I was a conversation with the customer just earlier today where they have a portion off their infrastructure of some applications that they absolutely wanted to leave alone and and just change out the underlying hardware. But there are other applications where they really want to adopt, continue ization and re factor those out, rewrite those applications so that they can have more scalability and more flexibility around that. So it really is is determined by the needs. Yeah. >>Um so last question, del Tech world this year was a digital experience, like all the other shows that we've seen here in 2020 just But it's a huge event, right? A big, big show, and we're excited to be back to cover it again. But I'm curious if there's some special announcements within such a big show. Sometimes things get lost a little bit here in there, but any special announcements You want to make sure that get highlighted that people may have missed within this kind of see if content over the last several days >>22 major things that that I'm very excited to share with you One is Dell Technologies Cloud platform. We actually discussing and talking about Dell Technologies cloud platform in the concept off instant capacity blocks. So in the past, we talked about it with respect to notes. Uh, you know, adult technology cloud platform. You can have, you know, so many notes in it to power your your on premises. Cloud resource is but really have changed the conversation and look into how cloud customers air consuming those resource is and we really want to drive focus to that and introduced the concept of instance Capacity blocks instances are think of it as a workload profile, you know, CPU and memory put together and then, uh, in different combinations in a pre defined way to address different workload needs. So this really changes the conversation for our customers that they don't have to worry about designing or or speaking out the hardware platforms, but really understand how many resource is they need, how many, how much you know, processing power, how much memory, how much stories they need and they define their requirements was in those terms, and we will deliver those instance capacity blocks to them in their data centers. So behind the scenes is built by best in class. Uh, you know, hardware from Vieques rails and best in class software from being where, but it's really delivered in terms off instant capacity blocks. The second interesting thing that I wanna share with you and I profession a few times is Dell Technologies Cloud console. We're building this single pane of glass to manage our customers entire journey from on premises to multi cloud hybrid cloud with consistency off. How you can discover services how you can order services and how you can grow your the manager footprint. So those are a couple things from adult technology standpoint that we're really excited to share with people. >>Well, congratulations. I know you've been busting your tail for for quite a while on these types of projects, and it's nice to be able to finally release him out to the world. >>Well, it's just my pleasure. Alright. Thank you very much. >>Well, thank you for stopping by again. Congratulations. And will continue the ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The digital experience. I'm Jeff Frick. He's to Park Prasad. You're watching the Cube. See you next time. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin welcoming back to the Cuba One of our distinguished alumni, Travis V. Hild s VP of product management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >>Hey, how's it going, Lisa? >>Not bad. Nice to connect a few, virtually. Of course, this year everything is so different. You've already done Virtual Cube. So welcome back our very socially distance program. 3rd 1 13 market. Alright. Eso back in May, you were on the Cube talking about the launch of power store. Really? What Dell Technologies was doing thio, um, kind of converged, Formerly overlapping technologies. My acquisitions compelling extreme io give us an update last few months of what's going on with power store customer adoption, mo mentum stuff like that. >>Yeah, you know, it's it's been, um, almost six months that we've launched the product and it's been a nun. Believable experience. Um, you know, let let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, you know, we had Thio launch power store into a very different world than we had anticipated. Um, the global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everybody, you know, and everything around the world. You know, our first priority, Adele, is the health and safety of our customers of our team members of our partners. And, you know, it was a very interesting experience in that this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad, um, you know, backdrop against which we had tow launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic mo mentum. Since launch, we've shipped worldwide over 40. We've we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. Um, but, you know, I think to really talk about mo mentum and what's going on, it's it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Um, start maybe with a health care example. Healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt power stories, a multimillion dollar deal and what they were trying to do Waas modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. Um, there was a lot of technical debt and they wanted toe modernize things, make things more autonomous and at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into, uh, you know, still, they had data centers across across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites and with power store because of the efficiency because of the D duplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual optics they had related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year. By going to PowerMax. I'm sorry by going to PowerStore, Um, so that that was a big one. Another, another good example was in a me, a high tech customer. They adopted power store because of power stores, ability to scale performance and capacity independently and in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications. And the other is, uh, kind of ah, variable. And you know and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this this nearly million dollar deal with them and then and then one other one that that's one of my favorites. Uh um entertainment company in the A P J region. Obviously, with with all of us staying home, I can speak for my my kids that air, you know, remote learning right over my shoulder. There is a lot more video games going on, and so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing power store. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from, uh, multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decrease cost a storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development and decreased cost. So those were just a couple of the examples that we have for power store. We were seeing great adoption, great traction and really, uh, customers and partners are are really excited about what we brought to market. >>He talked about, you know, some of the things that are essential that even back in May, when power Start was launched, no one would have thought here in October 2020. We'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company in a p j being essential as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption. For example, the health care organization that you talked about North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization Thio upgrade or migrate to power store so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site if it was on Prem? Because, of course, all the challenges there, right? >>Yeah, you know it, za Really good question on. We have to Do you know, this was a brand new product for us And in order to enable proof of concepts in order in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product is taken an enormous amount of coordination, an enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so you know, it's actually taken a little bit more time than, you know, had we've been ableto fly people around the world to do it. But we've gotten very proficient at organizing, with the customer being ableto host. The demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely be able to do our. You know, our customer briefing is remotely eso. It is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >>So Power Start was big. In the beginning, there was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history, the >>largest launch that we never did that we've ever done, >>launching it during a pandemic, unpredictable, and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through when you're talking to customers. What are some of the key differentiators that really make power store unique? >>Yeah, you know, I like to start at at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about power store because, um, with storage products, the architecture er is the thing that all future features and capabilities air built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of power store, it was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today in the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that the NBN me or NBN me or ECM it was micro services based so that, you know, it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And, uh, it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. You know, when we first launched this this array and this this fact is true. Today we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today. That was seven times more performance and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So that that core performance is kind of point number one point number two Data reduction data reduction is the new normal. And with power store, we have a guaranteed Fourtou one data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of of midrange storage devices. That and in their particular environment, they saw 4.6 to 1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4 to 1. So being, you know, very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, er and I talked about it in the in the high tech company that I mentioned the European high tech company, the ability to scale, performance and capacity independently in our scale. Out design is another differentiator. Um, for folks that have been around storage arrays a long time traditional storage array. You know, you you would add capacity sometimes when you need it performance or you that performance. Sometimes when you need to capacity by being ableto separate. Those two things customers can really get optimized in their environment for what they're trying toe. What their needs are. They need more performance, they can have more performance, they need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural, um, differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners and then above and beyond that we brought some industry Onley capability to market. Um, in that we are the Onley purpose built storage appliance with a built in vm ware s X i hyper visor. So what this allows customers to do is run bm where based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage. That's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables the whole new host of use cases where customers can, um, changed the way that they're optimized in the core. And also, there's a lot of good edge, uh, deployments that this that this new capability can help enable. So it z, you know, being architecturally advanced in performance efficiency and scale up and scale out and bringing industry Onley capabilities in our integration, especially with VM, where to market that have really resonated with our customers. >>How about some of those new use cases that the VM ware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate, with massively that scattered workforce that you know, some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding with device proliferation. What >>are some >>of the new use cases That that what Power Mac power store can deliver, uniquely as you said is gonna be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >>Yeah, you know, I think that there there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core. But I think the new, uh, you know, either remote, uh, site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less less. And so if you can have hardware that is ableto, you know, provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability. Those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device which leads toe, you know, easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having toe deploy multiple multiple devices. >>So you're great with the stats you show you you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with power store all the testing, what you're seeing actually, in customer, uh, environments, which is fantastic when you're talking with analysts looking at what Dell Technologies has done when it's in to develop our store. And like I said, you know, merging technologies from compelling and extreme Iot, uh, etcetera, our analysts looking at this is maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing. >>Uh, yeah. You know, there was was some press that was written when we announced that that that the release of Power Store established a new benchmark of what was expected from a million very storage array, which is, you know, it was something that that was really fulfilling, especially all after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about that that and the innovation that we have put into it over the course of a multi multi year journey. And so you know what? We're what we're seeing, you know, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have, um, taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio, that we're able to direct our R and D investments into a single platform to bring mawr and more capability to that platform over time, and that message is resonating very strongly. >>So wrapping things up here, Power Store is in its first five or six months. And during that time, you know, crazy things have happened in the world were in a state still disarray, if you will, no pun intended what is next for the second half of power stores? First year. How is Dele? Technology is going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now into thriving so that they could be the winners of tomorrow. >>Yeah. You know, I think the second half of this year, the first half of this year was was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners, trained up on it, getting those key early wins, you know, established establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of mawr customers. Getting into that that, you know, enabling our partners to, you know, amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're gonna You're gonna see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of mawr adoption mawr mo mentum and mawr success on power store. Uh, and for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture er comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture, er is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come when new media comes when new, uh, you know, interfaces or interconnect technologies come when we, uh, you know, invest in even tighter integration with VM where, like at VM World? Just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VM Ware on a new interconnect technology nbn me over TCP that core architectures so flexible that it can adopt, you know, with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, adopted and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market of alls. >>And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well, Travis. Thank you. So much for sharing with us. The moments, um, for the first half of power stores, first year and what we can look to see. And it's not just second half that going forward. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Travis, Be Hill. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 The Digital Experience.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to the CUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guys from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glynn, the senior director for product management for PowerMax Martin good morning. >> Good morning. >> Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the senior director of product management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you thanks for having us Lisa. >> So our virtual cube this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and present analysts digitally, which is great. So Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex, this was the kind of the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years formerly the VXFlex excuse me, from Scale IO, what's new with PowerFlex? >> Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to at IO, kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone that software defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex, just to kind of level set, it's really a software defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise while still delivering exemplary really great performance and scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end to end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. >> And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me Matthew, from a customer perspective since you've announced Asynchronous replication snapshots, what's the customer adoption, customer feedback been like? >> Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong, you know, we're focusing on high end large enterprise customers working towards, bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers, so it'll make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. >> All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax. And then also how it kind of fits into the whole power portfolio. >> Sure, yeah, so thanks Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course, the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio, PowerMax is the sort of flagship sort of derived product that we've had now for, you know, a few decades really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think that pace of innovation over the last year just like Matt describing the PowerFlex side has been a really phenomenal. Just about a year ago he came out with a storage class memory, we did fiber channel Endymion over fiber channel, and more recently brought in a few really interesting new technologies, like support for replication, with VVols, cloud mobility, and now, efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their you know, sort of traditional three tier SAN infrastructure is really just unmatched. >> So Matt talk to me about the last six seven months, where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight. Enterprises in every industry had to suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? >> Yeah, well, like everybody we were a little worried at the outset, you know lot of uncertainty about how things would play out and the response from our customers has been amazing. You know, they've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing really incredible, and it's been great to partner with our customers that help them continue to deliver the services that they need you know, in this new model. So that part's been, been really wonderful, and as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of so, you know, for example the new cloud mobility functionality that's letting them take information directly off of their mission, critical sort of bedrock sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store. And that could be a local private object store, it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's you know, it's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's going to help them work through this you know, new normal, we're all participating in. >> Yeah, we want to help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is going to remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all. 50% percent of the workforce is going to remain at home so really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority I know for Dell Technologies we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over to you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective, so we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. >> Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout and, you know, they were trying to run things, they were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough, it wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core, allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, Yeah, oh, go ahead sorry. >> That's okay go ahead. >> I was going to say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability, and then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex there's two or three key areas that we try to go after, if you, one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a dis-aggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like Honda, where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So that really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning the data center with transformation with software defined scale all block storage. So think about deploying Powerflex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, right along really cool new applications like the ELK Stack or Mongo DB or other things, because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. >> I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is no, that's good. >> No, I can tell you're passionate about it. >> I love it, yeah. >> And also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbs I check in, and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check in so that factor alone since us consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin let's go over to you, PowerMax, workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. >> Yeah Aatually, if I could I'll start with sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there, you know, just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex you know, were in environments that made sense for them. We had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole, you know pandemic. So we had some really big customers just so okay, now we have sort of line of sight and, you know, across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is you know, the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already. But they really pull forward, you know, huge numbers of systems and business, and be able to support you know, where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments in, you know, it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So, that was, I think a big part of the first half of the year, that sort of new, you know, new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for VVols remote replication. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level, much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our, our customers can do more granular operations for their end users, they can simplify the whole process, and now they can do it on top of our remote replication solution, which, you know going on 20 plus years now, it's really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now, to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use you know, new things like, you know the way VVols works with our cyber site recovery manager, to let them automate you know, the testing, I feel always in the actual fail over. There's an interesting example of how I think our customers are going to take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. >> You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services. And that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products, and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base. And that ability to leverage technology, to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, ding into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers, why PowerFlex is the ideal solution for them? >> That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So I think, you know, as part of being a product guy it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware, your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But, you know, when I think about my product I think first and foremost, around performance and scale right? You know, several million, IO'S a sub-millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale literally is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that we, you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy to use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments. You can have bare metal deployment. So if you want to run this with Linux and use software defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software defined infrastructure on the HCI side you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node you add compute power and storage power. With power flex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off, so a customer could actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only want to buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three tier model. So those are, I think are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. >> Matthew, sticking with you, are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? >> Yeah, I think, you know it's interesting 'cause those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to, you talked about compliance, you talk about scale and then you talk about management. So we said some really interesting requirements because of scale so large, for example, in our last release we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions they might be doing system at a time, doing updates taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do update these for an entire rack in one shot. Dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database back end, or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. >> It seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to, to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partner's perspective over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies, with the power portfolio, how have your partners embraced the simplification? >> So, you know, I think that the overall, this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for power max in particular, you know, I think it let them anchor on, you know the flagship product of the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and, you know, gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with, you know, our end customers and, you know, in what ways that the products would benefit their customers the most. So, you know, as Matt described on the PowerFlex side, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately, you know enabling them to do whatever they need to do, so across all the different data services and we got to talk ready about some of the new ones you know, but we also have a lot that we've you know, refined over the years and, you know making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope what everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So, you know, I think, you know maybe one of the thing, you know, worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and, you know, all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is, you know, security, you know, so we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And, you know I think ultimately that's going to help them sleep better at night and also, you know help them avoid some of the things that you've seen crop up now. Now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs you know, whether it's flexibility, performance reliability, but all these new new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible. >> That's exactly what they want to be, successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa this was fun. Alright from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cubes coverage, Dell Technologies World at 2020, the digital experience. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The digital coverage Find Lisa Martin And then we started to be talking with one of Dell Technologies customers. Earth Camp. Joining Me is built sharp, the senior VP of product development and strategy from Earth Camp Phil, Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you so much. >>So talk to me a little bit. About what Earth Cam does this very interesting Web can technology? You guys have tens of thousands of cameras and sensors all over the globe give her audience and understanding of what you guys are all about. >>Sure thing. The world's leading provider of Webcam technologies and mentioned content services were leaders and live streaming time lapse imaging primary focus in the vertical construction. So a lot of these, the most ambitious, largest construction projects around the world, you see, these amazing time lapse movies were capturing all of that imagery. You know, basically, around the clock of these cameras are are sending all of that image content to us when we're generating these time lapse movies from it. >>You guys, you're headquartered in New Jersey and I was commenting before we went live about your great background. So you're actually getting to be on site today? >>Yes, Yes, that's where lives from our headquarters in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. >>Excellent. So in terms of the types of information that you're capturing. So I was looking at the website and see from a construction perspective or some of the big projects you guys have done the Hudson Yards, the Panama Canal expansion, the 9 11 Museum. But you talked about one of the biggest focus is that you have is in the construction industry in terms of what type of data you're capturing from all of these thousands of edge devices give us a little bit of insight into how much data you're capturing high per day, how it gets from the edge, presumably back to your court data center for editing. >>Sure, and it's not just construction were also in travel, hospitality, tourism, security, architectural engineering, basically, any any industry that that need high resolution visualization of their their projects or their their performance or of their, you know, product flow. So it's it's high resolution documentation is basically our business. There are billions of files in the isil on system right now. We are ingesting millions of images a month. We are also creating very high resolution panoramic imagery where we're taking hundreds and sometimes multiple hundreds of images, very high resolution images and stitching these together to make panoramas that air up to 30 giga pixel, sometimes typically around 1 to 2 giga pixel. But that composite imagery Eyes represents millions of images per per month coming into the storage system and then being, uh, stitched together to those those composites >>the millions of images coming in every month. You mentioned Isil on talk to me a little bit about before you were working with Delhi, EMC and Power Scale. How are you managing this massive volume of data? >>Sure we had. We've used a number of other enterprise storage systems. It was really nothing was as easy to manage Azazel on really is there was there was a lot of a lot of problems with overhead, the amount of time necessary from a systems administrator resource standpoint, you to manage that, uh, and and it's interesting with the amount of data that we handle. This is being billions of relatively small files there there, you know, half a megabyte to a couple of megabytes each. It's an interesting data profile, which, which isil on really is well suited for. >>So if we think about some of the massive changes that we've all been through the last in 2020 what are some of the changes that that Earth Kemp has seen with respect to the needs for organizations? Or you mentioned other industries, like travel hospitality? Since none of us could get to these great travel destinations, Have you seen a big drive up in the demand and the need to process data more data faster? >>Yeah, that's an injury interesting point with with the Pandemic. Obviously we had to pivot and move a lot of people toe working from home, which we were able to do pretty quickly. But there's also an interesting opportunity that arose from this, where so many of our customers and other people also have to do the same. And there is an increased demand for our our technology so people can remotely collaborate. They can. They can work at a distance. They can stay at home and see what's going on in these projects sites. So we really so kind of an uptick in the in the need for our products and services. And we've also created Cem basically virtual travel applications. We have an application on the Amazon Fire TV, which is the number one app in the travel platform of people can kind of virtually travel when they can't really get out there. So it's, uh, we've been doing kind of giving back Thio to people that are having having some issues with being able to travel around. We've done the fireworks of the Washington Mall around the Statue of Liberty for the July 4th, and this year will be Webcasting and New Year's in Times Square for our 25th year, actually. So again, helping people travel virtually and be, uh, maintain can be collectivity with with each other and with their projects, >>which is so essential during these times, where for the last 67 months everyone is trying to get a sense of community, and most of us just have the Internet. So I also heard you guys were available on Apple TV, someone to fire that up later and maybe virtually travel. Um, but tell me a little bit about how working in conjunction with Delta Technologies and Power Cell How is that enabled you to manage this massive volume change you've experienced this year? Because, as you said, it's also about facilitating collaboration, which is largely online these days. >>Yeah, I mean, the the great things they're working with Dell has been just our confidence in this infrastructure. Like I said, the other systems we worked with in the past we've always found ourselves kind of second guessing. Obviously, resolutions are increasing. The camera performance is increasing. Streaming video is everything is is constantly getting bigger and better, faster. Maurits And we're always innovating. We found ourselves on previous storage platforms having to really kind of go back and look at the second guess we're at with it With with this, this did L infrastructure. That's been it's been fantastic. We don't really have to think about that as much. We just continue innovating everything scales as we needed to dio. It's it's much easier to work with, >>so you've got power scale at your core data center in New Jersey. Tell me a little bit about how data gets from thes tens of thousands of devices at the edge, back to your editors for editing and how power scale facilitates faster editing, for example. >>Basically, you imagine every one of these cameras on It's not just camera. We have mobile applications. We have fixed position of robotic cameras. There's all these different data acquisition systems were integrating with weather sensors and different types of telemetry. All of that data is coming back to us over the Internet, so these are all endpoints in our network. Eso that's that's constantly being ingested into our network and say WTO. I salon the big the big thing that's really been a timesaver Working with the video editors is, instead of having to take that content, move it into an editing environment where we have we have a whole team of award winning video editors. Creating these time lapse is we don't need to keep moving that around. We're working natively on Iselin clusters. They're doing their editing, their subsequent edits. Anytime we have to update or change these movies as a project evolves, that's all it happened right there on that live environment on the retention. Is there if we have to go back later on all of our customers, data is really kept within that 11 area. It's consolidated, its secure. >>I was looking at the Del Tech website. There's a case study that you guys did earth campaign with Deltek saying that the video processing time has been reduced 20%. So that's a pretty significant increase. I could imagine what the volumes changing so much now but on Li not only is huge for your business, but to the demands that your customers have as well, depending on where there's demands are coming from >>absolutely and and just being able to do that a lot faster and be more nimble allows us to scale. We've added actually against speaking on this pandemic, we've actually added person who we've been hiring people. A lot of those people are working remotely, as as we've stated before on it's just with the increase in business. We have to continue to keep building on that on this storage environments been been great. >>Tell me about what you guys really kind of think about with respect to power scale in terms of data management, not storage management and what that difference means to your business. >>Well, again, I mean number number one was was really eliminating the amount of resource is amount of time we have to spend managing it. We've almost eliminated any downtime of any of any kind. We have greater storage density, were able to have better visualization on how our data is being used, how it's being access so as thes as thes things, a revolving. We really have good visibility on how the how the storage system is being used in both our production and our and also in our backup environments. It's really, really easy for us Thio to make our business decisions as we innovate and change processes, having that continual visibility and really knowing where we stand. >>And you mentioned hiring folks during the pandemic, which is fantastic but also being able to do things much in a much more streamlined way with respect to managing all of this data. But I am curious in terms of of innovation and new product development. What have you been able to achieve because you've got more resource is presumably to focus on being more innovative rather than managing storage >>well again? It's were always really pushing the envelope of what the technology can do. As I mentioned before, we're getting things into, you know, 20 and 30 Giga pixel. You know, people are talking about megapixel images were stitching hundreds of these together. We've we're just really changing the way imagery is used, uh, both in the time lapse and also just in archival process. Ah, lot of these things we've done with the interior. You know, we have this virtual reality product where you can you can walk through and see in the 3 60 bubble. We're taking that imagery, and we're combining it with with these been models who are actually taking the three D models of the construction site and combining it with the imagery. And we can start doing things to visualize progress and different things that are happening on the site. Look for clashes or things that aren't built like they're supposed to be built, things that maybe aren't done on the proper schedule or things that are maybe ahead of schedule, doing a lot of things to save people, time and money on these construction sites. We've also introduced a I machine learning applications into directly into the workflow in this in the storage environment. So we're detecting equipment and people and activities in the site where a lot of that would have been difficult with our previous infrastructure, it really is seamless and working with YSL on now. >>Imagine, by being able to infuse AI and machine learning, you're able to get insight faster to be ableto either respond faster to those construction customers, for example, or alert them. If perhaps something isn't going according to plan. >>A lot of it's about schedule. It's about saving money about saving time and again, with not as many people traveling to the sites, they really just have have constant visualization of what's going on. Day to day, we're detecting things like different types of construction equipment and things that are happening on the side. We're partnering with people that are doing safety analytics and things of that nature. So these these are all things that are very important to construction sites. >>What are some of the things as we are rounding out the calendar year 2020? What are some of the things that you're excited about going forward in 2021? That Earth cam is going to be able to get into and to deliver >>it, just MAWR and more people really, finally seeing the value. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years, and it's just it's it's It's amazing how we're constantly seeing new applications and more people understanding how valuable these visual tools are. That's just a fantastic thing for us because we're really trying to create better lives through visual information. We're really helping people with things they can do with this imagery. That's what we're all about that's really exciting to us in a very challenging environment right now is that people are are recognizing the need for this technology and really starting to put it on a lot more projects. >>Well, it's You can kind of consider an essential service, whether or not it's a construction company that needs to manage and oversee their projects, making sure they're on budget on schedule, as you said, Or maybe even just the essential nous of helping folks from any country in the world connect with a favorite favorite travel location or sending the right to help. From an emotional perspective, I think the essential nous of what you guys are delivering is probably even more impactful now, don't you think? >>Absolutely and again about connecting people and when they're at home. And recently we we webcast the president's speech from the Flight 93 9 11 observation from the memorial. There was something where the only the immediate families were allowed to travel there. We webcast that so people could see that around the world we have documented again some of the biggest construction projects out there. The new rate years greater stadium was one of the recent ones, uh, is delivering this kind of flagship content. Wall Street Journal is to use some of our content recently to really show the things that have happened during the pandemic in Times Square's. We have these cameras around the world. So again, it's really bringing awareness of letting people virtually travel and share and really remain connected during this this challenging time on and again, we're seeing a really increase demand in the traffic in those areas as well. >>I can imagine some of these things that you're doing that you're achieving now are going to become permanent, not necessarily artifacts of Cove in 19 as you now have the opportunity to reach so many more people and probably the opportunity to help industries that might not have seen the value off this type of video to be able to reach consumers that they probably could never reach before. >>Yeah, I think the whole nature of business and communication and travel on everything is really going to be changed from this point forward. It's really people are looking at things very, very differently and again, seeing the technology really can help with so many different areas that, uh, that it's just it's gonna be a different kind of landscape out there we feel on that's really, you know, continuing to be seen on the uptick in our business and how many people are adopting this technology. We're developing a lot more. Partnerships with other companies were expanding into new industries on again. You know, we're confident that the current platform is going to keep up with us and help us, you know, really scale and evolved as thes needs air growing. >>It sounds to me like you have the foundation with Dell Technologies with power scale to be able to facilitate the massive growth that you're saying and the skill in the future like you've got that foundation. You're ready to go? >>Yeah, we've been We've been We've been using the system for five years already. We've already added capacity. We can add capacity on the fly, Really haven't hit any limits. And what we can do, It's It's almost infinitely scalable, highly redundant. Gives everyone a real sense of security on our side. And, you know, we could just keep innovating, which is what we do without hitting any any technological limits with with our partnership. >>Excellent. Well, Bill, I'm gonna let you get back to innovating for Earth camp. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time today. >>Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure >>for Bill Sharp and Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Digital coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 the digital edition. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world on the Cube without our next guest. Tim Crawford, CEO, Strategic Advisor from a boa. Tim, welcome back to the Cube. It's great to talk to you. >>Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on the Cube today. >>A lot has changed since we last got to sit down with you in person. We think of the last Dell Technologies world is a year and a half ago. But we've seen dramatic changes in the enterprise the last 67 months. Talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing. >>Yeah. You know, Lisa, you couldn't put, um, or sustained way around what we've seen over the last 10 months or less. Even theater prices change for Monster Blue. You know, we've gone from having a pretty clear strategy of how we're going to move forward in the technology is we're gonna use to setting all that aside the strategies and plans that we had in the end of 2019 no longer apply the way we engage with customers, the way we run our business, the way who our customers are. The markets we go after all of that is now up for grabs. All of that has changed. And so, therefore, technology and the underpinnings of how we use data has to change accordingly. And so I think we'll talk a little more about that, too. >>I'd like to get your perspective on this acceleration of digital transformation that happened this year. We've seen that we've seen the companies that weren't ready. We've seen the companies that were pretty decently able to pivot quickly. What's your advice for those who are still struggling? Because here we are seven months in. One thing we know for sure is this uncertainty is going to continue for a while. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. The uncertainty is going to continue for a while. We don't know what the new normal is gonna look like. We don't know how our customers are going to engage with us in the future. And so all the more reason why we need to be thinking very differently about how we operate our companies and how we remain flexible, how we stay in touch with our customers and how that translates into the choices we make in terms of the partners and technologies data that we use. You know, one of the great things about the coronavirus that has come out. If you can say that there is a great thing that's come out of it is it's really accelerated the need to transform companies. And I'm talking about business transformation, not digital transformation. Digital transformation is a downstream component of business transformation. And so a lot of the hurdles that companies were having that I T organizations were having to move to the cloud toe leverage, data toe leverage, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ah, lot of those hurdles have since dropped by the wayside because companies are realizing if they don't start to adopt some of this new technology, it's available and has been available for some time. They will die, and it it really is that dramatic for companies. And so the Kobe 19 virus has really kind of thrown everything into into the muck, and we've had toe kind of sort things out, but at the same time, it's really given companies an opportunity to say we have. We have a single opportunity here to do something that we will probably never see again. What I mean by that is now we have the lowest level of risk that our company will will observe, probably over our career lifetimes. And what I mean by that is just imagine if you're a commercial airline, you have the lowest passenger loads right now, If >>you need >>to change core operational systems, now is the time to do it. Not when you're operating at Peak, and this is playing out right now across all of the different industries, and that's a huge opportunity. >>That's a great point. And you're right. There are opportunities. There are pluses that are coming out of this. If you think of the I love the opportunity that you just described it, there's the lowest risk right now for, say, an airline to be able to rapidly pivot. Of course, one of the things that you know what happened during that is the customers that consumers would. We react in many different ways. The customer experience is almost under on even higher resolution microscope. The last seven months talk to me about what some of the things you're seeing, how companies need to react to preserve customer relationships because brand is at stake. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, Brand is at stake. The livelihood of your company is at stake, and at the core of that is technology and data. So all we have to do to answer that question is really look in the mirror. Look at how we have changed. Look at how our buying habits have changed. Now that's more of a B two C relationship. But even in the B two b space, those relationships have changed demonstrably. And so we have to think about how our customers air needing to change and how their business is changing, and then how we can accommodate that. And so what that means is we have to tap into data whether it's on the customer experience side or the business operation side of it. We have to tap into that data and use it in a more meaningful way than we ever have in the past. We have to remain more flexible. We have toe leverage it in ways that that we can do things and change on a moments notice. And that's something that we generally haven't architected our organizations or or our technology architectures for, for that matter. But now is the time to do it, and we have to be in touch with our customers in order to do it so again comes back to data, comes back to technology and architectures. Flexibility is the key here. >>I think consumers are far more demanding in the last seven months just because we have this expectation set for the last few years that we could go on Amazon to get anything we want. Anytime we could go on Netflix and watch any movie from any number of years ago anytime we want. And so when this happened and people were so used thio that speed of delivery and things were delayed, I just started seeing much more uproar from the consumer. I thought, Man, we've been conditioned for so long, but one of things I'm curious about when you're talking to the C suite is budget shifting. I mean, we know companies, some of them those enterprises that are in good shape have d our plans. They have business continuity plans. Probably. Nobody had a pandemic plan. So how do you help advise these enterprises to shift budget rapidly enough to be able thio implement the technologies that can harness insights from that data to drive a stupid earlier differentiated customer experience? >>Yeah, so let's kind of break that a part of it and unpack it. So on the pandemic, planning companies did have pandemic planning. I mean, 15 years ago, when I was leading I t. At Stanford University, we had a pandemic response plan that went with R D. R and B C plans. I think that most folks, though, they they struggled through that D R and B C process, and they never get to the pandemic end of that spectrum. And that's a really hard problem to solve for but kind of getting back to how that customer has changed and how we can accommodate that. Changed your right. Budgets have changed, technology has changed, and so we have to think about how we do things differently. I think from a budgetary standpoint, one of the first things we saw is just extreme spending and productivity tools, right? More laptops, more screens, more webcams, Mawr lights. Who would have thought that I would have needed Ah, lighting system for my home, right? Maybe a laptop was enough. We have to think about how our processes air different. How do we push patches out to people's computers out at their home? You know, that may sound somewhat trivial, but the reality is it's really hard to do because you're dealing with all kinds of different bandwidth requirements. Andi. It's not just me in the house. I have my wife, who is an executive on on video all day. I've got two teenage kids when in high school, when a middle school there on video all day. So we're taxing these networks within people's homes as well, in ways that we never have. And so all of these pieces kind of come together and cause us to rethink how we allocate our budgets within the I T organization. So the first thing is there was a lot of productivity tools that were being purchased. There was a lot of preservation of cash that companies kind of went into. How do we start to control, spend and kind of pull back on the reins? But the smart ones started to look at the opportunities to accelerate their innovation programs. And those are the folks that are really doing well right now. How do I start to use this opportunity again, not trying to suggest that the code 19 or the coronavirus is a great thing for us. But how do we start toe leverage that in the best way possible, and take advantage of it in such a way that it could benefit us on the long run? And this is where innovation and accelerating some of those changes really comes into play. And as I mentioned things like cloud artificial intelligence machine learning, leveraging data to understand your customers more intimately, being flexible to change your company's your business operations, how you engage with your customers, you know, instead of just a website, maybe you need thio move Mawr to a focus on a mobile device or mobile application, or vice versa. All of those start to come into play, but at the heart of it is data and data is what ultimately will drive the decisions down the path. >>So you talked about the work from home thing, and I kept thinking of the proliferation of endpoint devices at the edge you're right. How many of us tried to get a webcam months ago and couldn't? Because suddenly that became a tool that was essential for folks to continue their operations and and maintain their productivity. How are enterprises, in your opinion this year addressing the edge and understanding how they need to be able to take advantage of that? But also understand where all those devices are, to your point, pushing out patches, ensuring that there's a secure environment? What's their view of the edge? >>Yeah, the the edges incredibly complicated, and it's important to differentiate a couple of pieces here. So when you talk about the productivity devices, whether it's the laptops, the Webcams, the lighting, all of those I p connected components that we interface with, that's one aspect. And you're right. I mean, I can remember I t leaders that were telling their staff. Goto every office supply store, every big box store by every laptop keyboard, mouse, webcam you can get your hands on. I don't care what brand it is. I don't care what specs are. Just do it because they didn't have access to those. Resource is for their entire employee base. And so That's one aspect. And that's a whole another, um, consideration as we start to think about cybersecurity, and now we're talking about non non traditional, um, platforms that are in the environment in the enterprise environment, versus your standard kind of image and standard product. But aside from that, we also have data coming from the edge, whether it's from sensors and video cameras and other types of devices that we have to bring into the mix, too. Right understanding that Tim Crawford has now entered into a store and that Tim Crawford has now left the store but hasn't purchased. But we know that Tim Crawford is a loyal customer based on his loyalty at how do we start to gauge that? Or how do we start to gauge the number of folks that are moving through a given area and especially in light of coronavirus? I mean, there there's some aspect that air coming up where companies are starting to look at. How do we measure the number of people that are in a given room and do that in an automated way, and maybe alert people to say, Hey, you know, is there a way you can stand out or reminds people gently, Um, you know, keep your distance, make sure you're wearing your mask, etcetera. There are a lot of ways that edge comes into play, but at the core of this is data. And so that's where it becomes really important to understand that the amount of data, not just the sources of data but the amount of data that we're gonna have to deal with and we're dealing with today at the edge is just incredible. And it's on Lee going to grow exponentially. And so it's important to understand that your customer engagement pieces are going to be a source of data as well as a consumer of data. Let's not forget that people with the edge they need to be able to consume data and not in a batch way, they need to be able to do it in real time, which then gets back to flexibility and speed and algorithms at the edge. But understanding all of that data at the edge, being able to analyze it, whether it's for business operations or customer engagement and then providing that through the continuum from edge to cloud is really, really critical. It's a very complicated problem to solve for, but every single enterprise across the industries is already heading down this path. >>You're right. It is an incredibly complex problem to solve. So here we are, virtually at Dell Technologies World 2020. Talk to me about Dell Technologies Landscape. How do you think it fits into addressing some of these challenges in the complexities that you just talked >>about? Yeah, you know, Dell has been on this path for a while. I mean, through the partnerships through the ecosystem that Don't has is well as their portfolio of hardware and software. I think Della's position really well to be able to address both the customer experience as well as the business operations. The key here is you have to think about edge to Klag. You have to think about data. You have to think about analytics and then, from a nightie perspective, how do you start toe layer in the management and the algorithms on top of that to be able to manage that landscape? Because that landscape is getting increasingly more complicated on I think Dell starting to come up with the software pieces that actually make the connection between back those points on the continuum, and that's a really important piece here for I t. Organizations to understand. I think, you know, with the new announcements around Apex, I think that will will shine really well for dealt. I think if you look at the partnerships and the ecosystem and the connections that they're making both with public cloud providers as well as with other partners in the ecosystem, I think that's, ah, positive place. But the place that I would actually watch most closely with Dell is what is that? Software Later, They already have a really good hardware platform to build on top of them that portfolio. What is that software layer that connects or create that connective tissue for them? And I think that's the big piece, and I think we're going to hear more of that. Here is Dell Technologies World. >>I'm also curious. I read your posts and and listen to podcasts on the difference between a traditional CEO and a transformational CEO. If I think is such an important thing to discuss because part of that is cultural right, it's it's got, too. It's not just about a company being able to transform It's got to be the person with the right mindset with that flexible, agile mindset. But your advice to businesses who are still pivoting or pivoting multiple times and trying to become not just a survivor but a winner of tomorrow. From a cultural perspective, >>you know, culture is the hardest thing to change. It really is. You know, the technology is easy. Relatively speaking. We can swap out one technology for another. It's relatively straightforward to dio, and it always has been, Um, the real challenge here is how do you create the underpinnings and the foundation for that culture? What I mean by that is changing, like within the I T organization, and it starts with the CEO, but then also kind of branches out into the rest of the I T organization to the most junior levels of the I T staff. What I mean by that is you have to look at how you become less text centric and more business centric. And so my post about the change in the differentiation from the traditional CEO to transformational CEO is just about that. It's about how do you start to make that shift where you start focusing on business first and that ultimately becomes our context regardless of what organization you're in. I t marketing HR engineering product support. It doesn't matter. You start with the business context and then you flow down from that. And so part of that move to being the transformational CEO or the transformational organization is really shifting to be more business focused. And using that is your North Star and then from it, you start to understand how the different technology pieces fit into place. And so, for example, a traditional CEO would typically focus on business operations. More of the back end pieces, right? The underlying technology, the back end systems. But the transformational CEO is going to be incredibly more customer focused. They're actually gonna be out with the customer they're going to be doing right alongs will probably not right now in the absence of Corona virus, but they're going to be engaging firsthand with customers, understanding firsthand what they're dealing with, understanding what the business challenges are that they're having and then being able to translate that into where does technology fit in? And where does technology not fit in kind of going back to what I was saying earlier around the importance of customer experience. And so that's really where this transformational bent comes from. Is shifting from just being back office focused to moving toward understanding that front office or that customer focus. And that's the rial differentiator for companies. Here is when you can start to think about how tech enology plays. That's central role in changing your business. That's gold. That's absolute gold. >>Gold, but hard, hard Thio Dig for that gold. One last question, Tim, You talked about a number of the opportunities that Cove in 19 is bringing. And I completely agree with you. Not that any of us loves being stuck at home and isolated in the same walls, but there are opportunities that are going to come. We're gonna learn things from that if we're open minded and and flexible and agile in our thinking. But other things that that you think we haven't heard about yet that you see as a kind of maybe some north stars to come. >>Yeah, there there are a couple things that I think we generally are missing, and I kind of touched on one of from earlier, which is how do you start, Thio, accelerate some of that innovation now. And so you know, I used the airplane example of you know you've got the lowest passenger loads. Now is the time to implement that innovative technology. Because if something does go wrong, if something does go wrong, the impact to your customers is relatively low. And quite frankly, a lot of folks Aer giving out hall passes to say, You know what we understand Coronaviruses. Hard for all of us. Something went sideways here. Fine, go fix it, go fix it and then come back to us. And so I think customers are definitely more apt to hand out that whole past now versus when, where it full capacity. And that kind of leads me to. The second piece that I think people are missing is that companies are organized and built around operating efficiently at 80% utilization or 100% utilization. What I mean by that is they tend not to make money until they get to that level of utilization. But yet in the coronavirus era, what if we had a company that was organized in such a way that it could be profitable at 25% utilization that would cause us to think very differently about how we use technology, how we're able to scale technology, how we leverage data were thinking in more meaningful ways about the customer. And so what that means is that it gives us the ability to scale our business up and down. God forbid, if we ever run into another situation like this ever again in our lifetimes. But if we ever hit another patch of negativity around economic growth, it allows a company to be able to scale down and back up as needed for their customers. And that's another piece. I don't think people are thinking about their thinking about the big picture they're thinking about. How do we build for growth? But what they're not thinking about is what if we need to scale this back, and I think a great example of where this touches in we're here. A Dell Technologies world is Look at the way that companies are starting to shift towards this as a service model, right? We're able to scale technology up use it is, we need it, give it back when we don't need it. And so when you start to move into that more flexible mode. I talked about flexibility in other ways earlier, but as you start to get into a different consumption boat, it gives you a lot of opportunity to do a lot of different things in a lot of different ways. And that's ultimately what companies need to be thinking about today. >>Sounds like it's going to be some of the big differentiators between the winners and the losers of tomorrow. Will Tim, Thank you for joining us on the Cube virtually from your home. It's not a Dell Technologies world on the Cube without talking to you, Tim. And I appreciate we all appreciate your time and the insight that you shared today. >>Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on the Cube. >>Our pleasure for Tim Crawford. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of del Tech World 2020. This is David Want, and I'm here with Sam. Grow Kat. Who's the senior vice president of product marketing? Adele Technology. Sam. Great to see you. Welcome. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, we're gonna talk generally about Cloud in the coming decade, but in really how the cloud models evolving. But I want to specifically ask them about the as a service news that Dell's making at DT W You know what those solutions look like? How they're gonna evolve. Maybe maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Is that sound good? >>Yeah, Sounds great. Let's dive right in. >>All right, let's do that. So, look, you've come from the world of disruptor. You know, when you joined Isil on that got acquired by M. C. And then Del So you've you've been on both sides of the competitive table and cloud is obviously a major force. Actually, you know, I'd say, the major disruptive force in our industry. So let's talk about how Dell's responding to the cloud trend generally. Then we'll get into the announcements. >>Yeah, certainly. And you're right. I've been on both sides of this, and there is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so, how customers are partners. We're really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the the value of moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen it happen over the last decade or so, and it's happening at a more frequent pace. And there's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. You know, kind of a new lifestyle, so to speak around as a service, because when you go to the cloud, that's the only way they roll is you get in as a service experience. Eso that really has started to come into the data centers organizations or moving specific workloads and applications to the cloud of Hey, how do I get that in a non premise experience? And I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic, and Kobe, 19 has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker room or gradually by moving some applications to the cloud. Because, frankly, on Prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they like to see. So we're seeing that macro trend accelerate. And, you know, I think we're in good shape to take advantage of that as we go forward. >>Well, that brings us to the hard news of what you're calling Project Apex year as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >>Yes. So Project Apex is one of our big announcements. And that's really where we're targeting how we're bringing together and unifying our product development or sales go to market, our marketing, go to market Everything coming together underneath Project Apex, which is our as a service and cloud like experience. Look, we know in that world where customers were constantly evaluating which applications stay on Prem, which applications and workloads should go to the cloud. I think the market has certainly voted clearly that it's gonna be both. It's gonna be a hybrid, multi cloud world, but what they absolutely or clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience, regardless of if their on primer off from. And that's where. Really, the traditional on premise solutions fall down because it's just too darn complex. Still, they've got many different tools managing many different applications that oversee their cloud operations, their various infrastructure, whether it's server or compute or networking. They all run different tools, so it's very, very complex. It also is very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast because they can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention toe by more you to think I got a get a sales rep in house to come in and, uh, extend your environment and grow your environment. And then, of course, the traditional method is very cap ex heavy. In a world where organizations air really trying thio preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility. Traditionally, um, are going forward that they'd like to see on that front. So what they want to see is a consistent operating experience for their on and off from, uh, environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage and report to grow and do commerce across that environment, regardless of its on or off friend. Uh, they want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on Prem, it's not gonna be a click of a button, but you should be able to buy and procure that with the click of a button and then very quickly, within less than a handful of days, that equipment should be stood up, deployed and running in their environment. And then, finally, it's got to deliver this more flexible finance model, whether it's leveraging flexible subscription models or optics friendly models. Customers were really looking for that more off X friendly approach, which we're gonna be providing with Project Apex so very, very excited about kind of the goals and the aspirations of Project Apex. We're going to see a lot of it come come to market early next year, but we're I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >>So when I was looking through the announcement in sort of squinting through it, the three things jumped out and you definitely hit on. Those. One is choice, but sometimes you don't wanna give customers too much choice, so it's gotta be simple, and it's got to be consistent. So It feels like you're putting this abstraction layer over your entire portfolio and trying to hit on those three items. Uh, which is somewhat of a balancing act. But is that right? >>Yeah. No, you're You're exactly right. The kind of the pillars of the project Apex value proposition, So to speak is simplicity, choice and consistency. So we've got to deliver that simple kind of end end journey view of their entire cloud and as his for his experience, that need span our entire portfolio. So whether it's servers or stores are networking or PCs or cloud, all of that needs to be integrated into essentially a large single Web interface that gives you visibility across all of that. And, of course, the ease of scale up and, frankly, scaled down. You should be able to do that in real time through the system, you know, choices a big, big factor for us. You know, we've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure anyway. They want clearly they consume consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure people customers on Lee pay for what they use So highly metered environment pay for pay as they go. Leverage subscriptions essentially give them that op X flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the rial key differentiator is that consistent operating experience. So whether you move workloads on or off, Prem, it's got to be in a single environment that doesn't require you to jump around between different application and management experiences. >>Right? So I gotta ask you the tough question. I want to hear your answer to it. I mean, we've seen the cloud model. Everybody knows it very well, But But why now? People going to say Okay, you're just responding to HP. What's what's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >>Yeah, so I think it really comes down Thio the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're gonna provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what we're what will really define ourselves against them in China, ourselves against them is that consistent operating experience we've got that opportunity to provide both an on prem edge and cloud experience that doesn't require them to move out of that operating experience to jump between different tools. So whether you're running a storage as a service environment, which will have in the first after next year, um, looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year is Well, you're gonna be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. It also be able to move workloads from on Prem and off Prem without breaking that consistent experience. I think that is probably the biggest differentiator we're going to have when you when you ladder that onto just the General Dell Technologies value of being able to meet and deliver our solutions anywhere in the world at any point of the data center at the edge or even cloud native. We've got the broadest portfolio to meet our customer needs wherever we need to go. >>So my understanding is the offering is designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio from applying solutions I s G etcetera, not VM where specifically But that Zraly, that whole Dell Technologies portfolio correct. >>Yeah. And look, over time we totally expectable transacted VM ware through this so way. Do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. Eso Yeah, it is across. You know, PCs. A service storage is a service infrastructure. As a service, our cloud offers all of our services traditional services, um that are helping to deliver this as a service experience. And even our traditional financial flexible consumption models will be included in this. Because again, we want to offer ultimate choice and flexibility. We're not gonna force our customers to go down any of these pads, but we want to do is present thes pads and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breath of the portfolio in the offers. Thio, Get them there. >>Okay, so it's it's really a journey. You mentioned storage as a service coming out first, and then Aziz. Well, if I understand it, the idea is that I'm gonna have visibility and control over my entire state on Prem Cloud edge. Kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the chute. But that's the vision. >>Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue thio iterating over time and bring mawr environments more applications, more cloud environments into this. But that is absolutely the vision of Project Apex is to deliver that fully integrated core edge cloud. Uh, partner experienced thio all of the environments, our customers to be running it. >>I wanna put my my customer had on my CFO CEO had Okay, What's the fine print? You know, one of the minimum bars to get in. What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are the some of those? Those nuances? >>Yeah. So you know both the storage is a service which will be our first offer of many in our portfolio and the cloud console, which will give you that single web interface to kind of manage report and kind of thrive in this as a service experience. All that will be released in the first half of the next year. So we're still frankly defining what that will look like. But we wanna make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments from small business, the media business to the biggest enterprises out there globally. Goal expansion through our channel partners, we're gonna have gos and Channel Partners fully integrated as well service providers as well as a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience for our customers. So the fine print day will be out early next year. Is we G A. These releases and bring in the market. But ultimate flexibility and choice up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal of the intent. We plan to deliver that. >>Can you add any color to the sort of the sort of product journey, if you will, I even hesitate Sam to use the word product because you're really sort of transferring your mindset into a platform mindset in the services mindset as opposed to bolting services. On top of a product you sell a product is okay, service guys, you take it from here. It's really you have to sort of re think you know your how you deliver on DSO You say you start with storage on then So what can we expect over the next midterm? Long term? >>Yeah. I'll give you an example. Look, we sell a ton of as a service and flexible consumption today. We've been at it for 10 years. In fact, in Q two, we sold Our annual recurring revenue rate is 1.3 billion growing at 30% Very, very pleased. So this is not new to us. But how you described Dave is right. We adopt products customers in pick their product. They pick their service that they want a bolt on. Then they pick their financial payment model. They bolted on, so it's a very good, customized way to build it. That's great, and customers are going to continue to want that will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of the big easy button they want to focus on an outcome. Storage is a service is a great, great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is. Part of that, um, they want it fully managed by Dell Technologies or one of our partners. They don't want to manage it themselves. And of course, they want it to be paid for use on an op X plan that works for, works their business and gives them the flexibility. So when customers going forward want to go down this as a service outcome driven path. They're simply going to say, Hey, what data service do I want? I want file or block unified object. They pick their data service based on their workloads. They pick their performance and capacity tear. There is a term limit. You know, right now, we're playing 1125 years, depending on the amount of terms you want Dio. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies on bits, of course. Leveraging our great technology portfolio to bring that service and that experience to our customers. So the service is the product now it really is making that shift that we are. We're moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio on solutions for our customers. >>So you actually have a lot of data on this? I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business, uh, maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. Uh, you know, I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers, but what I'm really interested in the learnings and the feedback and how that's informed your strategy? >>Yeah. I mean, you're right again. We've been at this for, you know, many, many years. We have over 2000 customers today that have chosen to take advantage of our flexible consumption and as a service offers that we have today never mind, kind of as we move into these kind of turn key easy button as a service offers that air to come that early next year. So we've leveraged all of that learnings, and we've heard all of that feedback. And it's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the project. APEC strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest power max or the latest power store. They want to choose their network. They wanna choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service they they want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they wanna maybe leverage additional, more traditional means to acquire that based on their business goals. That feedback has been loud and clear, but there is that segment that is a no No, no. I need to focus more on my business and not my infrastructure. And that's where you're going to see these more turnkey as a service. Solutions fit that need where they want to just define s l. A's outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them so they can really thick focus on their applications in their business, not their infrastructure. So things like metering tons of feedback and how well wanna meter this, uh, tons of feedback on the types of configurations and scale they're looking for? The applications and workloads that they're targeting for this world is very different than the more traditional world. So we're leveraging all of that information to make sure we deliver our infrastructure as a service and then eventually solutions as a service you think about S A P is a service vb isa service ai machine learning as a service will be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >>So I wanna ask you so I mean, you've given us a couple of data points, their billion dollar plus business couple 1000 customers is this? I mean, you've got decent average contract values. If if I do my math right s so it's not just the little guys. I mean, I'm sorry. It's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle is, well, that they're taking this up. Is that fair to say >>totally? I mean, I would say frankly, you know, in the enterprise space, it's the mid the larger sides have historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best a breed apart. Best debris to products, best of breed services. Best to breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape. There were very competitive, very, very confident or competitive and competing in that space. Today, I think going into the turkey as a service space that will play up market. But it will really play downmarket mid market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there where they don't have. The resource is to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or backup infrastructure, compute infrastructure. They're gonna frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think are as a service offers will really play stronger in that mid and kind of lower end of the market. >>So tell us again the sort of availability of the actual, like the console, for example, when when can I actually get? I mean, I can get I could do as a service today. I could buy subscriptions from you. This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and roll out details? >>Sure. So as we look to move, move to our integrated kind of turn key as a service offers the console or announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So for organizations of customers that want to start using it, they can start using it. Now, Uh, the storage, as a service offers gonna be available in the first half of next year. So we're rapidly kind of working on that now, looking to early next year to bring that to market so you'll see the console and the first as a service offered with storage, is a service available in the first half of next year, readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. So we're We're not that far off right now, but we felt it was really, really important to make sure our customers, our partners and the industry really understands how important this transformation to as a service and cloud is for Dell Technologies. That's why you know, frankly, externally and internally, Project Apex will be that North Star to bring our end end value together across the business, across our customers across our our teams. And that's why we're really making sure that everybody understands Project Apex and as a services is the future for Dell. And we're very much focused on that. >>So I mean, is the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset of cultural change, really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing. In a way, How are you guys thinking about you know, that mindset shift? >>What? Really, it's it's How am I thinking about it? How is the broader marketing organization thinking about it? How is engineering Clearly thinking about it? How is finance thinking about it? How its sale like this is transformative across every single function within Dell Technologies has a role to play to do things very differently. Now it's going to take time. It's not gonna happen overnight. You know, various estimates have. This is a fairly small percentage of business today in our segments. But we do expect that to start to and it has started to accelerate. Ramp. You know, we're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires some changes in how we sell changes in how we mark. It clearly changes in how we build products and so forth, and then ultimately, have you know how we account for this has to change. So we're approaching it, I think the right way, Dave, where we're looking at this truly end. And this isn't a a tweak and how we do things or in evolution, this is a revolution for us to kind of move faster to this model again building on the learnings that we have today with our strong customer base on experience. We built up over the years. But this is a This is a big shift. This isn't an incremental turn of the crank. We know that. I think you expect that our customers expect that, and that's that's the mission we're on with Project date. >>Well, I mean with 30% growth. I mean that za clear indicator and people like growth. We're going. I've no doubt that clients are. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. And and I think many folks wanna buy this way. And I think increasingly, that's how they buy SAS. That's how they buy Cloud. You know, why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts, Sam. What are the big takeaways? >>Yeah, Big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together or as a service and cloud capabilities into a easy to consume, simple, flexible offer that provides ultimate choice to our customers. Look, the market has spoken. We're gonna be living in a hybrid, multi cloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak, that they want that to be in as a service experience, regardless of its on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that he's that simplicity and elegance to the on Prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. Eso That's the mission that we're on with Project Apex and I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're gonna We're gonna be after this for the next couple of years to refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >>Well, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to the Cuban. We were seeing the cloud model. I mean, it's extending on Prem Cloud, multi clouds going to the edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same same direction. So, Sam, good luck with this. And thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >>Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Everyone. Take care. >>All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The Virtual Cube will be right back right after this short break

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes wall to wall coverage of Dell Technologies World, The digital experience 2020. The Virtual Cube is coming at you. I'm Dave Volonte. And with me or two Great guest, my colleague and longtime business friend Howard Elias. He's the chief customer officer and president of services and digital Adele. And also joining me is Sri Raj, aka Sri Can't him Nene, who is the managing director of digital insights at Cargo, which is one of the world's largest privately held companies in the top maker and distributor of agricultural products and the things that we eat every day. Gentlemen, thanks so much for your time and coming on the Cube. Great to see you. >>Great to see you, Dave. And three. Great to see you again as well. >>Good to be with you both. So >>I wanna Howard, I wanna talk about start by talking about digital transformation. I'm gonna make it laugh. So I was talking to a customer every day or the other day, and we all talk about, you know, digital transformation. And I said, What's digital transformation to you? He said, Dave, my S a P system was 15 years old and I have to upgrade. It was like, Okay, there's eso There's a spectrum, as you know, but what do you seeing as digital transformation? What does that mean to your customers? >>Well, what we're seeing is a glimpse of the future. And first of all, Dave, Great to be with you again, uh, free and all of you out there hope everybody's safe. And, well, thanks for joining us, Adele Technologies World today. But digital transformation from our customers perspectives the technology enablement of experiences with customers, partners and employees, a swells automating processes to deliver value to the all key stakeholders. And we've just seen a glimpse of the future. Customers are accelerating their adoption of technology. We see this through necessity, right when everybody had to pivot from or toe work from home, especially those professional workers and for the most part, whether companies plan forward or not, we all embraced and learned new ways of being productive remotely, and that was all enabled by technology. But we've seen it in every walk of life. It's really an acceleration of trends that were already underway, whether it was the remote experience for professional employees, whether it's e commerce experience, whether it's telemedicine, distance learning. All of these things have been available for a while, but we've seen them be embraced and accelerated tremendously due to what we've seen over the last six months in all industries. And free will talk about what's happening specifically in the agricultural industry, and what we've seen is customers that have made investments over the years have been ableto move even faster in their specific industries. We've just on a survey of about 4600 customers around the world, and 80% have accelerated their investments in digital technology to improve the experience of their employees of their customers and of their partners. >>Yes, so So thank you for that, Howard. Three. I mean, a lot of people might think of cargo. There's physical business, but it's anything but. I mean, you've got such a huge data component to your business, but I wonder what you would add. I mean, we're maybe talk a little bit. I mean, it's such amazingly, you know, rich and deep company. But maybe talk about your digital transformation journey and at least in your sphere of the world where you're at. >>Yeah, thanks, David. You know, Howard's absolutely right. What? What Cove it has done is just accelerated the need for technology on farm and with our customers. And and certainly in the last few months, we've seen that accelerate tremendously, right? A t end of the day. Agriculture has been a technology first, um, industry for for hundreds of years, and and so we're seeing that take fold in the form of digital adoption, the use of analytics, the use of really unique sensor technologies like cameras and computer vision. Um, sound I liken it to the senses that we all have every day that we used to make decisions. Well, we're now seeing that adopted with our with our customers. And so it's a really interesting time, and I think an opportunity for for the industry to really move forward. >>I mean, in terms of the three in terms of the pandemic, you know, we we talked to a lot of customers. Howard just mentioned a survey. You certainly saw the pivot in tow work from home you know, increase in laptop momentum. And in Dell's business, we saw that you're seeing identity access, management, cloud security and point security. Even even VD I These were big tail winds early on. What did the pandemic due to your business and just in terms of your your priorities did you have to obviously shift to those things to support work from home? What happened to your digital transformation was was anything put on hold and is restarting. Can you just Yeah, I don't know what you could tell us about that, but anything you could describe and add some color to that narrative would be really helpful to our audience. >>Certainly. Yeah. You know, I think overnight we had, ah, workforce that went from being in the office toe working from home and and that just accelerated the need for for collaboration tools. Things like like teams and and Skype and Zoom have just taken off right? But also technologies that allow for virtual engagement, like white boarding and brainstorming sessions that we used to do in the office with customers and suppliers. We're now having to do in a virtual setting. So so that has just transformed how we do business on the customer. And, you know, technologies like computer vision and and sound really transform the need to to leverage labor differently. Right? One of the biggest challenges that the cove it has has placed is how labor interacts with animals and and with food production. And we've just seen a significant adoption of technology to help alleviate some of those stresses. >>Now you guys probably have seen the tongue in cheek cartoons, the covert wrecking ball, you know, the guys in the audience or the building saying digital transformation. Not on my watch in the cove, it comes in. I've often joked, uh, I guess we have to have a sense of humor in these times, but But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll cove. It kind of broke everything. And Howard, when you think about digital transformation, yes, was going on before co vid. But But there are a lot of industries that hadn't been disrupted. I think about health care. I think about financial services. I think about defense. I mean, the list goes on unlike publishing, for instance, which got totally disrupted by the Internet. But now it seems like If you're not a digital business, you're out of business. Eso Are you seeing like virtually every industry adopting digital? Or are you seeing any trends that are different by industry? What are you seeing out there >>were absolutely seeing every company in every industry adopted in their own way, thinking through their business models. I mean, even think about what's happened in your local town. How technology is able enabled restaurants to dio, you know, uh, take out and delivery through digital tools, your local dry cleaner, your your local butcher and your baker. I mean, everybody's having toe be creative and reinvent. It's not just the, you know, large professional industrial financial services companies who are also reinventing. But I go back to what I said before what we're seeing. These trends were already underway. They've just been put into hyperspeed what folks were thinking about doing in two or three years we're doing into two or three months. The pivot toe work from home worldwide happened in two or three weeks, and it's not the crisis we planned for, but we're always preparing for the future. The groundwork was laid, and now it's just been accelerated. We're seeing it everywhere, including inside Adele. You know, I think about all the processes and the way we serve our employees, our customers and partners we've accelerated were adopting the product model within our own Del digital organization, for example, that's been accelerated. The move to multi cloud on having a cloud operating model no matter where the infrastructure has been accelerated. And you know, everything we've talked about on the client experience. Security models, networking model software, defined models, every every industry, every company has had to embrace this >>so sorry. I mean, I'm fascinated by your business. I mean again, I think a lot of people think of it as a real physical business. But there's so much data. You're the head of digital insights, which is You've got data running through your your entire operations. There's other things. There's there's double take words I see in your your background like aqua culture. So So how are you re imagining the future of your industry? >>That's Ah, that's a fascinating question, Dave. You know, think, Imagine this. You could listen to a shrimp eat and then turn that into unique insights about the feeding patterns on behaviors of shrimp, right? Who would have imagined 10 years ago that we would have technology that enabled us to do things like that? Right? And so, from aquaculture thio the dairy industry to, you know, grain origination. We're leveraging digital and data to really help our customers and producers make better, more informed decisions where in in the past it was really experience that allowed them toe be good farmers and and good stewards of our planet. Now we're using technology, so it's really an opportunity toe harness, the power of digital for our industry. >>Well, you know, and it's critical because we have people to feed and actually it's working. I mean, the yields that air coming out of the industry or are amazing. I know there's a lot of discussion now, but hey, you know, we're actually getting a lot of food to people. And now there's a discussion around nutrition that's that's front and center, and I presume technology and data fit in there as well. Three. I wonder if you could comment. >>Yeah, you know, by 2050 day there will be nearly 10 billion people on this planet. And to feed that growing population, we're gonna need 70% more protein on DSO. As you think about the impacts that that that growing population has on the planet. There's also, you know, nutrition. But think about sustainability. How do we how do we grow this food and get it from the place that it's produced to the place where it's consumed in a way that's a resource efficient and effective? So there's nutrition in just the middle class in Asia, you know, having a higher propensity to spend and dealing with that challenge on one end of the spectrum and then on the other end of the spectrum, being ableto really deal with with sustainability. >>I would have watched your career over the decades, and you've had so many roles, and I always used to joke with you. They give you the hardest problems if you want. If you want to get stuff done, you give it to the busiest guy. It was always Howard, you know, help us with with our own transformations. Help us do the integrations, whether it was m and a or the course, the largest in just >>industry I love a good challenge is you know, >>I do know and so I want to get. Get the update on Dell's own transformation. I've been talking to a number of your executives this week, and it looks like you know, you guys air, drinking your own champagne, dog food and whatever you wanna call it. But but bring us up to date on what you guys are doing internally. >>We are, and we're no different than any of our customers. And having Thio focus on our digital transformation agenda, I mentioned earlier the adoption of our product model, you know, moving from a project based Dell Digital and I T Organization to one that's a product model. So these are balanced teams with a product manager, a designer and developers working closely with the business and the function in an agile manner and the C I. C. D pipeline manner. And all of this again has been accelerated. We have our own del digital cloud, which is our hybrid cloud that we leverage internally. We're software defining everything, and it's really paying dividends because what we've seen literally in the last 6 to 8 months is higher levels of security, higher levels of availability, higher levels of resiliency. We've been able to handle all of the increased transactions on our e commerce engines, all at higher quality and lower costs. Now we the groundwork for this with Jen Felch in the team over the last couple of years, but again, by necessity, had to accelerate. And we've done that. And we're even moving faster now on data pipelines and really understanding all of our key processes and understanding the work flows and the data flows, working with machine learning and artificial intelligence again, exactly the way Cargill and other of our customers are doing in their businesses. I know you're talking or have talked to Doug Schmidt. You know, we've digitized and automated thousands of processes and our services organization Theobald bility on a remote basis to service our customers were we've invented new and innovative ways the service our customers remotely versus going on site, not just in break fix, deployment, remote change, management, manage services, consulting. It's just, you know, great to see all this wonderful innovation come together serving our customers. >>Thank you for that, Howard. And you, you said something that triggered me in a good way. Data pipelines. I use that term a lot. And three I wonder if you could talk about this because you're You guys have been around since the 18 hundreds, I think the largest privately held company in United States, I think, right, and probably close to one of the largest in the world. And so >>you >>got a lot of data and a lot of different places. So a huge challenge for you is okay. How do you manage those data pipelines? Those data, the data lifecycle, And I would think the company the size of cargo to the extent that you can reduce the end to end time it takes to go from raw data to insights E. That's gonna be telephone numbers for for your business and your bottom line that you can then reinvest and get back to customers, etcetera and be competitive. I wonder if you could talk about >>you >>know, that whole concept of the data pipeline And how are you using data and and some of the challenges of compressing that end to end cycle time and Leighton >>see, to >>get to insights >>that day. You know, Carlos, 155 year old company and and at our core were a supply chain company. Right? Um, you know, taking food from where it's produced, getting it through the manufacturing process, toe customers. And so at the end of the day, I I joked that not only are we have physical supply chain company, but we're also a data supply chain company. So the data value chain right is really about taking all the different inputs in data that we have in turning that into unique insights. And I don't think there's ah company on the planet in the food space that has the ability to connect those dots in the way that we dio. And so our ability to create unique, actionable insights for our customers is going to be really powerful, especially in the in the coming years. >>So talk about let's talk about Dell a little bit. I always ask, uh, technology leaders how your vendors doing for you? How did they help you through the pandemic? How would you grade del uh, in terms of its support through the pandemic? >>Dell has been absolutely fantastic, right? I mean, I think it is really need to have partners like Dell helping us achieve our mission for our customers. And I know they feel that way about us as their customers. So it's really wonderful. Toe have the type of collaboration and partnership that we do. >>Alright, Howard, Same question for you. How would you grade Del Onda? How you guys have done through the through the pandemic with regard to supporting your customers. I mean, you're you're never one toe overhype, uh, in my experience with you. But give us the your take. >>Why would grade del by what our customers say? And we do it both through direct conversations as well as the data and telemetry we get and the data and telemetry we have in terms of our NPS r R C sat scores or service level objectives that were delivering all have remained in profile. The team has really risen to the occasion. Been super creative, passionate, full of grit. We heard Alison and Angela talk about that the Dell Technologies world this morning, and our team is embodied that spirit and that great to be able to deliver. But in the conversations we're having with customers three and his peers, uh, you know, look, it's it's been a challenging time, but as you know, Dell has always focused on delivering value for the long term. We're not in it for the short term, and that has served us well. That philosophy Theobald active. We have with working with customers, eyes always about what's in the best interests of our customers in the long term. Because if we do that, it will ultimately be in the best interest of Dell. >>Well, it's It's been amazing to just watch. I mean, it's just ironic that we got hit with this at the beginning of this decade. It's gonna It's obviously gonna define. You know what we do going forward. I think we've all talked about it. It's funny. Everybody in our business and the technology business. We've become covert experts in some way, shape or form overnight. But we've talked a lot about the the things that we see as as permanent, and I think that >>you >>know you clearly the your two companies are examples of agility leaning into technology. And, as you said, Howard here for the long term, 155 years old, I think story said so well, here's to another 155 years. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to Cuba. Awesome guests. >>Thanks. Day. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for watching everybody. Our continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. You're watching the Cube?

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)