>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome back. Good evening from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. As you well know, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Day two of our coverage of MWC 23. Dave, we've been talking about sexy stuff all day. It's about to get, we're bringing sexy back. >> It's about to get hot. >> It's about to get hot. We've had two guests with us, two senior consultants from the product planning, networking and emerging server solutions group at Dell, Heather Raheel and James Bryan. Welcome guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Dude, you're bringing sexy back. >> I know. We are. We are. We wanted to bring it, yes. >> This is like XR8000 >> We've been talking about this all day. It's here... >> Yes. Yes. Talk to us about why this is so innovative. >> So, actually we wanted to bring this, getting a lot of attention here on site. Matter of fact, we even have a lot of our competition taking pictures of it. And why is it so innovative? So one of the things that we've done here is we've taken a lot of insights and feedback from our customers that are looking at 5G deployments and looking at how do they, basically, bring commercial off the shelf to a very proprietary industry. So what we've done is we've built a very flexible and scalable form factor in the XR8000. And so this is actually a product that we've purposely built for the telecommunications space. Specifically can be deployed for serving a virtual DU or DUC at a cell site for distributed ram. Or it can be put in a local data center, but outside a main data center to support centralized ram. We'll get into it, which is where the really excitement gets is it's sled-based in its design. And so because of that, it enables us to provide both functionality for telecommunications. Could be network, could be enterprise edge as well as being designed to be configured to whatever that workload is, and be cost-optimized for whatever that work. >> Ah, you're killing us! Let's see. Show, show it to us. >> Actually this is where I have to hand it off to my colleague Heather. But what I really want to show you here is the flexibility that we have and the scalability. So, right here what I'm going to show you first is a one U sled. So I'll set that out here, and I'll let Heather tell us all about it. >> Yeah. So XR8000. Let's talk about flexibility first. So the chassis is a two U chassis with a hot swap shared power supply on the right. Within it there are two form factors for the sleds. What James brought out here, this is the one U form factor. Each sled features one node or one CPU first sled. So we're calling the one U the highest, highest density sled right? Cause you can have up to four one node one U sleds in the chassis. The other form factor is a two U sled, on the right here. And that's just really building on top of the one U sled that adds two PCIe sleds on top. So this is really our general purpose sled. You could have up to two of these sleds within the chassis. So what's really cool about the flexibility is you can plug and play with these. So you could have two one Us, two two Us, or mix and match of each of those. >> Talk about the catalyst to build this for telco and some of the emerging trends that, that you guys have seen and said this needs to be purpose-built for the telco. There's so much challenge and complexity there, they need this. >> Want me to take this? So actually that, that's a great question by the way. It turns out that the market's growing. It's nascent right now. Different telecommunication providers have different needs. Their workloads are different. So they're looking for a form factor like this that, when we say flexible, they need to be able to configure it for theirs. They don't all configure the same way. And so they're looking for something that they can configure to their needs, but they also don't want to pay for things that they don't need. And so that's what led to the creation of, of this device the way we've created it. >> How is it specific for edge use cases, though? We think of the edge: it's emerging, it's burgeoning. What makes this so (pause) specific to edge use cases? >> Yeah, let's talk about some of the the ruggedized features of the product. So first of all, it is short depth. So only 430 millimeters. And this is designed for extreme temperatures, really for any environment. So the normal temperatures of operating are negative five to 55, but we've also developed an enhanced heat sink to get us even beyond that. >> Dave: That's Celsius? >> Celsius. Thank you. >> Lisa: Right. So this will get us all the way down to negative 20 boot in operating all the way up to 65 C. So this is one of the most extreme temperature edge offerings we've seen on the market so far. >> And so this is all outside the data center, so not your typical data center server. So not only are we getting those capabilities, but half the size when you look at a typical data center server. >> So these can go into a place where there's a rack, maybe, but definitely not, not doesn't have to be raised for... >> Could be a cell side cabinet. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Heather: Yeah. And we also have AC and DC power options that can be changed over time as well. >> So what can you pack into that one one U sled in terms of CPU cores and memory, just as an example? >> Yeah, great. So, each of the sleds will support the fourth generation of Intel Sapphire Rapids up to 32 corp. They'll also be supporting their new vRAN boost SKUs. And the benefit of those is it has an integrated FEC accelerator within the CPU. Traditionally, to get FEC acceleration, you would need a PCIe card that would take up one of the slots here. Now with it integrated, you're freeing up a PCIe slot, and there's also a power savings involved with that as well. >> So talk about the involvement of, of the telco customer here and then design, I know Dell is very tight with its customers. I imagine there was a lot of communications and collaboration with customers to, to deliver this. >> Interesting question. So it turns out that early on, we had had some initial insight, but it was actually through deep engagement with our customers that we actually redesigned the form factor to what you see here today. So we actually spent significant amount of time with various telecommunication customers from around the world, and they had a very strong influence in this form factor. Even to the point, like Lisa mentioned, we ended up redesigning it. >> Do, do you have a sense for how many of these, or in what kinds of configurations would you deploy in like the typical BBU? So if we're thinking about radio access network literally tran- tower transmitter receiver... somewhere down there (pause) in a cabinet, you have one of these, you have multiple units. I know, I know the answer is "it depends". >> You are right. >> But if, but if someone tells you, well you know, we have 20, 20 cellular sites, and we need (pause) we're we're moving to an open model, and we need the horsepower to do what we want to do. I'm trying to, I'm trying to gauge like what, one of these, what does that, what does that mean? Or is it more like four of these? >> So that, so we'll go >> It depends? >> Yeah it depends, you're absolutely right. However, we can go right there. So if you look in the two U >> Yeah. >> we have three PCIe slots, you know, as Heather mentioned. And so let's say you have a typical cell site, right? We could be able to support a cell site that could have it could have three radios in the configuration here, it could have a, multiply by three, right? It could have up to 18 radios, and we could actually support that. We could support multiple form factors or multiple deployments at a particular cell site. It really then to your point, it does depend, and that's one of the reasons that we've designed it the way we have. For example, if a customer says their initial deployment, they only need one compute node because maybe they're only going to have, you know, two or three carriers. So then, there, you've got maybe six or eight or nine radios. Well then, you put in a single node, but then they may want to scale over time. Well then, you actually have a chassis. They just come in, and they put in a new chassis. The other beauty of that is, is that maybe they wait, but then they want to do new technology. They don't even have to buy a whole new server. They can update to >> Heather: Yeah. the newest technology, same chassis put that in, connect to the radios, and keep going. >> But in this chassis, is it fair to say that most people will be shocked by how much traffic can go through something like this? In the sense that, if a tower is servicing 'n' number of conversations and data streams, going through something like this? I mean somehow blow, it blows my mind to think of thousands of people accessing something and having them all wrapped through something like this. >> It, it'll depend on what they're doing with that data. So you've probably talked a lot about a type of radios, right? Are we going to be massive MIMO or what type of radio? Is it going to be a mix of 4G or 5G? So it'll really depend on that type of radio, and then where this is located. Is it in a dense urban environment, or is it in a rural type of environment at that cell site shelter, but out in a suburban area. So will depend, but then, that's the beauty of this is then, (pause) I get the right CPU, I get the right number of adding cards to connect to the right radios. I purchase whatever, what I need. I may scale to that. I may be (pause) in a growing part of the city, like where we're from or where I'm from or in San Diego where Heather's from where she's in a new suburban, and they put out a new tower and the community grows rapidly. Well then, we may, they may put out one and then you may add another one and I can connect to more radios, more carriers. So it really just comes down to the type and what you're trying to put through that. It could edit a stadium where I may have a lot of people. I may have like, video streaming, and other things. Not only could I be a network connectivity, but I could do other functions like me, multi-axis axon point that you've heard about, talked about here. So I could have a GPU processing information on one side. I could do network on the other side. >> I do, I do. >> Go for it >> Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't want to, don't want to hog all of the time. What about expansion beyond the chassis? Is there a scenario where you might load this chassis up with four of those nodes, but then because you need some type of external connectivity, you go to another chassis that has maybe some of these sleds? Or are these self-contained and independent of one another? >> They are all independent. >> Okay. >> So, and then we've done that for a reason. So one of the things that was clear from the customers, again and again and again, was cost, right? Total cost of ownership. So not only, how much does this cost when I buy it from you to what is it going to take to power and run it. And so basically we've designed that with that in mind. So we've separated the compute and isolated the compute from the chassis, from the power. So (pause) I can only deal with this. And the other thing is is it's, it's a sophisticated piece of equipment that people that would go out and service it are not used to. So they can just come out, pull it out without even bringing the system down. If they've got multiple nodes, pull it. They don't have to pull out a whole chassis or whole server. Put one in, connect it back up while the system is still running. If a power supply goes out, they can come and pull it out. We've got one, it's designed with a power infrastructure that if I lose one power supply, I'm not losing the whole system. So it's really that serviceability, total cost of ownership at the edge, which led us to do this as a configurable chassis. >> I was just going to ask you about TCO reduction but another thing that I'm curious about is: there seems to be like a sustainability angle here. Is that something that you guys talk with customers about in terms of reducing footprint and being able to pack more in with less reducing TCO, reducing storage, power consumption, that sort of thing? >> Go ahead. >> You want me to take that one as well? So yes, so it comes at me, varies by the customer, but it does come up and matter of fact one- in that vein, similar to this from a chassis perspective is, I don't, especially now with the technology changing so fast and and customers still trying to figure out well is this how we're really going to deploy it? You basically can configure, and so maybe that doesn't work. They reconfigure it, or, as I mentioned earlier, I purchased a single sled today, and I purchased a chassis. Well then the next generation comes. I don't have to purchase a new chassis. I don't have to purchase a new power supply. So we're trying to address those sustainability issues as we go, you know, again, back to the whole TCO. So they, they're kind of related to some extent. >> Right. Right, right. Definitely. We hear a lot from customers in every industry about ESG, and it's, and it's an important initiative. So Dell being able to, to help facilitate that for customers, I'm sure is part of what gives you that competitive advantage, but you talked about, James, that and, and we talked about it in an earlier segment that competitors are coming by, sniffing around your booth. What's going on? Talk about, from both of your lenses, the (pause) competitive advantage that you think this gives Dell in telco. Heather, we'll start with you. >> Heather: Yeah, I think the first one which we've really been hitting home with is the flexibility for scalability, right? This is really designed for any workload, from AI and inferencing on like a factory floor all the way to the cell site. I don't know another server that could say that. All in one box, right? And the second thing is, really, all of the TCO savings that will happen, you know, immediately at the point of sale and also throughout the life cycle of this product that is designed to have an extremely long lifetime compared to a traditional server. >> Yeah, I'll get a little geeky with you on that one. Heather mentioned that we'll be able to take this, eventually, to 65 C operating conditions. So we've even designed some of the thermal solutions enabling us to go there. We'll also help us become more power efficient. So, again, back to the flexibility even on how we cool it so it enables us to do that. >> So do, do you expect, you just mentioned maybe if I, if I heard you correctly, the idea that this might have a longer (pause) user-usable life than the average kind of refresh cycle we see in general IT. What? I mean, how often are they replacing equipment now in, kind of, legacy network environments? >> I believe the traditional life cycle of a of a server is, what? Three? Three to five years? Three to five years traditionally. And with the sled based design, like James said, we'll be designing new sleds, you know, every year two years that can just be plugged in, and swapped out. So the chassis is really designed to live much longer than, than just three to five years. >> James: We're having customers ask anywhere from seven to when it dies. So (pause) substantial increase in the life cycle as we move out because as you can, as you probably know, well, right? The further I get out on the edge, it, the more costly it is. >> Lisa: Yep. >> And, I don't want to change it if I don't have to. And so something has to justify me changing it. And so we're trying to build to support that both that longevity, but then with that longevity, things change. I mean, seven years is a long time in technology. >> Lisa: Yes it is. >> So we need to be there for those customers that are ready for that change, or something changed, and they want to still be able to, to adopt that without having to change a lot of their infrastructure. >> So customers are going to want to get their hands on this, obviously. We know, we, we can tell by your excitement. Is this GA now? Where is it GA, and where can folks go to learn more? >> Yeah, so we are here at Mobile World Congress in our booth. We've got a few featured here, and other booths throughout the venue. But if you're not here at Mobile World Congress, this will be launched live on the market at the end of May for Dell. >> Awesome. And what geographies? >> Worldwide. >> Worldwide. Get your hands on the XR8000. Worldwide in just a couple months. Guys, thank you >> James: Thank you very much. >> for the show and tell, talking to us about really why you're designing this for the telco edge, the importance there, what it's going to enable operators to achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights and your show and tell. >> Thanks! >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, Spain in Mobile MWC 23. Be back with our sho- day two wrap with Dave Valente and some guests in just a minute. (bright music)

(bright music) >> Well, hey, everybody. John Walls here with theCUBE continuing coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. It has been three really fantastic days here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. And we still have more to come with us to talk about Persistent Systems, the Senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Dominique Bastos. Dominique, good to see you. >> Pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for joining us here on the queue. >> Thank you for having me. >> Oh, you bet. You bet. >> Thank you. All right. Tell us about Persistent Systems. So, first off, core focus, what you're up to and then we'll jump in from there. >> Sure, sure. So Persistent Systems is a digital engineering solutions and services provider. They've been around for 32 years doing software engineering, innovating in several areas within different verticals. There's over 22,500 people at Persistent now as of my last count. We're in 18 countries. >> Mm. >> And in October we hit the $1 billion annualized recurring revenue mark. >> Oh, that's a good number right there. >> It's a good number. It's a great company. It's been such an interesting journey. I was with AWS for almost seven years before recently joining Persistent, and it almost felt like a such a logical transition in terms of bringing what I've seen in my entire career of interacting with customers and businesses to what Persistent can provide as people are looking to make their journey to the cloud whatever stage they might be at so. >> Right. And we should point out is that SVP of Cloud, but your focus is AWS. >> My focus AWS. >> Other options, other opportunities. >> Right. >> But you're AWS all the way. >> Right. It's a multicloud company because, you know, we really don't believe in dictating to a customer what they need. I think the benefit, one of the differentiators for Persistent is the amount of legacy history that they have across these industries and customers. I mean, 32 years is a lot, and in terms of like software engineering. So it's like really doing the hard work, the heavy lifting. And then seeing what can actually be commoditized, repeatable building solutions within these verticals to help customers accelerate their transformations. >> Mm hmm. >> So... >> You know, when we talk about cloud, I mean, this has been something that's been on the forefront feel like a long time. Right? But yet there are still many and maybe you can help me out with that percentage, whatever of companies who are either haven't begun yet, are just beginning, they're really in a nascent stage of this transformation. And yeah, I found it curious this week as we've talked with different people about where are you in your journey and so and so forth. A lot of people are way back just starting pass go, and aren't as mature as I would've thought. I mean, do you find that to be the case? >> Absolutely. And there's many reasons for that. I mean, I think what I've started, I mean I've been seeing it over the years, but we all know IT and business back then was very much kept separate. >> Two separate animals. >> Two separate animals. >> Yeah. >> IT made the decisions, not in a vacuum, but almost in a vacuum, right? Now, obviously companies who know it's necessary and have embraced it, bring together the function of looking at the technological solutions that they're adopting to solve a business problem. Right? But that business problem really is dictated by the customer need. >> Mm hmm. >> So I think I have seen, you know, in terms of like the life cycle of a business adopting technology, post cloud, there's a lot of enterprises that are still, they've made such big investments in their legacy infrastructure. >> Mm hmm. >> And in actually, you know, the developers and the people that are maintaining those systems, and the different connections to put it in layman's terms between their systems and their customers systems, right? So, that entire scenario makes it very difficult for them to move. >> Mm hmm. >> It's like moving a mountain. So, I would say there's like three ways of looking at it. You have those that kind of want to revitalize their technology, right? Their backend systems, they want to optimize costs, they want to, and my background in technology is specifically in data, kind of I came up as a DBA and built data models, and I've always loved data before it was a thing to love data. (John chuckles) So... >> You were so far ahead of the curve. >> I was ahead of the curve. I was a trendsetter. >> What a trendsetter? >> I'm a trendsetter. (Dominique chuckles) So I think from that perspective they're looking at, you know, these enormous of amounts of data that they've been capturing in these legacy systems that they're so heavily invested in, but they're not able to derive the insights to better serve their customers or to even innovate new revenue streams from that data. But, they're taking the first step to say, look, you know, we can actually operate more smoothly at a lower cost by moving to the cloud. >> Mm hmm. >> So there's that. Then there are those that are looking to actually innovate and create new revenue streams, monetize their data, look at opportunities to integrate feedback that they've been getting from their customers to provide new services. So they're using the cloud journey, they've probably already moved into the cloud. They're starting to look at analytics, and potentially using AIML to facilitate creating these solutions and services. And then there's those that, you know, want to pioneer, and break into new inventions and ways of solving the big world problems. >> Mm hmm. >> Right? I mean, I think that's one thing I noticed in this re:Invent that I thought was so special is there's like a really big focus on humanity, on humans, on you know, as we were talking earlier everything and I myself have like holding books and I don't like people being on their phone when we're having a conversation. (John chuckles) >> Right. But I think, you know, we are where we are. The reality is the world has evolved in such a way that community is no longer, it takes a small village, all, you know everybody knows each other. You have face to face interactions. You're not doing that with your customers either. There's digitally native businesses that have for a long time cropped up in the FinTech space in you know, you name the space, there's a startup that was born in the cloud that can reach customers immediately, and can provide a service that an enterprise that's kind of like weighed down with their legacy systems. They can't pivot fast enough. So, I think, you know, the pioneers think beyond that. How do we use quantum computing? You know, how do we use 3D simulation to anticipate solving big world problems? Whether it's, you know, people no longer, I don't know what the statistics are, but it's very sad. That elderly people, you know, the amount of human contact that they have is very little. You know, and if you could provide, I don't know, an experience, an immersive experience where their memories are triggered, you know, to help them with dementia, or Alzheimer's. >> Sure. >> I mean, those types of things, those are the things that I think that's what excites me about the launches that I see at re:Invent. And I think the innovation, you know, you have to take that journey. Unless you're born in the cloud, you do have to kind of take that journey. >> You got to get there. >> You have to get there. >> Right. Sure. >> But it's so worth it. >> So how about, let's just say, if I'm a health sciences company, or I'm a pharmaceutical or whatever, and so I've got this desire to create this new opportunity you know, with a human, I say, but yeah, but if you're also Persistent Systems and you're working with you know, somebody in FinTech, or somebody in EEG or whatever, you can't really understand my challenges or my problems. I mean, how do you wear those different hats so you can identify not only what the focus of that client is, but also their technology and how you're going to get them to marry up so they can achieve their goals? >> Well, the beauty of being, you know, in a company with teams of people that you work with, I cut across industries. Right? So we have vertical leaders that have very deep subject matter expertise in any number of those areas. You know, we're working with genomics for example. So, for example, you know, we engage with a customer that we've been helping over the past 32 years use technology to bring services to their customers. And now we are seeing an opportunity to help them innovate to keep up for their business for obvious reasons, but also to supply their customers with the new innovative solutions within that industry, right? 'Cause you need that vehicle to kind of deploy and deliver what customers need. The way we do it is from end to end, right? So, we have in the partnership with AWS, we're a partner of AWS, and as such we are able to collaborate with AWS and their customers or bring our customers to the cloud for all the way from assessment to planning to execution. And even within Persistent, we have ways to main operationalize the maintenance of these solutions. So it's really very easy managed services type framework that we work under. In terms of like migration planning, we have competencies within AWS. For looking at migrations we have AIML, we have DevOps. So we have the various competencies aligned with AWS to be able to execute at whatever stage the customer is. But also in terms of like the accelerators that we provide or the frameworks to look at total cost, that cuts across, right? And then we don't kind of like, here's what you needed and buy, never speak to us again. (John chuckles) I mean, I think the beauty of this company and what I really loved when I was first speaking to them is the depth of the relationships with their customers and the longevity of them. So they've really seen their customers grow. And you can only do that if you're there for the long run. >> You've got to be present. >> You have to be present. >> Sure. So how do you handle if people are making this transformation and they're moving into the cloud, but the people they have on staff might not be familiar with it, right? They have great expertise in what they've been doing on these legacy systems, but now you're moving, you're migrating to a new world, new culture, new environment, and you got to get 'em up to speed. And that's not easy. >> No. >> Right? So what do you do, or what does Persistent suggest or what are you doing and with regard to closing that gap into making that bridge so that they can maintain a little bit on their own. >> Yeah. >> They can execute and implement on their own. >> Yep. >> A little bit. They don't need somebody there to stand over their shoulder the whole time. >> I won't geek out on having joined AWS in professional services way back when to migrate a major company to the cloud, and having lived through painstakingly all those problems and blockers and adoption roadblocks that you speak of. >> Mm hmm. >> You know, I think the way Persistent handles it is what I would've done myself, right? If I were to start a company and say how do we help customers simplify their cloud journey, and remove the complexity? I think that's what Persistent Systems does. We, there's training programs that we are aligned to with AWS. So there's up-skilling of development teams, application developers. We collaborate from the top down with executives to look at the resources that they have available. Obviously mission critical systems that cannot sacrifice having engineers pulled away for a new project. You know, you take that into account. I think, you know, when I spoke earlier about assessments, you're not just assessing what needs to be lifted and shifted or refactored or rearchitected, you're looking at, you know, all these applications that are going to move to the cloud. Who owns them? >> Mm hmm. >> You know, do you have a CI/CD pipeline, or a data pipeline built? Well, we're going to need that, right? So, the continuous integration, continuous development of applications, that type of DevOps, obviously security also DevSecOps, we look at it from end to end as well. We have a very strong security practice. So, all those advisory pieces we have, but we also have the capability to execute on it. Where we're not just coming in and saying well this is what you should do. We're kind of in there saying, this is what you should do, here's how we can get you started. And then, you know, it's a collaborative effort with our customers to see how much they still want us to stay versus how much they want to take over. >> Right. It's nice to have a friend. >> Yeah. (John laughs) Who doesn't need a friend. (Dominique laughs) And Persistent Systems is your friend. Dominique, thanks for the time. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> I appreciate it. >> Thanks again for having me. >> Thanks for being here on theCUBE. You bet. >> Absolutely. >> You are watching theCUBE as you well know the leader in high tech coverage. (soft music)

(calm tech music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to the AWS Cube coverage of Reinvent 2022. I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got a great interview segment here co-creating innovation with E.design. We got Shigeo Kuwabara who is with the President and the Chief Executive Officer E.design Insurance, and Akiko Hora Senior Managing Director Financial Services in Japan Inclusion and Diversity Lead at Accenture Japan. Thank you for joining me today. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome, You're welcome, Thank you. >> I love this topic. E.design Create co-creating innovation automobile insurance with a product called "&e" It's cloud-based advanced automobile insurance system you guys built and called Safe Driving Together an initiative that uses data to reduce accidents. So great stuff. So let's get into it. Tell us about eDesign Insurance and your vision behind transforming to insurance tech company. Combining the technology, new type of automobile insurance for a digital age. >> Okay. With the pandemic of Covid 19 dissertation is accelerating at rapid pace everywhere. First, insurance were required to define the kind of easy to use, meaningful service they wanted to offer their customers. eDesign in collaboration with Accenture, sought to redefine the company's mission, vision and values by embracing the customer experience in a new way. While a customer's traditional view of automobile insurance is "just in case" Accenture and eDesign form the view that what customers really want is accident prevention. With a redefined objective of co-creating with customers not only peace of mind in the event of an accident, but also a world without accidents. ANDI developed a service that uses cutting edge digital technologies to create a safer and more secure car experience. >> Akiko talk about from insurance perspective and Accenture you know, we know about FinTech, you got InsureTech this is a segment that's growing rapidly, lot of data lot of new capabilities with the cloud. Can you share your thoughts on this new opportunity? >> This is a new innovation for many insurance client especially who owns, the traditional policyholder and the new generations. So they that give the new experience for customers, it makes a big change for the customer experience, and that eDesign is leading this experience in the world I think. >> Awesome. What are the key features of the advanced cloud-based automobile insurance system you guys call ANDI, and how does it work? >> The most advanced full crowd insurance system in the world and it embraces digital convenience to the fullest with a concept of creating safety with data; ANDI enables that initiative Safe Driving Together. It designs new initiative, aims to use available data to reduce the risk and causes of an accident, and to make society as a whole, as a whole safer and more secure. >> Why did you choose Accenture and AWS for this innovation? What unique value do they bring? >> Good question about Accenture. Accenture supported us in a wide range of areas including business, design, and IT. In addition to the industry knowledge embodiment of vision, and definition requirements. The PMO eliminated communication loss between the business and IT sites, and as a result the development was completed in a short period of time. In addition, Accenture studies in cutting edge digital technologies such as AI and data analysis is necessary to become an insured insurance company. And I appreciate Accenture's ability to provide such capabilities as well. >> Akiko talk about the IOT implementation here. A lot of data, a lot of design work. >> Yeah >> Take us through the experience. >> Okay. >> And how does Amazon and Accenture come together. >> ANDI and to support safe driving with eDesign insurance for the compact IOT car sensor with this size to put free charge for all of the policyholders to use a language mobile app. The system captures capture and monitors the drivers driving data, diagnosed and driving mood, and driving behavior which is safe or not and supports safe driving. In the event of the accident the system automatically detect the impact and can summarize the accident situation which is very difficult for the driver to recognize by themselves, and the location, location data. And many others and driver can then report the accident with single tap on their smartphone, very easy. And request assistance or repair shop on the spot. It's very safe and also very smooth for the giving the good experience for customers. >> I know Accenture has great expertise, that's one. But you have been in both involved in this smart market rollout. Can you explain that? The smart market rollout? >> Yeah, it's, it was very interesting that we we had the very smooth importation with eDesign and especially AWS allow us to give the open and crowd system to strong collaboration with many other ecosystem partners and many AI sensors and many IOT sensors opportunity. That gives us a lot of experience and give more opportunity for an eScape company like eDesign sample, so that can be more smooth and open implementation for the future. >> That's great rollout. You know we love this example of AWS Accenture eDesign co-creation. It reminds me of the big super cloud trend where industries can be refactored and and and scaled up. So how was ANDI built and what were the requirements driving the technical solution? >> We, we, we, we brought, we planned the architecture how that works for the future and especially Kuwabarason and the great leadership. He doesn't like something which already in the market and also which can be more fit for the future, the solution which fit for the future and maybe that can allow market customers to have big experience. That's why we, we choose open crowd, new trend, new digital trend and IOT or whatever. That gives our architecture definition, which can, lead by Kuwabarason with AWS with this crowd solution as well as with very packaged basis and also open connection with many other AI in the new technology. So that's why it can be more, this solution going to be grow more in the future and we will have more surprises in the future. Kuwabarason if you have some add add comment please >> Go Ahead. >> (laughing) >> Go ahead. What's your thought? Share? >> Thank, thank you Horason very good comment (laugh). So in collaboration with Accenture, I could develop our team's capability. Because we are working together like one team. That is a key success factor I think. >> Talk about the customer experience, and the results. What feedback have you received from your customers and what does the data say? >> Okay. One interesting feedback we receive is "I was always concerned about my wife's love of driving, but by showing her the ANDI driving score, I was able to point it out to her objectively, which was very helpful." That was a good feedback. In this way there are many positive feedback about the ability of visualize the safety, and danger of ones own driving. When I hear customers say that they can now drive more safely because they can objectively identify their bad driving through ANDI's safe driving program I feel very happy that we created ANDI >> Kiko your thoughts? >> Yeah, it's, it's very obvious that the customers likes how, customers likes the sensor saying how they are driving and they, they they sense my driving behavior is safe they are going to be confident. If not, they going to be very careful in the future that's happening. And maybe that can be aligned with insurance which eDesign is giving is more they feel more confident to drive in in many areas. And also that can give more opportunity that they can have more new type of insurance and new experience with the car. That's, that's kind of the interesting make up of power of the driving including the sensor would be happening. That can be good news for us and we can be more creative to think about new experience for customers. >> Congratulations for receiving the highest IT grand prize from the IT award sponsored by the Japan Institute of Information Technology. What's next for eDesign? Congratulations. What's next? How do you take it further, to change to transform the insurance business? >> Okay. I believe ANDI's strength lies in its data. By sharing data with our customers in a timely manner we contribute to their safe driving. We hope to work with customers to create a safe driving experience that is based on parts and that can be enjoyed like a game. Furthermore, we would like to create a society and community where accidents are less likely to occur. Based on the accumulated data in cooperation with local governments and other organizations. We'd like to contribute to the realization of such a safe and secure society by acquiring and analyzing solid data through ANDI On what kind of accidents occur and under what circumstances. >> Akiko Big awards. What's next? AWS, Accenture, eDesign take us through the vision. >> Yeah, it's, it's, I'm, I'm looking forward to do to do the next things and actually eDesign have not only auto insurance, they cover more home and also many others. So that can be giving the more safer opportunity for customers. They can leave their home very smoothly and even some disaster happening, they can escape very safely. Whatever happening in the family like childcare or maybe even their pet have some challenges we can take care of them and that's kind of many experience which which can align with eDesign's insurance. Most of the things we can give lot of safe and with data and also some IOT things and also insurance that's giving the more opportunity and something can truly resolve the social issue. That can be many opportunities. So that's why we have some plan. But we like to we like to keep a secret for the next future. >> Safe driving together, unlock benefits by gamifying and creating cloud-based advanced data, IOT sensors, encouraging drivers to work together to be safe. This is very, very an important story and thank you so much for sharing. eDesign, thank you for coming on. Congratulations on your awards, and transforming insurance tech. It should be fun. Not a hassle. Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you very much. >> Very much. >> Okay. eDesign co-creating innovation. This is the story of Cloud Next Generation. I'm John Fur the Cube, part of the AWS Reinvent 2022 Cube coverage here with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (calm tech music)

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreau is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padre and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with the high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it is really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multi-cloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >>What does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cybersecurity, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vhi to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? It performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery, you specific news that you have there. >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We can talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis and all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right? Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We have the trusted market leader, no, if and or buts, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc and we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Travis. Good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Ante, and I'll be your host today In this segment, we welcome into the Cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreau is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the Senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it.

>>Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell the cube privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges and there's a little doubt. We're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery. Specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cyber crime. Well, security in the public clouds is certainly world class. The result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. >>And at the end of the day, more, not less complexity, but there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of Multi-Cloud Data Protection Made Possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into the Cube, two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. >>Jeff Boudreaux is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, isg, and he's gonna share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're gonna ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now Jeff is gonna be joined by Travis Vhi. Travis is the senior Vice President of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's gonna give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also gonna challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. We're here with Jeff Padro and Travis Behill. We're gonna dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks >>For coming in. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >>You're very welcome. Right. Let's start off, Jeff, with a high level, you know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing. You're talking to customers all the time, What are they telling you? >>Sure. As you know, we do, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. Notice no surprise to any of us, that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important, important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure in its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >>Okay. So maybe we could get into some of those, those challenges. I mean, when, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? Sure. >>So for those big three themes, I'd say, you know, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at an unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multi-cloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that service a tax base for cyber criminals. >>And and by gravity you mean the data's there and people don't wanna move it. >>It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, I think edge, core or cloud, it's there and that's, it's something we have to help our customers with. >>Okay, so just it's nuanced cuz complexity has other layers. What, what are those >>Layers? Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multi-cloud complexity and we talk about multi-cloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this, you know, multi-cloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So we talk about that increased attack surface, but this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're a lack consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >>So how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the ciso now they have this shared responsibility model, they have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and, and frameworks and syntax. So maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >>Sure. I'd say the big, you know, the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency. And specifically they're feeling, feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber tax being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a, a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. >>You know, it's funny, I said this in my open, I, I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency and now they're like, Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient. You know, I you hearing >>That? Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things, one's about simplifying it, two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big, big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the global data protected, excuse me, the global data protection index gdp. >>I, Yes. Jesus. Not to be confused with gdpr, >>Actually that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges, but also it highlights an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >>Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I, I want to dig into it. I think this is, you've done this many, many years in a row. I like to look at the, the, the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At, at a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell and from your point of view is best suited? >>Sure. So we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection solution in needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach, >>But what does that mean? What, what do you mean by modern? >>Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture, right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud in any workload. So we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1700 customers that trust us to protect them more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >>Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What, what do you mean by simple? Sure. >>We wanna provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge, and that's from deployment to consumption to management and support. So our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So traditional subscription or as a service. >>And when you, when you talk about resilient, I mean, I, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, Well, that's gonna gonna cost us more. Well, it may, but you're gonna also reduce your, your risk. So how, what's your point of view on resilience? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's something all customers need. So we're gonna be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secured by design. We have some ver some unique capabilities in a combination of things like built in amenability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI par recovery and just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >>So it's interesting when you think about the, the NIST framework for cyber security, it's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to, to data protection, correct? Yeah. All right. In a minute we're gonna come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're gonna take a short break. Keep it right there. Okay. We're back with Jeff and Travis Vehill to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >>Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern simple power protect data managers software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize and they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So tho that's the backdrop to the news today. And, and as we go through the news, I think you'll, you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular today we're announcing the Power Protect data manager appliance. We are announcing power protect cyber recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our Apex data storage >>Services. Okay, so three pieces. Let's, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, Well, we actually want appliances because we just wanna put it in and it works, right? Performs great. So, so what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? Well, >>You know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have at this strong foundation of, of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >>So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well, well over a year, is that, that that data protection is becoming an extension of your, your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. You, you have specific news that you have there? >>Yeah, you know, we, we are, in addition to simplifying things via the, the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud with this announcement. It means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises in a colo at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this, this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >>I always invoke my, my favorite Matt Baker here. It's not a zero sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so Mike, my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into Apex? We hear a lot about Apex as a service, it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around Apex? >>Yeah, we, we've seen incredible momentum with our Apex solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding Apex data storage services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all Apex offers, it's a pay as you go solution really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We, we get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And it's, as with many of our Apex solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified Apex console. >>Okay. So it's you keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about t-shirt sizes. I I'm a big fan of that cuz you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I, what I need, how different is this? I wonder if you guys could, could, could address this. Jeff, maybe you can, >>You can start. Sure. I'll start and then pitch me, you know, Travis, you you jump in when I screw up here. So, awesome. So first I'd say we offer innovative multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the, the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >>80%. 80%, That's a big number, right. Travis, what's your point of view on this? Yeah, >>I, I think number one, end to end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software, we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the Apex solution as well. So really we can, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives edge core to cloud. The other thing that we hear as a, as a, a big differentiator for Dell and, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in, in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as, as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And the, at more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks, it can help customers speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber re attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And, and you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing power protect cyber recovery. >>So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obvious been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know, your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end to end capability that that, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did a a, an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your r and d now they have a lot of work to do, so it's, it's not like they can go home and just relax, but, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the, the, the final thoughts. >>Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner with it, right? So we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched within data protection itself. We are the trusted market leader, no if and or bots, we're number one for both data protection software in appliances per idc. And we would just name for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >>Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of, of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for Thank you sir. Thanks Dave. Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm gonna come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage right back >>In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient, multi-cloud data protection strategy. >>It's not a matter of if you're gonna get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I wanna know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >>It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >>Power protects. Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >>We chose Power Protect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologists has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >>With Power Protect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >>Got installed it by myself, learned it by myself with very intuitive >>While restoring a machine with Power Protect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage Power Protect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >>Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data workloads and VMs. >>In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours at night to do a single backup of each vm. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >>With Power Protects Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >>Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >>Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell Power Protect Data manager. Visit dell.com/power Protect Data Manager. >>We put forth the premise in our introduction that the world's of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the Power Protect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in the moment. Second is Dell's Power Protect cyber recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and and Azure support. >>Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in Apex. You might recall earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of Apex backup services and then in May at Dell Technologies world, we heard about the introduction of Apex Cyber Recovery Services. And today Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available and Apex. Now I wanna come back to the Power Protect data manager appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items, Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. >>Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course that's gonna lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the data protectionPage@dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/data protection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand@thecube.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Valante. Thanks for watching the future of multi-cloud protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell theCUBE privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly, we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges. And there's a little doubt we're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. While security in the public cloud is certainly world class, the result of multicloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. And at the end of the day, more, not less, . But there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy, industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today, there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but is becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection people, technologies and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello, and welcome to "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into theCUBE two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. Jeff Boudreau is the President and General Manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG, and he's going to share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're going to ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is going to be joined by Travis Vigil. Travis is the Senior Vice-President of Product Management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's going to give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also going to challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. (upbeat music) We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Alright, let's start off Jeff, with the high level. You know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing? You're talking to customers all the time. What are they telling you? >> Sure, as you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. No surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So, they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure and its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay, so maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multicloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that surface as attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity, you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay, so it's nuanced 'cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multicloud complexity and we talk about multicloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this multicloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So, we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lacking consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So, how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the Cisco, now they have this shared responsibility model. They have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So, maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency and specifically, they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. You know, it's funny. I said this in my open. I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency, and now they're like, "Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient." You know, are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things. One's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the Global Data Protected, excuse me, the Global Data Protection Index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus. >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually, that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges. But also it highlights at an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, I've done this many, many years in a row. I'd like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell, from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So, we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multicloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> What does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture. Right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So, we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1,700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge. And that's from deployment to consumption, to management and support. So, our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So, traditional subscription or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, "Well, that's going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk." So, what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So, we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secure by design. And we have some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in immutability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI part recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have, our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity. It's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Jeff: Correct. Yeah. >> All right. In a minute, we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break. Keep it right there. (upbeat music) (upbeat adventurous music) Okay, we're back with Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah. Thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern, simple PowerProtect Data Manager Software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, 1,700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions. They want us to help them modernize. And they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So, that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX Data Storage Services. >> Okay, so three pieces. Let's dig to that. It's interesting, appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works." >> Travis: (laughs) Right. >> It performs great. So, what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >> So, the premise that I've been putting forth for months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So, I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. Your specific news that you have there. >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So, what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running on-premises, in Acolo, at the Edge, in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always invoke my favorite Matt Baker here. "It's not a zero sum game", but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service. It's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so, what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you-go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is specify their base capacity. They specify their performance tier. They tell us do they want a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX Console. >> Okay, so it's, you're keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small. You know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this. Jeff, maybe you can start. >> Sure, I'll start and then- >> Pitch me. >> You know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here. >> Awesome. >> So, first I'd say we offer innovative multicloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis said, all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> Dave: 80%? >> 80% >> Hey, that's a big number. All right, Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We are that one stop shop that I talked about, whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the Edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software. We have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX Solution as well. So really, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives. Edge, Core to Cloud. The other thing that we hear as a big differentiator for Dell, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our Intelligent Cyber Resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks. It can help customers speed time to recovery. And really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And if you look at customer adoption of that solution, specifically in the cloud, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So, I think it's fair to say that your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator. Whenever I talk to your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end-to-end capability, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting the client's burden to your R&D. now they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax. But that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So, we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio. We're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale. We have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we are the trusted market leader. No if, ands or buts. We're number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC and we were just named for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So, bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years. It's really becoming an adjacency and really, a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you, sir. >> Dave. >> Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Right back. >> Advertiser: In our data-driven world, protecting data has never been more critical. To guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages, you need a cyber resilient multicloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >> Advertiser: PowerProtect Data Manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >> We chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> I'd installed it by myself, learn it by myself. It was very intuitive. >> While restoring your machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast, we can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Instructor: Data Manager offers innovation such as transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups, and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights into protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now, we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Advertiser: Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect's Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now, in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. And there were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall, earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX Backup Services and then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now, I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance and I asked Dell off camera, "Really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition?" Because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So, I heard a number of items. Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So, I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So, we're talking minutes to deploy, and of course that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now, this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the Data Protection Page at dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multicloud Protection" made possible by Dell, in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(light upbeat music) >> Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency, as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell theCUBE privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. Certainly we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges. And there's a little doubt we're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers, and building business resilience, had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. While security in the public clouds is certainly world class, the result of multi-cloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds, and on-prem. At the end of the day, more, not less, complexity. But there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy, industry collaboration, and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to but it's becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection, people, technologies, and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello and welcome to the future of multi-cloud data protection made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into theCUBE two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. Jeff Boudreau is the president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group ISG, and he's going to share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're going to ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now Jeff is going to be joined by Travis Vigil. Travis is the senior vice president of product management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's going to give us details on the the products that are being announced today, and go into the hard news. Now, we're also going to challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. (light upbeat music)

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

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

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Virtually all tech companies have expressed caution in their respective earnings calls, and why not? I know you're sick in talking about the macroeconomic environment, but it's full of uncertainties and there's no upside to providing aggressive guidance when sellers are in control. They punish even the slightest miss. Moreover, the spending data confirms the softening market across the board, so it's becoming expected that CFOs will guide cautiously. But companies facing execution challenges, they can't hide behind the macro, which is why it's important to understand which firms are best positioned to maintain momentum through the headwinds and come out the other side stronger. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," we'll do three things. First, we're going to share a high-level view of the spending pinch that almost all sectors are experiencing. Second, we're going to highlight some of those companies that continue to show notably strong momentum and relatively high spending velocity on their platforms, albeit less robust than last year. And third, we're going to give you a peak at how one senior technology leader in the financial sector sees the competitive dynamic between AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks. So I landed on the red eye this morning and opened my eyes, and then opened my email to see this. My Barron's Daily had a headline telling me how bad things are and why they could get worse. The S&P Thursday hit a new closing low for the year. The safe haven of bonds are sucking wind. The market hasn't seemed to find a floor. Central banks are raising rates. Inflation is still high, but the job market remains strong. Oh, not to mention that the US debt service is headed toward a trillion dollars per year, and the geopolitical situation is pretty tense, and Europe seems to be really struggling. Yeah, so the Santa Claus rally is really looking pretty precarious, especially if there's a liquidity crunch coming, like guess why they call Barron's Barron's. Last week, we showed you this graphic ahead of the UiPath event. For months, the big four sectors, cloud, containers, AI, and RPA, have shown spending momentum above the rest. Now, this chart shows net score or spending velocity on specific sectors, and these four have consistently trended above the 40% red line for two years now, until this past ETR survey. ML/AI and RPA have decelerated as shown by the squiggly lines, and our premise was that they are more discretionary than the other sectors. The big four is now the big two: cloud and containers. But the reality is almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy is down as shown here. This chart shows the sectors that have decreased in a meaningful way. Almost all sectors are now below the trend line and only cloud and containers, as we showed earlier, are above the magic 40% mark. Container platforms and container orchestration are those gray dots. And no sector has shown a significant increase in spending velocity relative to October 2021 survey. In addition to ML/AI and RPA, information security, yes, security, virtualizations, video conferencing, outsourced IT, syndicated research. Syndicated research, yeah, those Gartner, IDC, Forrester, they stand out as seemingly the most discretionary, although we would argue that security is less discretionary. But what you're seeing is a share shift as we've previously reported toward modern platforms and away from point tools. But the point is there is no sector that is immune from the macroeconomic environment. Although remember, as we reported last week, we're still expecting five to 6% IT spending growth this year relative to 2021, but it's a dynamic environment. So let's now take a look at some of the key players and see how they're performing on a relative basis. This chart shows the net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and the pervasiveness of the vendor within the ETR survey measured as the percentage of respondents citing the vendor in use. As usual, Microsoft and AWS stand out because they are both pervasive on the x-axis and they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. For two companies of this size that demonstrate and maintain net scores above the 40% mark is extremely impressive. Although AWS is now showing much higher on the vertical scale relative to Microsoft, which is a new trend. Normally, we see Microsoft dominating on both dimensions. Salesforce is impressive as well because it's so large, but it's below those two on the vertical axis. Now, Google is meaningfully large, but relative to the other big public clouds, AWS and Azure, we see this as disappointing. John Blackledge of Cowen went on CNBC this past week and said that GCP, by his estimates, are 75% of Google Cloud's reported revenue and is now only five years behind AWS in Azure. Now, our models say, "No way." Google Cloud Platform, by our estimate, is running at about $3 billion per quarter or more like 60% of Google's reported overall cloud revenue. You have to go back to 2016 to find AWS running at that level and 2018 for Azure. So we would estimate that GCP is six years behind AWS and four years behind Azure from a revenue performance standpoint. Now, tech-wise, you can make a stronger case for Google. They have really strong tech. But revenue is, in our view, a really good indicator. Now, we circle here ServiceNow because they have become a generational company and impressively remain above the 40% line. We were at CrowdStrike with theCUBE two weeks ago, and we saw firsthand what we see as another generational company in the making. And you can see the company spending momentum is quite impressive. Now, HashiCorp and Snowflake have now surpassed Kubernetes to claim the top net score spots. Now, we know Kubernetes isn't a company, but ETR tracks it as though it were just for context. And we've highlighted Databricks as well, showing momentum, but it doesn't have the market presence of Snowflake. And there are a number of other players in the green: Pure Storage, Workday, Elastic, JFrog, Datadog, Palo Alto, Zscaler, CyberArk, Fortinet. Those last ones are in security, but again, they're all off their recent highs of 2021 and early 2022. Now, speaking of AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks, our colleague Eric Bradley of ETR recently held an in-depth interview with a senior executive at a large financial institution to dig into the analytics space. And there were some interesting takeaways that we'd like to share. The first is a discussion about whether or not AWS can usurp Snowflake as the top dog in analytics. I'll let you read this at your at your leisure, but I'll pull out some call-outs as indicated by the red lines. This individual's take was quite interesting. Note the comment that quote, this is my area of expertise. This person cited AWS's numerous databases as problematic, but Redshift was cited as the closest competitors to Snowflake. This individual also called out Snowflake's current cross-cloud Advantage, what we sometimes call supercloud, as well as the value add in their marketplace as a differentiator. But the point is this person was actually making, the point that this person was actually making is that cloud vendors make a lot of money from Snowflake. AWS, for example, see Snowflake as much more of a partner than a competitor. And as we've reported, Snowflake drives a lot of EC2 and storage revenue for AWS. Now, as well, this doesn't mean AWS does not have a strong marketplace. It does. Probably the best in the business, but the point is Snowflake's marketplace is exclusively focused on a data marketplace and the company's challenge or opportunity is to build up that ecosystem and to continue to add partners and create network effects that allow them to create long-term sustainable moat for the company, while at the same time, staying ahead of the competition with innovation. Now, the other comment that caught our attention was Snowflake's differentiators. This individual cited three areas. One, the well-known separation of compute and storage, which, of course, AWS has replicated sort of, maybe not as elegant in the sense that you can reduce the compute load with Redshift, but unlike Snowflake, you can't shut it down. Two, with Snowflake's data sharing capability, which is becoming quite well-known and a key part of its value proposition. And three, its marketplace. And again, key opportunity for Snowflake to build out its ecosystem. Close feature gaps that it's not necessarily going to deliver on its own. And really importantly, create governed and secure data sharing experiences for anyone on the data cloud or across clouds. Now, the last thing this individual addressed in the ETR interview that we'll share is how Databricks and Snowflake are attacking a similar problem, i.e. simplifying data, data sharing, and getting more value from data. The key messages here are there's overlap with these two platforms, but Databricks appeals to a more techy crowd. You open a notebook, when you're working with Databricks, you're more likely to be a data scientist, whereas with Snowflake, you're more likely to be aligned with the lines of business within sometimes an industry emphasis. We've talked about this quite often on "Breaking Analysis." Snowflake is moving into the data science arena from its data warehouse strength, and Databricks is moving into analytics and the world of SQL from its AI/ML position of strength, and both companies are doing well, although Snowflake was able to get to the public markets at IPO, Databricks has not. Now, even though Snowflake is on the quarterly shock clock as we saw earlier, it has a larger presence in the market. That's at least partly due to the tailwind of an IPO, and, of course, a stronger go-to market posture. Okay, so we wanted to share some of that with you, and I realize it's a bit of a tangent, but it's good stuff from a qualitative practitioner perspective. All right, let's close with some final thoughts. Look forward a little bit. Things in the short-term are really hard to predict. We've seen these oversold rallies peter out for the last couple of months because the world is such a mess right now, and it's really difficult to reconcile these counterveiling trends. Nothing seems to be working from a public policy perspective. Now, we know tech spending is softening, but let's not forget it, five to 6% growth. It's at or above historical norms, but there's no question the trend line is down. That said, there are certain growth companies, several mentioned in this episode, that are modern and vying to be generational platforms. They're well-positioned, financially sound, disciplined, with strong cash positions, with inherent profitability. What I mean by that is they can dial down growth if they wanted to, dial up EBIT, but being a growth company today is not what it was a year ago. Because of rising rates, the discounted cash flows are just less attractive. So earnings estimates, along with revenue multiples on these growth companies, are reverting toward the mean. However, companies like Snowflake, and CrowdStrike, and some others are able to still command a relative premium because of their execution and continued momentum. Others, as we reported last week, like UiPath for example, despite really strong momentum and customer spending, have had execution challenges. Okta is another example of a company with strong spending momentum, but is absorbing off zero for example. And as a result, they're getting hit harder from evaluation standpoint. The bottom line is sellers are still firmly in control, the bulls have been humbled, and the traders aren't buying growth tech or much tech at all right now. But long-term investors are looking for entry points because these generational companies are going to be worth significantly more five to 10 years down the line. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching this "Breaking Analysis" episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson and Ken Schiffman on production. And Alex manages our podcast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE do some wonderful editing for us, so thank you. Thank you all. Remember that all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. All you do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or DM me @dvellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out etr.ai for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (gentle music)

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two live coverage of VMware Explore 2022 from Moscone Center in San Francisco. Lisa Martin here as your host with Dave Nicholson. We've got a couple of guests here and we have some props on set. Get a load of this Nature Fresh Farms produce. Keith Bradley joins us, the VP of IT from Nature Fresh Farms, and Alison Biers is back, as well, director of marketing at Edge Solutions for Dell. Guys, welcome back to the program and thanks for bringin' some food. >> Well, thank you, yeah. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Keith, talk to us a little bit about technology from Nature Fresh Farm's perspective. How do we look at this farming organization as a tech company? >> As technical, we're something that measures everything we grow. So, we're 200 acres of greenhouse, spanning probably about 3 or 400 acres of land. Everything's entirely environmentally controlled. So, the peppers that we have in front of you, the tomatoes, they're all grown and controlled from everything they get from light to moisture to irrigation and nutrients. So, we do all that. >> So, should I be able to taste the Dell goodness in these cucumbers, for example? >> I'd like to say Nature Fresh slash Dell good. >> Connect the dots for us. So, let's go through that sort of mental exercise of how are these end products for consumers better because of what you're doing in IT? >> So, one of the things that we've been able to do, and one of the transformations we made is we are now able to run our ETLs. So, analyze the data realtime at the Edge. So, making decisions which used to be only once a day based on analytics to now multiple times a day. Our ETLs used to take 8 to 10 hours to run. Now they run- >> So, extraction, transformation and load. >> Yep, yep. >> Okay. So, we consider it a party foul if you use a TLA and you don't find it the first time. >> Okay. >> But you get a pass 'cause you're an actual and real person. >> I'll give you that one. >> I already had a claim laid on that. I'm sorry, so continue. >> Yeah, yeah. So, it allowed now the growers to make multiple decisions and then you start adding the next layer. As we expanded our technology base, we started introducing AI into it. So now, AI is even starting to make decisions before the grower even knows to make them based on historical data. So, it's allowed us to become more proactive in protecting the health and longevity and even taste of that plant and the product coming out to you. >> That's awesome. Alison, talk to us about from Dell's perspective how is it helping Nature Fresh to simplify the Edge which there's a lot of complexity there? You talked about the size of the organization but how do you help simplify it? >> I think Nature Fresh had a lot of common problems that we see customers have. So, they had some really interesting ambitions to improve their produce and do it in a GMO free way and really bring a quality product to their customer. But yet, they were each solving their problems on their individual farms in different ways. And so, one of the ways that we were able to help was to consolidate a lot of those silos as they were expanding the scope and scale of what they really wanted to do from a technology perspective. And then being able to do that in a secure way that's delivering the insights they need when they need them right there at the Edge is really critical. >> I think it's wonderful that we have the actual stuff here. Because we often talk in these abstract terms about outcomes. There's your outcome right there. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> But talk about this growing in the soil somewhere. You have growers. It's not an abstraction. These are actual actual people. Where does the technology organism interface occur here? You have organically grown crops. Where's that interface? Where's the first technology involved in this process? Literally physically. >> Physically. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a shack with a server in it somewhere? >> So, we actually have, we have a core data center at the center of Nature Fresh set up basically where everything ends up. We have our Edge. So, we have computers, we're at the Edge analyzing stuff. But if you want to go right back to the grassroots of where it actually is, is it's right at, not dirt, but a ground up coconut husk. That is what the plants are grown in. And we analyze the data right there, 'cause that is our first Edge. And people think that's static for us. The Edge isn't static. 'Cause the Edge now moves. We have a plant that grows. Then we pick it. And then we have to store it and then we have to ship it. So, our Edge actually does move from area to area to area. So, statically one thing isn't the same all the time. It's a hard thing to say how it all starts but it's just a combination of everything from natural gas to everything. >> Okay, then are those, 'cause we think of things in terms of like internet of things and these sensors. >> Oh yeah. >> Things are being gathered. So, you've got stuff happily growing in husks and then being picked. What's the next step there? Where is that aggregated? Where does that go? Is that all going straight back to your data center or are there sort of intermediate steps in the process? >> So, what we do is we actually store everything at the Edge, and we do daily processes right there. And then it aggregates that data and it drops it down from a large number to a smaller number to go to the core. >> Got it. >> And then that way, at the core, it does the long term analysis. 'Cause again, a lot of the data that we collect, we don't need to keep. A lot of it is the temperature was X, the temperature was X, the temperature, we don't need that. So, it aggregates it all down. So, that way the information coming to the core doesn't overwhelm it. Because we do store enough information. And to give you an idea of how our 1.8 million plants are living and breathing. We actually have estimated 1.8 million plants throughout our 200 acres. >> At any moment. >> Yeah. >> That's how many plants they're tracking. And so, that realtime information is helping to make sure that they water the plants precisely with the amount that they need, that they're fertilizing them. And you were telling me about how the life of a plant, you're really maintaining that plant over the life of 12 months. So, if you make a mistake at any point along the line, then you're dealing with that in terms of their yield throughout the life of the plant. But you aggregate a lot of that data right there on site so that you're not having to send so much back to the cloud or to the core. And you do that a lot with VxRail as well as other technology you have on site. Right? >> Yeah. Our VxRail is the center of the core of how we process things. It allowed us to even expand, not even just for compute but GPUs for our AIs to do it. So, it's what we did. And it allowed us to mold how we do things. >> Alison, question for you, this sounds like a dynamic Edge the way that you described it, Keith, and you described it so eloquently. How does the partnership that Dell has with Nature Fresh, how is Dell enabling and accelerating and advancing its Edge solutions based on what you're seeing here and this need for realtime data analytics. >> Well, we spend a lot of time with customers like Keith and also across all kinds of other industries. And what we see is that they have a really common set of problems. They're all trying to derive realtime data right then and there so that they can make business decisions that impact their profitability and their competitiveness and all of their customers experience their product quality. And what we see a lot of times is that they have a common set of concerns around security. How to manage all of the hardware that they're implementing. And at the same time, they really want to be an enabler for the business outcome. So, people have creative ideas and they come to IT hoping for support in that journey. If you're managing everything as a snowflake, it becomes really hard and untenable. So, I think one of the things that we have as our mission is to help customers simplify their Edge so that they can be the enabler that's helping the business to transform and modernize. One of the things I really admire about Nature Fresh Farms is that they decided it from a full organization perspective. So, everybody from the operational technologists to the IT to the business decision makers and leaders at the company, they all decided to modernize together. And so, I think from a partnership perspective, too, that's one of the areas that we try to work with our customers on is really talking about total transformation and modernization. >> So, it sounds like, Keith, there was an appetite there as Alison was saying for a digital transformation and IT transformation. Talk to me a little bit about from a historical perspective, how old Nature Fresh is and how did you get the team on board sounds so eloquent. How did you get the team on board to go, "This is what we need to do and technology needs to fuel our business because it's going to impact the end user, consumer of our fabulous English cucumbers." >> So, it's actually really neat. Our owner, Pete Quiring, when he first started out he really wanted to embrace technology. And this is going back right to 2000. 2000 is when we first had our first planting. And he was actually a builder by nature. He actually was a builder and fabricator and he built greenhouses for other companies. But he said they're getting a little bigger and it's the labor amount, and the number of growers he needed for a range was getting exponentially higher. So, he was one of the first ones that said, "I'm going to put a computer right in the middle and control this 16 acre range." >> It's a pretty visionary view when you really think about it. He's trying to operate his farm. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> From one single computer. >> Operationalize it. It's really cool. >> So, it was neat concept and it was actually very much not a normal concept then. You go back to 2000, people weren't talking about internet of things. They didn't talk about automation. It wasn't there. And he basically said, this is the way to go. And unfortunately, he thought, "I'll sell it to somebody. I'll grow it, I'll put a product in for a year and I'll sell it." And then guess what happened? He didn't sell it. He says, "Ah, it's not big enough. I'll build another phase two." And then his comment to me was after he built the fourth phase, he says, "I guess I'm in the pepper and cucumber business now." And that's what he is just grown. But he said it was a great relationship we had and it's a great concept. And it even goes back, and I know we talked about before, is the computer allowed one senior grower to control large number of acreages. Where before, you'd need multiple growers that know exactly what to do, 'cause they'd have to manually change all these things. Now, from a single computer they can see everything that's going on in the entire range. >> You mentioned temperature and water. And this is kind of out of the blue question, but how have global circumstances and increases in the cost of fertilizer affected you? Or is that fertilizer that's not the type that you use in your operation? You have any insight into that. >> Yeah, everything has, the global change in cost has changed everybody. I don't think there's anybody that's exempt from it. The only thing that we've been able to do is we're able to control it. We don't need to rely on, I guess you can say, rely on the weather to help us do things. We can control how much is. And we recycle all of our water. So, what the plant doesn't absorb today for nutrients, we'll put it back in the system, sterilize- >> Wait, when you say 200 acres, it's all enclosed? >> Yep, 200 acres. >> 200 acres of greenhouse. >> Yep, at 200 acres of greenhouse entirely enclosed. >> Okay, okay. >> There is not a single portion of our greenhouse that's actually gets exposed to the outside. And if you ever see a picture of a greenhouse and you see one of these lovely plants here wet, that's not true. That's just a nice to make it look better. >> Spray it for the photo. >> Yeah, yeah. They spray it for the photo. But actually everything is dry. That water goes directly to the roots and we monitor how much we put in and how much comes out. And then we recycle it. We even get so much recycling, we run natural gas generators to heat the water to heat the greenhouse. We take the burn-off of natural gas, the CO2, and funnel that into the greenhouse to give it natural stimulant. >> So, this is starting to remind me of "The Martian", if you read the book or if you seen the movie. >> Oh yeah. >> But planting the potatoes inside the hab, in the habitat. >> Yeah, and you cut 'em in half and the little ones grow with that next ones. But yep, we recycle everything that we do. And that's what we do. >> That's amazing. >> And all that information at their fingertips. Really, I think what technology is enabling you all to do is focus on what you all are good at, which is focusing on your farming operation and not necessarily the technology. So, one of the places I think we deliver some value is in validating a lot of the solutions so that customers don't have to figure that all out themselves. >> Yeah, 'cause I'm not a security expert. I don't always understand the true depth of security, but that's where that relationship is. We need this and we need that. And we need a secure way to let those communicate. And we can hand that off to the experts at Dell and let us do what we do best. >> What have been some of the changes? In the last couple of years, we've seen the security elevate skyrocket to a board level conversation. Ransomware is a when, not if, we get attacked. How does Dell help you from a security perspective ensure that what you're able to do ultimately gets these products to market in a secure fashion so that all that data that you're generating isn't exposed? >> So, like I said, I agree 100%. It's not matter of if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. So, one of the things that we've actually done is we started to use Dell solution, the PowerProtect Data Manager to back up our solutions on the VxRail. And it actually did twofold for us. It allowed us to do a lot of database manipulation from restores and stuff like that. But we're now actually even investing in the cyber recovery vault that gives us that protection. And it allows us to now look at how long will it take us to get back up. And we're doing some tests right now and the last test we did is we're able to get back up going as a company from a full attack in about an hour. >> Wow. >> We've actually done a few simulations now. So, we are able to recover what our core needs are within an hour. >> Which is a very different metric than simply saying, "Oh, the data's available." >> Yeah. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get zero credit for that. We need our operations to be back up and running. >> Even that hour is stressful to our growers. >> Sure. >> It's a variable within a variable because if you go in the summer when it's super hot, they'll be very stressed out within an hour. And then you got nice calm weather day, it's not as bad. But the weather can change in how they have to close the vents. And you're not just closing one vent, you're closing 32, 64, 100 acres of vents. And you're changing irrigation cycle. You need that automation to do it for you. >> How do you let people eat these things after all the care that goes into it? I'm going to feel mildly guilty for just about a second and a half before I sink my teeth into the cucumber. >> Oh, but that's the joy of it. That's one of the things that I love. >> This is serious. You're proud of this, aren't you? >> Oh yeah. You know what? There's not single person at Nature Fresh that isn't proud of what we do each day. We enjoy what we do and it's a culture that makes us strive to do better every day. It's just a great feeling to be there every day and to just enjoy what you're doing. >> And see, it's real. It's real. Isn't it great? Isn't it great to be a part of? My background's in economics. I think of these things in terms of driving efficiency. And this is just a beautiful thing. When you control those variables, you leverage the technology and what's the end result? You're essentially uplifting everything in the world. >> Yeah, so true. >> Not to get philosophical on ya. >> Right, and feeding the world, especially during the last couple of years, that access. One of the things we learned in the pandemic, one of many, is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore, it's essential. >> Yeah. >> So true. >> And so, the story that you're telling here, the impact to the growers, enabling them to focus what you were saying, Alison, on what they do best, Dell Technologies, VxRail enabling Nature Fresh to focus on what it does best, ultimately delivering food to people during the last couple of years was huge. >> Yeah, and allowing even at a reduced labor number for us to keep growing and doing things by automation. We still need labor in the greenhouse to pick, prune and do stuff like that. But again, we're looking into technologies to help offset that. But again, it was one of those things that we just had to be efficient at everything we do. And we drove that through everything we have. >> Well, and you guys haven't stopped. Right? >> Yeah. >> You're continuing to figure out, he was just telling me a little bit about what their next step is. So, just getting more and more accurate, more intelligence as they grow. So, it's the possibilities, that's what's exciting to me about Edge. I think this example is great, 'cause it's so relatable. Everybody can understand what the Edge is in this context. And it's really driven by the fact that you can put compute into so many different places now. It's more though a matter about how do you gather it? How do you do it in a way where you can actually understand and glean information and insights from it? And that, I think, is what you all are really focused on. >> Yeah, yeah, information is key. >> It is key. What's next from Dell's perspective for Edge computing technologies? what are some of the things you guys got cooking? >> Yeah, we're going to try to help customers to continue to simplify their Edge. So, to deliver those insights that they need where they need them, to do it in a really secure way. I know we talked about security but to do it in really a zero trust fashion. And to help customers to do it also in a zero IT fashion. Because in this example, it's the growers that are out there in the fields, or in your greenhouse in this sense, helping people that aren't necessarily IT specialists to be able to get all the benefits from the technology. >> So, do you think that VxRail technology could be used to optimize say the production of olive oil? I'm looking here and we have the makings of a pretty good salad. >> Yeah, you do. >> There you go. >> It obviously doesn't just apply to food production. >> Yeah, it really goes across the board. Whether we're talking about manufacturing or retail or energy, putting technology right there at the point of data creation and being able to figure out how to manage that inflow of data, be able to figure out which portion of the data is really valuable, and then driving decisions and being able to understand and intelligently make decisions for your business based on that data is really important. >> Keith, what's next? Give us, as we wrap out this segment here, what's next from a technology perspective? You mentioned a couple things you're looking into. >> Yeah, so I think automation is really going to change the way we do things. And automation within the greenhouse is truly just becoming a reality. It's funny we go back and we say, can we do this stuff? And now it's like, oh, even three years ago, I don't think we were quite ready for it, but now it's right there. So, I see us doing a lot more work with vendors like Dell and to do automatic picking, automatic scouting, all that stuff that we do by hand, do it in an automated fashion. >> And at scale, right? >> Yeah. >> That's the important part. I think when you're managing a snowflake, you can only do it to some level, and to be able to automate it and to be able to break down those silos, you're going to be able to apply it to so many parts of your business. >> Yeah, wide applicability. Guys, thank you so much for joining us, sharing the Nature Fresh, Dell story, bringing us actual product. This is so exciting. We congratulate you on how you're leveraging technology in a really innovative way. And we look forward to hearing what's next. Maybe we'll see you at Dell Technologies World next year. >> Sounds great. >> Sounds great. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, our pleasure, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So, stick around. (light upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave Valante host of the cube. We're here on the ground floor, Moscone west two sets Walter Wall coverage. Three days. We heard Laura Heisman, the senior vice president and CMO of VMware, put it all together. Great to see you. Nice, thanks for, to see you for spending time outta your very busy week. >>It is a busy week. It is a great week. >>So a lot of people were anticipating what world was gonna look like. And then the name changed to VMware Explorer. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly known ASM world. Now VMware Explorer, bold move, but Raghu teased it out on his keynote. Some reason behind it, expand on, on the thought process. The name change, obviously multi-cloud big headline here. vSphere eight partnerships with cloud hyperscale is a completely clear direction for VMware. Take us through why the name changed. Exactly, exactly. And why it's all coming together. Think he kind of hinted that he kinda said exactly, you know, exploring the new things, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But take us through that. You've architected it. >>Yeah. It is a, a change of, we have a great past at VMware and we're looking to our future at the same time. And so when you come back from a pandemic and things changing, and you're really looking at the expansion of the business now is the time because it wasn't just to come back to what we were doing before. And every company should be thinking about that, but it's what are we gonna do to actually go forward? And VMware itself is on our own journey as expanding in more into the cloud, our multi-cloud leadership and everything that we're doing there. And we wanted to make sure that our audience was able to explore that with us. And so it was the perfect opportunity we're back live. And VMware Explorer is for everyone. That's been coming Tom world for so many years. We love our community and expanding it to our new communities that maybe don't have that legacy and that history and have them here with us at >>VMware. You did a great job. I love the event here. Love how it turned out. And, and a lot of interesting things happened along the way. Prior to this event you had we're coming outta the pandemic. So it's the first face to face yes. Of the VMware community coming together, which this is an annual right of passage for everyone in the customer base. Broadcom buys VMware. No, no, if you name change it to VMware Explorer and then Broadcom buys VMware. So announces, announces the, the buyout. So, and all the certainty, uncertainty kind of hanging around it. You had to navigate those waters, take us through, what was that like? How did you pull it off? It was a huge success. Yeah, because everyone showed up. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the same event, different name, >>It's >>Same vibe. >>The only thing constant is change. Right? And so it's the, we've gotta focus on the business and our VMware customers and our partners and our community at large. And so it's really keeping the eye on what we're trying to communicate to our community. And this is for our VMware community. The VMO community is here in spades. It is wonderful to have the VMO community here. We have tons of different customers, new customers, old customers, and it's just being able to share everything VMware. And I think people are just excited about that. It's great energy on the show floor and all >>Around. And it's not like you had years to plan it. I mean, you basically six months in you, you went, you said you went on a six month listening tour the other day. What was the number one question you got on that listening tour? >>Well, definitely about the name change was one, but I would say also, it's not just the question. It was the ask of, we have we're in what we call our chapter three here. And it's really our move into multicloud and helping all of our customers with their complexities. >>So virtualization, private cloud, and now multi-cloud correct. The third chapter. >>Yeah. And the, the question and the ask is how do we let our customers and partners know what this is, help us Laura. Like that was the number one ask to me of help us explain it. And that was my challenge and opportunity coming into explore, and really to explain everything about our, if you watched the gen session yesterday, these was, was going through our multiple different chapters where we are helping our customers with their multi-cloud strategies. And so it is been that evolution gets us today and it doesn't end today. It starts today. And we keep going, >>Like, like a lot of companies, obviously in you in this new role, you inherited a hybrid world and, and you've got, you got two years of virtual under your belt, and now you're running a completely different event from that standpoint. How does the sort of the COVID online translate into new relationships and how you're cultivating those? What's that dynamic like? >>Well, let's start with how happy everyone is to see each other in person. No doubt. Yeah. It is amazing just to see people, the high fives in the hallways, the hugs, oh, some people just the fist pump, whatever people mats are there masks aren't there, right? It is something of where everyone's comfort level, but it is really just about getting everyone together and thinking about how do, how was it before the pandemic? You don't necessarily just wanna repeat coming back. And so how do you think about this from an in-person event? People have been sitting behind their screens. How do we engage and how are we interactive? Knowing that attention spans are probably a little bit shorter. People are used to getting up and going get their coffee. We have coffee in the conference rooms, right? Things like that, making the experience just a really great one for everyone. So they're comfortable back in person, but I mean, honestly the energy and seeing people's smiles on their faces, it's wonderful to be back in person. >>It's interesting, you know, the cube, we've had some transformations ourselves with the pandemic and, and living through and getting back to events, but hybrid cloud and hybrid events is now the steady state. So, and in a way it's kind of interesting how hybrid cloud and now multi-cloud the digital aspect of integrating into the physical events is now key. First class citizen thinking. Yeah. For CMOs, you guys did a great job of preserving the, the, the, the best part of it, which is face to face people seeing each other and now bringing in the digital and then extending this. So that it's an always on kind of explore. Is that the thinking behind it? Yes. What's your vision on where you go next? Because if it's not, it's not one and done and see you next year. No anymore, because no, the pandemic showed us that hybrid and digital and physical together. If design as first class citizens with each other. Yeah. One sub-optimize me obviously face to face is better than digital, but if you can't make it, it shouldn't be a bad experience. >>No, not at all. Good's your vision. And, and we're in a point where not everyone's gonna come back, that everyone has what's going on with their life. And so you have to think about it as in person and online, it's not necessarily even hybrid. And so it's, what's the experience for people that are here, you know, over 10,000 people here, you wanna be sure that that is a great experience for them. And then our viewers online, we wanna be sure that they're able to, to know what's going on, stay in touch with everything VMware and enjoy that. So the gen session that was live, we have a ton of on demand content. And this is just the start. So now we go on to essentially multiple other VMware explorers around the world. >>It's interesting. The business model of events is so tickets driven or sponsorship on site on the location that you can get almost addicted to the, no, we don't wanna do digital and kind of foreclose that you guys embraced the, the combo. So what's the attendance. I mean, probably wasn't as big as when everyone was physical. Yep. What are some of the numbers? Can you give us some D data on attendance? Some of the stats around the show, cuz obviously people showed up and drove. Yes. It wasn't a no show. That's sure a lot of great stuff here >>We have. So it's over 10,000 people that are registered and we see them here. The gen session was packed. They're walking the show floor and then I don't have the numbers yet for our online viewership, but everything that we're doing to promote it online, if anyone missed it online, the gen session is already up and they'll see more sessions going live as well as all the on demand content so that everyone can stay in the loop of what's happening. And all of our announcements, >>You're obviously not disappointed. Were you surprised? A little nervous. >>So I will say one thing that we learned from others, thank goodness others have gone before us. So as far as coming back in person is the big change is actually registration happens closer to the event, right. Is a very big change from pre so, >>So it's at the end. Yes. >>The last three weeks. And we had been told that from peers at RSA and other conferences, that that's what happens. So we were prepared for that, but people wanna know what's going on in the world. Yeah. Right. You wanna have that faith before you buy that ticket and book your travel. And so that has definitely been one of the biggest changes and one that I think that will maybe continue to see here. So that was probably the biggest thing that changed as far as what to expect as registration. But we planned for this. We knew it was not going to be as big in the past and that that's gonna be, I think the new norm, >>I think you're right. I think a lot of last minute decisions, you know, sometimes people >>Wanna know, I mean, it's, what's gonna happen another gonna be outbreak or, I mean, I think people have gotten trained to be disappointed >>Well and be flexible >>With COVID I and, and, and weirded out by things. So people get anxiety on the COVID you've seen that. Yeah. >>Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask you about the developer messaging cause that's one of the real huge takeaways. It was so strong. And you said the other day in the analyst session, the developers of the Kings and the Queens now, you know, we, when we hear developers, we think we pictured Steve Bama running around on stage developers develop, but it's different. It's a different vibe here. It it's like you're serving the Kings in the, in the Queens with, through partnerships and embracing open source. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached or, and you are approaching developer messages? Yeah, >>I, so, you know, I came from GitHub and so developers have been on my mind for many years now. And so joining VMware, I got to join this great world of enterprise software background and my developer background. And we have such an opportunity to really help our developer community understand the benefits of VMware to make them heroes just like we made sort of virtualization professionals heroes in the past, we can do the same thing with developers. We wanna be sure that we're speaking with our developer community. That was very much on stage as well as many of the sessions. And so our, we think about that with our products and what we're doing as far as product development and helping developers be able to test and learn with our products. And it's really thinking about the enterprise developer and how can we help them be successful. >>And I think, I think the beautiful thing about that message is, is that the enterprises that you guys have that great base with, they're all pretty much leaned into cl cloud native and they see it and it's starting to see the hybrid private cloud public cloud. And now with edge coming, it's pretty much a mandate that cloud native drive the architecture and that came clear in the messaging. So I have to ask you on the activations, you guys have done how much developer ops customer base mix are you seeing transfer over? Because the trend that we're seeing is is that it operations and that's generic. I'll say that word generically, but you know, your base is it almost every company has VMware. So they're also enabling inside their company developers. So how much is developer percentage to ops or is they blending in, it's almost a hundred percent, which how would you see >>That it's growing? So it's definitely growing. I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent, but it is growing. And it is one where every company is thinking about their developer. There's not enough developers in the world per the number of job openings out there. Everyone wants to innovate fast and they need to be able to invest in their developers. And we wanna be able to give them the tools to be able to do that. Cuz you want your developers to be happy and make it easier to do their jobs. And so that's what we're committed to really being able to help them do. And so we're seeing an uptick there and we're seeing, you'll see that with our product announcements and what we're doing. And so it's growing. >>The other thing I want to ask you, we saw again, we saw a lot of energy on the customer vibe. We're getting catching that here, cuz the sessions are right behind us and upstairs the floor, we've heard comments like the ecosystem's back. I mean not to anywhere, but there was a definitely an ecosystem spring to the step. If you will, amongst the partners, can you share what's happening here? Observations things that you've noticed that have been cool, that that can highlight some trends in the partner side of it. Yeah. What's going on with partners. >>Yeah. I mean our partners are so important to us. We're thrilled that they're here with us here. The expo floor, it is busy and people are visiting and reuniting and learning from each other and everything that you want to happen on the expo floor. And we've done special things throughout the week. For example, we have a whole hyperscaler day essentially happening where we wanna highlight some of the hyperscalers and let them be able to, to share with all of our attendees what they're doing. So we've given them more time within the sessions as well. And so you'll see our partner ecosystem all over the place, not just on the expo >>Floor, a lot of range of partners. Dave, you got the hyperscalers, you have the big, the big whales and cloud whales. And then you have now the second tier we call 'em super cloud type customer and partners. And you got the multi-cloud architecture, developing a lot of moving parts that are changing and growing and evolving. How do you view that? How you just gonna ride the wave? Are you watching it? Are you gonna explore it through more, you know, kind of joint marketing. I mean, what's your, how do you take this momentum that you have? And by the way, a lot of stuff's coming outta the oven. I was talking with Joan last night at the, at the press analyst event. And there's a lot of stuff coming outta the VMware oven product wise that hasn't hit the market yet. Yep. That's that's that's I mean, you can't really put a number on that sales yet, but it's got value. Yep. So you got that happening. You got this momentum behind you, you just ride the wave and what's the strategy. Well, >>It is all about how do we pass to the partner, right? So it is about the partner relationship. And we think about that our partner community is huge to us at VMware. I'm sure you've been hearing that from everyone you've been speaking to. So it's not even it's ride the wave, but it's embrace. Got it. It's embrace our partners. We need their help, our customer base. We do touch everybody and we need them to be able to support us and share what it is that we're doing from our product E evolution, our product announcements. So it's continuous education. It's there in educating us. It's definitely a two way relationship and really what we're even to get done here at explore together. It's progress that you can't always do on a zoom or a teams call or a WebEx call. You can't do that in two weeks, two years sometimes. And we're able to even have really great conversations >>Here and, and your go to market is transforming as well. You, you guys have talked about how you're reaching many different touchpoints. We've talked about developers. I mean, the other thing we've seen at events, we talked about the last minute, you know, registrations. The other thing we've seen is a lot more senior members of audiences. And now part of that is maybe okay, maybe some of the junior folks can't travel, they can't get, but, but, but why is it that the senior people come, they, they maybe they wouldn't have come before maybe because they're going through digital transformations. They wanna lean in and understand it better. But it seemed, I know you had an executive summit, you know, on day zero and Hawk 10 was here and, and so forth. So, okay. I get that. But it seems in talking to the partners, they're like, wow, the quality of the conversations that we're having has really been up leveled compared to previous years in other conferences. >>So yeah. Yeah. I think it's that they're all thinking about their transformation as well. We had the executive summit on day zero for us Monday, right? And it was a hundred plus executives invited in for a day who have stayed because they wanna hear what's going on. When I joined VMware, I said, VMware has a gift that so many companies are jealous of because we have relationships with the executives and that's what every company's startup to large company wants. And they're, they're really trusted customers of ours. And so we haven't been together and they want to be here to be able to know what's going on and join us in the meetings. And we have tons of meetings happening throughout >>The event and they're loyal and they're loyal. They're absolutely, they're active, active in a good way. They'll give you great feedback, candid feedback. Sometimes, you know, you might not wanna hear, but it's truthful. They're rare, engaging feedback gift. And they stay with you and they're loyal and they show up and they learn they're in sessions. So all good stuff. And then we only have about a minute left. Laura. I want to get your thoughts and, and end the segment with your explanation to the world around explore. What's next? What does it mean? What's gonna happen next? What does this brand turn into? Yeah. How do you see this unfolding? How do people, how should people view the VMware Explorer event brand and future activities? >>Yeah. VMware Explorer. This is just the start. So we're after this, we're going to Brazil, Barcelona, Singapore, China, and Japan. And so it is definitely a momentum that we're going on. The brand is unbelievable. It is so beautiful. We're exploring with it. We can have so much fun with this brand and we plan to continue to have fun with this brand. And it is all about the, the momentum with our sales team and our customers and our partners. And just continuing what we're doing, this is, this is just the beginning. It's not the, it's a global >>Brand explore >>Global. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>All right, Dave, that's gonna be great for the cube global activities. There you go, Laura. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on. I know you're super busy. Final question. It's kind of the trick question. What's your favorite aspect of the event? Pick a favorite child. What's going on here? Okay. In your mind, what's the most exciting thing about this event that that's near and dear to >>Your heart? So first it's hearing the feedback from the customers, but I do have to say my team as well. I mean, huge shout out to my team. They are the hub and spoke of all parts of explore. Yeah. VMware Explorer. Wouldn't be here without them. And so it's great to see it all coming >>Together. As they say in the scoring and the Olympics, the degree of difficulty for this event, given all the things going on, you guys did an amazing job. >>We witnessed >>To it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for a great booth here. It looks beautiful. Thanks for coming. Wonderful. >>Thank you for >>Having me. Okay. The cues live coverage here on the floor of Moscone west I'm Trevor Dave. Valante two sets, three days. Stay with us for more live coverage. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Okay, we're back here at HPE Discover 2022, theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day two, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. John Frey's here. He is the chief technologist for sustainable transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Justin Murrill who's the director of corporate responsibility for AMD. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> So again, I remember the days where, you know, CIOs didn't really care about the power budget. They didn't pay the power budget. You had, you know, facilities over here, IT over here and they didn't talk to each other. That's changed. Why is there so much discussion around sustainable IT today? >> It's exciting to see how much it's up leveled, as you say. I think there are a couple different trends happening but mainly, you know, the IT teams and IT leaders that are making decisions are seeing to your point how their decisions are affecting enterprise level, greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. So that connection is becoming very clear. Everything from the server processor to beyond it, those decisions have a key role. And importantly we're seeing, you know, 60% of the Fortune 500 now have climate or energy efficiency related goals. So there's a perfect storm of sorts happening where more companies setting goals, IT decision makers looking particularly at the data center because as the computational heart of an organization, it has a wealth of opportunity from an energy and a mission savings perspective. >> I'm surprised it's only 60%. I mean, that number really shocked me. So it's got to be a 100% within the next couple of years here. I would think, I mean, it's not trivial, right? You've got responsibilities in terms of reporting and you can't just mail it in, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot more disclosure happening but the goal setting is really upleveling as well. >> And the metrics involved too. Can you just scope the scale and challenge of like getting the right metrics, not when you have the goals. Does that factor in, how do you see there? What's your commentary on that? >> Yeah, I think there's, the aperture is continuing to open as metrics go, so to speak. So from an operations perspective, companies are reporting on what's referred to as scope one and scope two. And scope two is the big one from electricity, right? And then scope three is everything else. That's the supply chain and the outside of that. So a lot of implications there as well from IT decision making. >> Is there a business case for sustainable IT? I mean, you're probably not going to lower the power budget, right? But is it just, hey, it's the right thing to do. We have to do it, it's good for the brand. It'll allow us to attract people or is there a a more of a rich business case? >> So there really is a business case even just within inside the data center walls, for example. There's inefficiencies that are inherent in many of these data centers. There's really low utilization levels as well. And by reducing over provisioning and increasing utilization, there's real money to be saved in terms of equipment costs, maintenance agreement costs, software licensing costs. So actually the power consumption and the environmental piece is an added benefit but it's not the main reason. So we actually had IDC do a survey for us last year and we asked IT executives, 500 senior IT executives, were you implementing sustainable IT programs and why? My guess initially was about 40% of them would say yes. Actually the number was 96% of them. And when we asked them why they fell into three categories. The digital leaders, those that are the early adopters moving the quickest. They said we do it to attract and retain institutional investors. They've been hearing from their boards. They've been hearing from their investor relations teams and investors are starting to ask and even in a couple cases board seats are becoming contentious based on the environmental perspective of the person being nominated. This digital mainstream, the folks in the middle about 80% of the total pie, they're doing it to attract and retain customers because customers are asking them about their sustainable IT programs. If they're a non-manufacturing customer, their data center consumption is probably the largest part of their company. It's also by the way usually the most expensive real estate the company owns. So customers are asking and customers are not only asking, do you have basic programs in place? But they're asking, what are your goals to Justin's point? The customers are starting to realize that carbon goals have been vaguely defined historically. So they're asking for specificity, they're asking for transparency and by the way the science-based target initiative recently released their requirements for net zero science-based targets. And that requires significant reduction to your point before you start considering renewable energy in that balance. The third reason those digital followers, that slowest group or folks that are in industries that move the slowest, they said they were doing this to attract and retain employees. Because they recognize the data scientists, the computer science, computer engineering students that they're trying to attract want to work at a company where they can see how what they do directly contributes to purpose. And they vote with their feet. If they come on and they can't make that connection pretty quickly or if they spend a lot of their time chasing down inefficiencies in a technology infrastructure, they're not going to stay there very long. >> I mean, the mission-driven organization is definitely an employee factor. People are interested in that. The work for company is responsible, doing the right thing but that business case is interesting because I think there's recognition now more than ever before. You think you're right on. It used to be kind of like mailed it in before. Okay, we're doing some stuff. Now it's like, we all have to do it. And it's a board issue. It's a financing issue. It might be a filing issue as you guys mentioned. So that's all great. So I got to ask how you guys specifically are working together, AMD and HPE. What are you guys doing to make it more efficient? And then I'll see with Cloud and Cloud scale, there's more servers being shipped now than ever before. And more devices at the edge. What are you guys doing together specifically? >> Yeah, we've been working together, AMD and HPE on advancing sustainability for many years. I've had the opportunity to working directly with John for many years and I've learned a lot from him and your team. It's fantastic to see all the developments here. I mean, so most recently the top 500 and the green 500 list of supercomputers came out. And at the top of that list is AMD HPE systems. And it shows kind of the pinnacle of what can be possible for other data centers looking to modernize and scale. So the number one system, the fastest system in the world and the most energy efficient system in the world, the Frontier supercomputer has AMD HPE technology in it. And it just passed the exit scale barrier. I mean, I'm still just blown away by this. A billion, billion calculations per second. It's just amazing. And the research is doing around clean energy, alternative energy sources, scientific research is really exciting. So there's that. The other system that really jumps out is the LUMI system, the number three system because it's a 100% powered by renewable energy. So not only that, it takes the heat and it channels it to a nearby town and covers 20% of that town's heating needs thereby avoiding 12,400 metric tons of carbon emissions. So this system is carbon negative, right? And you just go down the list. I mean, AMD is in the top eight out of 10 most green... >> Rewind that second. So you have the heat and the power shifting to a town? >> Yes, the LUMI supercomputer has the heat from the system to an nearby town. It's like a closed loop, the idea of circular economy but with energy. And it takes that waste and it makes it an input, a resource. >> But this is the kind of innovation that's going on, right? This is the scale, this is where scale and efficiency kind of come together. That's huge. Where's that going to go? What's your perspective on where that goes next because that's a blueprint that could be replicated. >> You bet. So I think we're going to continue to see overall power consumption go up at the system level. But performance per wat is climbing much more dramatically. So I think that's going to continue to scale. It's going to require a new cooling technology. So direct liquid cooling is becoming more and more in use and customers really interested in that. There's shifting from industry standard architectures to lower end high performance computer architectures to get direct liquid cooling, higher core processors and get the performance they want in a smaller footprint. And at the same time, they're really thinking about how do we operate the infrastructure as a system not as individual piece parts. And one of the things that Frontier and LUMI do so well is they were designed from the start as a system, not as piece parts making up the system. So I think that happens. The other thing that's really critical is no one company is going to solve these challenges ourself. So one of the things I love about our partnership with AMD is we look at each other's sustainability goals before we launch 'em. We say, well, how can we help? One of AMD's goals that I'll let Justin talk about came about because HPE at the time of separation laid a really aggressive product, energy efficiency goal out, said but we're not sure how we're going to make this. And AMD said we can help. So that collaboration, we critique each other's programs, we push each other, but we work together. I like to say partnership is leadership in this. >> Well, that's a nuance point. Before you get to that solution there Justin, this system's thinking is really important. You're seeing that now with Cloud. Some of the things that GreenLake and the systems are pointing out, this holistic systems' thinking is applied to partnerships, not just the company. >> Yep. >> This is a really nuanced point but we're seeing that more and more. >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, Justin mentioned the heat reuse, same way with the national renewable energy lab. They actually did snow removal and building heating with the heat reuse. So if you're designing for example, a liquid cold system from the start, how do you make it a symbiotic relationship? There's more and more interest in co-locating data centers and greenhouses in colder environments for example. Because the principle of the circular economy is nothing is waste. So if you think it's waste or you think it's a byproduct, think about how can that be an input to something else. >> Right, so you might put a data center so you can use ambient cooling or in somewhere in the Columbia River so you can, you know, take advantage of, you know, renewable energy. What are some goals that you guys can share with us? >> So we've got some great momentum and a track record coming off of, going back to 2014, we set a 25 by 20 goal to improve the energy efficiency for our mobile processors and mobile devices, right? So laptops. And we were able to achieve a 31.7x in that timeframe. So which was twice the industry trend to that. And then moving on, we've doubled down on data center and we've set a new goal of a 30x increase in energy efficiency for our server processors and accelerators to really focused on HPC and AI training. So that's a 30x goal over 2020 to 2025 focused on these really important workloads 'cause they're fast growing. We heard yesterday 150 billion devices connected by 2025 generating a lot of data, right? So that's one of the reasons why we focused on that. 'Cause these are demanding workloads. And this represents a 2.5x increase over the historical trend, right? And fundamentally speaking, that's a 97% reduction in energy use per computation in five years. So we're very pleased. We announced an update recently. We're at 6.8x. We're on track for this goal and making great progress and showing how these, you know, solutions at a processor level and an accelerator level can be amplified, taken into HPE technology. >> Generally tech companies, you know, that compete want to rip each other's faces off. And is that the case in this space or do you guys collaborate with your competitors to share best practice? Is that beginning? Is it already there? >> There's much more collaboration in this space. This is one of the safe places I think where collaboration does occur more. >> Yeah. And we've all got to work together. A great example that was in the supply chain. When HPE first set our supply chain expectations for our suppliers around things like worker rights and environment and worker protection from a health and safety perspective. We initially had our code of conduct asked their suppliers to comply with it. Started auditing in event. And we quickly got into the factories and saw they were doing it for our workloads. But if you looked around the factory, they weren't doing in other places. And we took a step back and said, well, wait a minute. Why is that? And they said that vendor doesn't require it. So we took a step back and said let's get the industry together. We share a common supply chain. How do we have a common set of expectations and push them out to our supply chain? How to now do third party audits so the same supplier doesn't get audited by each of the major vendors and then share those audit results. And what we found was that really had a large lever effect of moving the electronic supply chain much more rapidly towards our expectations in all those areas. Well then other industries looked and said, well, wait a minute, if that worked for electronics, it'll probably work broader. And so now, the output of that is what's called the responsible business alliance across many industries taking that same approach. So that's a pre-competitive. We all have the same challenge. In many cases we share a common supply chain. So that's a great example of electronic companies coming together, design standards for things. There's a green grid group at the moment looking at liquid cooling connects. You know, we don't want every vendor to have a different connection point for liquid cooling for example. So how do we standardize that to make our customers have a easier time about looking at the technologies they want from any vendor and having common connection points. >> Right. Okay. So a lot of collaboration. Last question. How much of a difference do you think it can make? In other words, what percent of the blame pie goes to information technology? And I think regardless, you got to do your part. Will it make a dent? >> I think the sector has done a really good job of keeping that increase from going up while exponentially increasing performance. So it's been a really amazing industry effort. And moving forward, I think this is more important than ever, right? And with the slowdown of Moore's law we're seeing more gains that need to come from beyond process architecture to include packaging innovations, to power management, to just the architecture here. So the challenge of mitigating and minimizing energy growth is important. And we believe like with that 30x energy efficiency goal that it is doable but it does take a lot of collaboration and focus. >> That's a great point. I mean, if you didn't pay attention to this, IT could really become a big piece of the pie. Guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate. >> People are watching. They're paying attention at all levels. Congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Dave Vellante, John Furrier and our guests. Don't forget to go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the news. Our YouTube channel, actually go to CUBE.net. You'll get all these videos in our YouTube channel, youtube.com/SiliconANGLE. You can check out everything on demand. Keep it right there. We'll be right back. HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>>Okay. Okay. We're back at Caesar's Forum. The Snowflake summit 2022. The cubes. Continuous coverage this day to wall to wall coverage. We're so excited to have the analyst panel here, some of my colleagues that we've done a number. You've probably seen some power panels that we've done. David McGregor is here. He's the senior vice president and research director at Ventana Research. To his left is Tony Blair, principal at DB Inside and my in the co host seat. Sanjeev Mohan Sanremo. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. I'm glad we can. Thank you. You're very welcome. I wasn't able to attend the analyst action because I've been doing this all all day, every day. But let me start with you, Dave. What have you seen? That's kind of interested you. Pluses, minuses. Concerns. >>Well, how about if I focus on what I think valuable to the customers of snowflakes and our research shows that the majority of organisations, the majority of people, do not have access to analytics. And so a couple of things they've announced I think address those are helped to address those issues very directly. So Snow Park and support for Python and other languages is a way for organisations to embed analytics into different business processes. And so I think that will be really beneficial to try and get analytics into more people's hands. And I also think that the native applications as part of the marketplace is another way to get applications into people's hands rather than just analytical tools. Because most most people in the organisation or not, analysts, they're doing some line of business function. Their HR managers, their marketing people, their salespeople, their finance people right there, not sitting there mucking around in the data. They're doing a job and they need analytics in that job. So, >>Tony, I thank you. I've heard a lot of data mesh talk this week. It's kind of funny. Can't >>seem to get away from it. You >>can't see. It seems to be gathering momentum, but But what have you seen? That's been interesting. >>What I have noticed. Unfortunately, you know, because the rooms are too small, you just can't get into the data mesh sessions, so there's a lot of interest in it. Um, it's still very I don't think there's very much understanding of it, but I think the idea that you can put all the data in one place which, you know, to me, stuff like it seems to be kind of sort of in a way, it sounds like almost like the Enterprise Data warehouse, you know, Clouded Cloud Native Edition, you know, bring it all in one place again. Um, I think it's providing, sort of, You know, it's I think, for these folks that think this might be kind of like a a linchpin for that. I think there are several other things that actually that really have made a bigger impression on me. Actually, at this event, one is is basically is, um we watch their move with Eunice store. Um, and it's kind of interesting coming, you know, coming from mongo db last week. And I see it's like these two companies seem to be going converging towards the same place at different speeds. I think it's not like it's going to get there faster than Mongo for a number of different reasons, but I see like a number of common threads here. I mean, one is that Mongo was was was a company. It's always been towards developers. They need you know, start cultivating data, people, >>these guys going the other way. >>Exactly. Bingo. And the thing is that but they I think where they're converging is the idea of operational analytics and trying to serve all constituencies. The other thing, which which also in terms of serving, you know, multiple constituencies is how snowflake is laid out Snow Park and what I'm finding like. There's an interesting I economy. On one hand, you have this very ingrained integration of Anaconda, which I think is pretty ingenious. On the other hand, you speak, let's say, like, let's say the data robot folks and say, You know something our folks wanna work data signs us. We want to work in our environment and use snowflake in the background. So I see those kind of some interesting sort of cross cutting trends. >>So, Sandy, I mean, Frank Sullivan, we'll talk about there's definitely benefits into going into the walled garden. Yeah, I don't think we dispute that, but we see them making moves and adding more and more open source capabilities like Apache iceberg. Is that a Is that a move to sort of counteract the narrative that the data breaks is put out there. Is that customer driven? What's your take on that? >>Uh, primarily I think it is to contract this whole notion that once you move data into snowflake, it's a proprietary format. So I think that's how it started. But it's hugely beneficial to the customers to the users, because now, if you have large amounts of data in parquet files, you can leave it on s three. But then you using the the Apache iceberg table format. In a snowflake, you get all the benefits of snowflakes. Optimizer. So, for example, you get the, you know, the micro partitioning. You get the meta data. So, uh, in a single query, you can join. You can do select from a snowflake table union and select from iceberg table, and you can do store procedures, user defined functions. So I think they what they've done is extremely interesting. Uh, iceberg by itself still does not have multi table transactional capabilities. So if I'm running a workload, I might be touching 10 different tables. So if I use Apache iceberg in a raw format, they don't have it. But snowflake does, >>right? There's hence the delta. And maybe that maybe that closes over time. I want to ask you as you look around this I mean the ecosystems pretty vibrant. I mean, it reminds me of, like reinvent in 2013, you know? But then I'm struck by the complexity of the last big data era and a dupe and all the different tools. And is this different, or is it the sort of same wine new new bottle? You guys have any thoughts on that? >>I think it's different and I'll tell you why. I think it's different because it's based around sequel. So if back to Tony's point, these vendors are coming at this from different angles, right? You've got data warehouse vendors and you've got data lake vendors and they're all going to meet in the middle. So in your case, you're taught operational analytical. But the same thing is true with Data Lake and Data Warehouse and Snowflake no longer wants to be known as the Data Warehouse. There a data cloud and our research again. I like to base everything off of that. >>I love what our >>research shows that organisation Two thirds of organisations have sequel skills and one third have big data skills, so >>you >>know they're going to meet in the middle. But it sure is a lot easier to bring along those people who know sequel already to that midpoint than it is to bring big data people to remember. >>Mrr Odula, one of the founders of Cloudera, said to me one time, John Kerry and the Cube, that, uh, sequel is the killer app for a Yeah, >>the difference at this, you know, with with snowflake, is that you don't have to worry about taming the zoo. Animals really have thought out the ease of use, you know? I mean, they thought about I mean, from the get go, they thought of too thin to polls. One is ease of use, and the other is scale. And they've had. And that's basically, you know, I think very much differentiates it. I mean, who do have the scale, but it didn't have the ease of use. But don't I >>still need? Like, if I have, you know, governance from this vendor or, you know, data prep from, you know, don't I still have to have expertise? That's sort of distributed in those those worlds, right? I mean, go ahead. Yeah. >>So the way I see it is snowflake is adding more and more capabilities right into the database. So, for example, they've they've gone ahead and added security and privacy so you can now create policies and do even set level masking, dynamic masking. But most organisations have more than snowflake. So what we are starting to see all around here is that there's a whole series of data catalogue companies, a bunch of companies that are doing dynamic data masking security and governance data observe ability, which is not a space snowflake has gone into. So there's a whole ecosystem of companies that that is mushrooming, although, you know so they're using the native capabilities of snowflake, but they are at a level higher. So if you have a data lake and a cloud data warehouse and you have other, like relational databases, you can run these cross platform capabilities in that layer. So so that way, you know, snowflakes done a great job of enabling that ecosystem about >>the stream lit acquisition. Did you see anything here that indicated there making strong progress there? Are you excited about that? You're sceptical. Go ahead. >>And I think it's like the last mile. Essentially. In other words, it's like, Okay, you have folks that are basically that are very, very comfortable with tableau. But you do have developers who don't want to have to shell out to a separate tool. And so this is where Snowflake is essentially working to address that constituency, um, to San James Point. I think part of it, this kind of plays into it is what makes this different from the ado Pere is the fact that this all these capabilities, you know, a lot of vendors are taking it very seriously to make put this native obviously snowflake acquired stream. Let's so we can expect that's extremely capabilities are going to be native. >>And the other thing, too, about the Hadoop ecosystem is Claudia had to help fund all those different projects and got really, really spread thin. I want to ask you guys about this super cloud we use. Super Cloud is this sort of metaphor for the next wave of cloud. You've got infrastructure aws, azure, Google. It's not multi cloud, but you've got that infrastructure you're building a layer on top of it that hides the underlying complexities of the primitives and the a p I s. And you're adding new value in this case, the data cloud or super data cloud. And now we're seeing now is that snowflake putting forth the notion that they're adding a super path layer. You can now build applications that you can monetise, which to me is kind of exciting. It makes makes this platform even less discretionary. We had a lot of talk on Wall Street about discretionary spending, and that's not discretionary. If you're monetising it, um, what do you guys think about that? Is this something that's that's real? Is it just a figment of my imagination, or do you see a different way of coming any thoughts on that? >>So, in effect, they're trying to become a data operating system, right? And I think that's wonderful. It's ambitious. I think they'll experience some success with that. As I said, applications are important. That's a great way to deliver information. You can monetise them, so you know there's there's a good economic model around it. I think they will still struggle, however, with bringing everything together onto one platform. That's always the challenge. Can you become the platform that's hard, hard to predict? You know, I think this is This is pretty exciting, right? A lot of energy, a lot of large ecosystem. There is a network effect already. Can they succeed in being the only place where data exists? You know, I think that's going to be a challenge. >>I mean, the fact is, I mean, this is a classic best of breed versus the umbrella play. The thing is, this is nothing new. I mean, this is like the you know, the old days with enterprise applications were basically oracle and ASAP vacuumed up all these. You know, all these applications in their in their ecosystem, whereas with snowflake is. And if you look at the cloud, folks, the hyper scale is still building out their own portfolios as well. Some are, You know, some hyper skills are more partner friendly than others. What? What Snowflake is saying is that we're going to give all of you folks who basically are competing against the hyper skills in various areas like data catalogue and pipelines and all that sort of wonderful stuff will make you basically, you know, all equal citizens. You know the burden is on you to basically we will leave. We will lay out the A P. I s Well, we'll allow you to basically, you know, integrate natively to us so you can provide as good experience. But the but the onus is on your back. >>Should the ecosystem be concerned, as they were back to reinvent 2014 that Amazon was going to nibble away at them or or is it different? >>I find what they're doing is different. Uh, for example, data sharing. They were the first ones out the door were data sharing at a large scale. And then everybody has jumped in and said, Oh, we also do data sharing. All the hyper scholars came in. But now what snowflake has done is they've taken it to the next level. Now they're saying it's not just data sharing. It's up sharing and not only up sharing. You can stream the thing you can build, test deploy, and then monetise it. Make it discoverable through, you know, through your marketplace >>you can monetise it. >>Yes. Yeah, so So I I think what they're doing is they are taking it a step further than what hyper scale as they are doing. And because it's like what they said is becoming like the data operating system You log in and you have all of these different functionalities you can do in machine learning. Now you can do data quality. You can do data preparation and you can do Monetisation. Who do you >>think is snowflakes? Biggest competitor? What do you guys think? It's a hard question, isn't it? Because you're like because we all get the we separate computer from storage. We have a cloud data and you go, Okay, that's nice, >>but there's, like, a crack. I think >>there's uniqueness. I >>mean, put it this way. In the old days, it would have been you know, how you know the prime household names. I think today is the hyper scholars and the idea what I mean again, this comes down to the best of breed versus by, you know, get it all from one source. So where is your comfort level? Um, so I think they're kind. They're their co op a Titian the hyper scale. >>Okay, so it's not data bricks, because why they're smaller. >>Well, there is some okay now within the best of breed area. Yes, there is competition. The obvious is data bricks coming in from the data engineering angle. You know, basically the snowflake coming from, you know, from the from the data analyst angle. I think what? Another potential competitor. And I think Snowflake, basically, you know, admitted as such potentially is mongo >>DB. Yeah, >>Exactly. So I mean, yes, there are two different levels of sort >>of a on a longer term collision course. >>Exactly. Exactly. >>Sort of service now and in salesforce >>thing that was that we actually get when I say that a lot of people just laughed. I was like, No, you're kidding. There's no way. I said Excuse me, >>But then you see Mongo last week. We're adding some analytics capabilities and always been developers, as you say, and >>they trashed sequel. But yet they finally have started to write their first real sequel. >>We have M c M Q. Well, now we have a sequel. So what >>were those numbers, >>Dave? Two thirds. One third. >>So the hyper scale is but the hyper scale urz are you going to trust your hyper scale is to do your cross cloud. I mean, maybe Google may be I mean, Microsoft, perhaps aws not there yet. Right? I mean, how important is cross cloud, multi cloud Super cloud Whatever you want to call it What is your data? >>Shows? Cloud is important if I remember correctly. Our research shows that three quarters of organisations are operating in the cloud and 52% are operating across more than one cloud. So, uh, two thirds of the organisations are in the cloud are doing multi cloud, so that's pretty significant. And now they may be operating across clouds for different reasons. Maybe one application runs in one cloud provider. Another application runs another cloud provider. But I do think organisations want that leverage over the hyper scholars right they want they want to be able to tell the hyper scale. I'm gonna move my workloads over here if you don't give us a better rate. Uh, >>I mean, I I think you know, from a database standpoint, I think you're right. I mean, they are competing against some really well funded and you look at big Query barely, you know, solid platform Red shift, for all its faults, has really done an amazing job of moving forward. But to David's point, you know those to me in any way. Those hyper skills aren't going to solve that cross cloud cloud problem, right? >>Right. No, I'm certainly >>not as quickly. No. >>Or with as much zeal, >>right? Yeah, right across cloud. But we're gonna operate better on our >>Exactly. Yes. >>Yes. Even when we talk about multi cloud, the many, many definitions, like, you know, you can mean anything. So the way snowflake does multi cloud and the way mongo db two are very different. So a snowflake says we run on all the hyper scalar, but you have to replicate your data. What Mongo DB is claiming is that one cluster can have notes in multiple different clouds. That is right, you know, quite something. >>Yeah, right. I mean, again, you hit that. We got to go. But, uh, last question, um, snowflake undervalued, overvalued or just about right >>in the stock market or in customers. Yeah. Yeah, well, but, you know, I'm not sure that's the right question. >>That's the question I'm asking. You know, >>I'll say the question is undervalued or overvalued for customers, right? That's really what matters. Um, there's a different audience. Who cares about the investor side? Some of those are watching, but But I believe I believe that the from the customer's perspective, it's probably valued about right, because >>the reason I I ask it, is because it has so hyped. You had $100 billion value. It's the past service now is value, which is crazy for this student Now. It's obviously come back quite a bit below its IPO price. So But you guys are at the financial analyst meeting. Scarpelli laid out 2029 projections signed up for $10 billion.25 percent free time for 20% operating profit. I mean, they better be worth more than they are today. If they do >>that. If I If I see the momentum here this week, I think they are undervalued. But before this week, I probably would have thought there at the right evaluation, >>I would say they're probably more at the right valuation employed because the IPO valuation is just such a false valuation. So hyped >>guys, I could go on for another 45 minutes. Thanks so much. David. Tony Sanjeev. Always great to have you on. We'll have you back for sure. Having us. All right. Thank you. Keep it right there. Were wrapping up Day two and the Cube. Snowflake. Summit 2022. Right back. Mm. Mhm.