>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell tech world 2022. This is the cube alive. My name is Dave Volante. We're here with our wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We actually started last night. Uh, the, the cube after dark John furry is here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson. We're gonna talk about apex. The business value of apex flex on demand. Darren fedora is here. He's the senior vice president of Dell financial services, and we're joined by a customer and a partner Jud Barron is R and D infrastructure architect at Silicon labs. And Steve end is the regional VP of copy center comp computer center. I say that like I'm from Boston guys. Welcome to the queue. >>Thank you, >>Darren, take us through what's going on with, with apex, you got custom solutions, you know, people are gonna ask, is this just a financial gimick? What is this? >>No gimmicks, no gimmicks, Dave. So I think when we think about technology, historically customers purchased, they bought and they owned and they may have financed it and paid over time, but it was really an ownership model, especially in infrastructure and apex is about subscription. So think about Dell apex, as you can either buy, or you can subscribe to your technology and under apex subscription, we have options for custom based solutions or an outcome base. And I know today we're gonna talk about flex on demand and, and custom based solutions. So it's a high level pay for what you use when you use it with a high level of choice and flexibility. All >>Right, Steve, I'm gonna ask you to play little >>Co-host all right. I like >>This. Okay. So add some color color commentary, Jud, tell us a little bit about, uh, Silicon labs. I'm really interested in what your requirements were, your challenges and kinda why you landed on, on apex. Sure. >>Uh, Silicon labs is a semiconductor company were headquartered in Austin, 10 Xs, uh, just under a billion dollars a year right now. And, uh, at any ed shop or, uh, that, that people who are doing electronic design automation, that's not just in the semiconductor industry, but we have these HPC farms who are running, you know, millions of jobs a day. And the, a balance that you have to strike when you're doing capacity planning in one of these environments is we have these things called tape outs, and that's where we're finishing a project and there's a much higher volume of jobs that we have to run and you have to decide, do we buy for peak or do we, you know, come under that some amount and say, oh, we're gonna buy 80% of what we think >>As an over, over, over under, right. Do we over buy for peak normally, right, correct. Right >>Hard. One is geo Overy the under buy. It's always a hard decision. >>There's a tradeoff. Right? And, and so the, the challenge there is that you'll end up kind of linking the time and potentially miss a tape out window. And there's costs associated with that because you work with the Foundry and you kind of schedule based off that tape out when you're gonna deliver the photo mask to them. So anyway, the point is we in the past using a traditional like camp X, we're gonna buy a bunch of servers. We, we tend to undershoot whatever our peaks are. Cause we may have a peak every couple of months during, you know, these tape outs. Uh, but you know, sometimes tape outs, slip. And so one slips two months, another one comes in a little bit early and now you have multiple tape outs in the same months. And what was gonna be a, a small, uh, difference in from peak to what you actually purchased ends up being a big peak. And, uh, the thing that was interesting to us about flex on demand is the ability to have a commit rate that, you know, the customer can work with Dell financial services to figure out is that 80% is at 60% whatever. And they give us additional servers that we pay just when we're using them. Now I'm somewhat oversimplifying the process. Um, but we're, we gotta talk about that, >>But, but the point is, if I understand it correctly, that infrastructure was dominoing the, the time to tape out in a negative way, and you you've been able to address that more cost effectively. >>It, it can, it, it has on occasion. And so this, this basically gives us a way to lever to pull, to say, well, we can spend some additional OPEX this month and open up this additional capacity. So it's not like bursting to the cloud. Exactly. Uh, because I mean, you have to have the equipment in your data center already for you to be able to use it. But, um, it's under a traditional acquisition model. It's, it's just not a, a, a thing that was available to us before and looking at leasing or other types of, uh, you know, financing was wasn't really attractive previously, but the flex on demand model, when we first heard about it, we're like, that's very interesting. Tell me more. And we ended up using it in, in Austin, and then we built a whole data center in Asia and did the whole thing on flex on demand and >>Got it. Okay, Steve, uh, talk a little bit about your role what's going on at, at computer center and you know, why apex give us the background? Yeah. >>Um, computer center is a, one of the largest global VAs on the planet, right? Um, we, we have a lot of global and international reach, but at the end of the day, it's about one on one customer of relationships. Um, talking to them, understanding what their challenges are. And we've had a multiyear relationship with Jud. I've known you for a long time. And, and, um, typically that relationship, or initially that relationship was about collaborating, working hand in hand, kind of figure out what the solutions were that best fit their environment to solve their issues they need. And it was typically a procurement, a, a purchase based relationship and, and it worked well for a long time, but it, when Jud posed the challenge to us about kind of more pay as you go, uh, uh, subscription based modeling for, for how he want to do acquire in the future. >>Um, we just, we huddle with the Dell team collectively, um, and, and talked about what we could offer and how we could solve the problem. Uh, apex is a really nice brand today, but this was two and a half years ago, Uhhuh. Okay. So it was a little, we were a little early on on putting it together. I feel good that we were able to, to put that type of solution together for Jud and it's, and it's working today, working wonderful today. And it was good for it's good for the whenever it's good for the customer, the manufacturer and the partner altogether. It's a wonderful solution. >>So you took a little risk, but it worked out and you helped. >>Yeah, that was probably the infancy as we were growing our, as a service, think of this, you know, there's a, a lot of big words out there, Dave, right? As a service utility cloud, it doesn't matter what it is super cloud it's super cloud. It doesn't really matter. Super. This is really Jud was talking about a really important element, which is around flexibility choice. There's uncertainty oftentimes in a, in an environment, but they want to control. They still want have a level of control and leveraging partnerships, being able to deliver flexibility and choice. Don't worry about the words. Don't worry about cloud utility as a service we end up solving the customer need, right? And when we talk about flex on demand, I'll give you a little bit deeper into flex on demand. So when we think about flex on demand, it really is about understanding the customer needs and our capability and Jed reference this, determining what a baseline is. So if you think about your own utility bill, right, you, you go home and even if you're on vacation for a month, I'm sure you went on vacation for a month right. Month at a time. If I ever. >>Yeah, >>I know, but if you leave you your utility bill, even if you don't turn on a light, you still get a utility bill, it's your baseline. So we, we determine a baseline with our customers, with computer center, to understand in your environment, you're gonna use this minimum amount and that becomes your baseline. And that baseline can go as low as 25%. And up to 80% in a environment, it usually is typically in this 70, 80%. And then we determine what is gonna be optimal based on that 25 or above we charge based on the usage on a day to day basis, average by a month. And if you go up one month during your peak, you get charged at that peak. If you then a couple months are lower, then you're gonna pay only for the usage. And so for a customer that's growing has variability or seasonality. >>Um, this is a great model cuz they can still control their environment either within their own domain or um, in a colo. They also have the capability to pick anything within the Dell ISG catalog, any product, configure it to meet their environment, be able to work with a trusted partner like computer center. That it's a solution based on a partner relationship and delivers choice and flexibility on the catalog of anything Dell sells within your control of how you can configure it. So it gives this ability to say, instead of buying and instead of paying a predictable payment, a I E a financing I'm gonna pay for use. Yeah. If I turn on my light switch more or if it's during the summer in Texas where I am the ACS a lot higher. So your utilities go up and if you are a much lower because you're on vacation in Hawaii, maybe you've been in vacation in Hawaii for a month, you're gonna have a much lower and you're gonna hit your baseline. Right. So it gives flexibility choice and it gives the control back to the customer. >>Okay. So the whole ISD portfolio. So you're like the tip of the spear for future apex, right? >>We, we, we absolutely are the tip and that's why, you know, Steve referenced a couple years ago as we were still in our infancy, growing, listening to our customers, listening to our partners, we've evolved to become a more robust program, um, 35 countries today. So we can cover 35 countries over the globe, all ISG you products that are sold with a high level of flexibility and it, and it's Jud and feedback over time that we've continued to evolve this program. Mm-hmm >>So Jud you, if I understood correctly, the business impact to you was gonna better predict predictability. You didn't have to over buy or undery and take all that risk. Is that right? You maybe could quantify. Did you ever quantify that? What can you tell us about the, the business impact? Yeah, >>Sure. So, I mean, traditionally we will, uh, base our capacity demands on, uh, complex calculation that effectively just boils down to number of engineers, like head count, uh, and you know, kind of personas within that. And we figure out, okay, well how many compute do we need? And then we say, okay, well how many tape outs are we doing? And when are those tape outs gonna land? And try to figure out which months are gonna be the hot months and the design teams have to kind of vary their tape out schedules so that they don't pile up all into like July or something. And then there's not enough compute capacity. So with, with something like flex on and where I can turn additional capacity on in our HBC farm, it, you know, we just go in and make some changes to the LSF configuration and say, Hey, you know, now you've got these extra nodes available. >>We don't really have to worry about that as much. Uh, in fact, last year we, we ended up with one month where for us, it was unusual. We had five tape outs, uh, at all land within two weeks of one and a other. And they all finished, which in previous years before we had deployed that that would not have been the outcome things we would've had multiple, uh, tape outs delayed. And you know, that that's a seven figure impact for each one of those commits that we miss with the foundries. So it it's a big deal. >>Yeah. That's real dollars. And >>It is. And you know what else, this, as, as Joe's going through this, we all know their supply chain chain constraints, right? And this solves a lot of supply constraints because Joe, if you would be purchasing today, you'd be buying, you're looking at had, and you're actually having to purchase today where if you go into an apex flex on demand, you don't have that full commitment of having to purchase, but you can get ahead of the supply chain. So you can be looking six months in advance, you can be doing capacity planning and I'm Jed. I'm sure you're doing that leveraging. Like what's my future and not be worried about, I have this huge burden upfront. >>Yeah. And I mean, we have two levers right now. One is we have this extra capacity there. I can, you know, pick up the phone and, and call our Dell rep and say, Hey, I'm gonna modify my commit rate. And so now that's, you know, the new baseline I can use all day every day. Uh, and, and, you know, we still have some burstability and then separately, we can say, we want to expand the contract or, or, or, you know, basically acquire more hardware for additional burst or additional commit. Both of those things are, are options. We only had the, we had to go buy it and we need to know when we have to have it available. So you kind of back into this ordering schedule for, uh, you know, like a traditional CapEx purchase. >>So Steve, obviously Silicon labs is, is leaning again. Are you seeing any other patterns in your customer base, uh, where this is being applied? What can you share >>With us there? Yeah, it's it, I believe this is a fairly horizontal solution. Any customer can really utilize it. I mean, traditionally people would buy for two and three years worth of capacity and slowly consume it over time, but you paid up front. Right. That's how it, that's kind of how it worked. Cause I didn't want to go back to the well year after year after year. Right. So, um, you know, and I, and I think, I think if anything, the, the, the cloud, the hyperscalers has, uh, taught the world, some things taught the industry. Some things, you know, in a, in a perfect world customers like to consume and pay for what they use, you know, and in the increments that they use it as much as possible as closely aligned to that as they could get. And what I see, what I see in this, you know, cuz I, I kind of put solu in my role, I'm putting solutions and customers and bringing those together other right. And, and complimenting that with services of our own. Right. But, but what I see over time that, that almost all the manufacturers and Dells does a wonderful job, but almost all the manufacturers will be delivering technology on a subscription basis. So the more I learn, the more I know, the more I understand about how to deliver those and provide those to customers is better off we are >>Because it aligns with business value. And that's what you're seeing Jud correct. >>Steve made an interesting comment in there. Uh, you know, he was talking about the cloud and for us, there's always pressure to say, Hey, you know, can we burst in the cloud? And for Edda workloads, every time we look at this, it's a data problem. It, it, it's not a computing problem for us. EA workloads tend to generate a lot of data and you know, there's a, there are a lot of tools, uh, you know, there's just a bunch of stuff that you have to have available to run those jobs. And so you have to look at that very carefully. The company that I work for Silicon labs has been around for a long time and we have a lot of development effort. That's been put into automating and simplifying things for our design engineering and trying to, you know, manipulate that and make it to where we can burst just certain jobs out to the cloud efficiently and cost effectively. Hasn't really resonated for us. But the flex on demand thing gave a us the ability to kind of achieve some of that burst ability. I mean, not to the same level of scale of course, but you know, we, we can do that at, you know, our own speed in our own data centers with our own data. And we don't have to worry about trying to, you know, peel an onion and put something new together, make it cloud friendly. It's >>Substantially similar. We gotta go. But to Aaron bring us home. >>Yeah. Hey, I think when we think about Dell, it's about listening to our customers and our partners. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, which we continue to do. We continue to evolve our products and, and apex is around choice and flexibility in delivering to customers an option to pay for what they use. It's a great solution. Appreciate the time guys. >>Great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. All right. Thank you. Good luck. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave VoLTE for the cube. We've been back with more wall to wall coverage. John furry, you'll be back Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. You're watching the queue >>And.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell Technologies. Caitlin is great to see you again though virtually. >> This is good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well, global client executive at Equinix. Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin, let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we're trying to remember when did we last see each other of course it was virtual, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here. (all laughs) Go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had preannounced, but we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future, it really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in theCUBE, right? What's happening in IT. What's happening with our customers is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly, still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on, the management can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage-based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services. >> Talk to me a little bit Caitlin about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah, and it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about the product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything 'cause what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for, which is in the case of storage, they're looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier. So it was at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it. And I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing, and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services, this is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block storage of services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Store and Services, you've pick your type, you pick your tier, pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in this view and as little as 14 days, time to value. And for us, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage is really something it's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced some the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, let's start with you and then Tony will bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released the APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple of exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here in our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell-through. Our partners are really, really important, whether they're resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. Partner sell-through is another important piece. And of course, most important for our conversation today is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available on Equinix facilities all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this, to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell is doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to deliver, to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities storage as a service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprint of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix, talk to me about what the reception has been from from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We all already had been working together in many different ways and matters taking this partnership to the next level and what we've already seen actually all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us either first step first, it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that, right? We have the combination of the right infrastructure. And with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer and we were solving those separately and now we're solving those together. >> The spokes wanting to get out of the data center. If we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market. And as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data centers that we've seen in the last 18 months, help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier is a really important part of really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became out in rural America, out rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way for as an IT team to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible, my partners that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together? So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your least favorite way to do business. But the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are zooming with each other right now. Let's talk about, Tony I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one pro leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems. And those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading, also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large, and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank, trying to hire people and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool, the compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So some ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership, He said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that 'cause it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There were very short list to choose from. Once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony, you already hit on, the networking, the interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. 'Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of the data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that, oftentimes what actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects, the ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyperscalers and the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched. And that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base. >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for storage as a service, the next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going by directionally right now, the volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like a snowball, just going down the hill, it's just picking up speed. And with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focus teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last few months, or have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability in this partnership. >> Yeah, I would point to highly regulated industries thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a U.S. situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in is defined by the different governments around the world. You see the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted thankfully prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, the healthcare, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors we've got this covered. That's something we're able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries certainly. >> Got it, thanks for that Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed so single bill from Dell, where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex, you'll learn more about all things, APEX, really the APEX consoles, the experience. So you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner. Now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix, and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. In our remote studio, we have a quarantine crew here during this COVID-19 crisis. Here talking about the crisis and the impact to business and overall work. Joined by a great guest Dustin Kirkland, CUBE alumni, who's now the chief product officer at Apex Clearing. This COVID-19 has really demonstrated to the mainstream world stage, not just inside the industry that we've been covering for many, many years, that the idea of at-scale means something completely different, and certainly DevOps and Agile is going mainstream to survive, and people are realizing that now. No better guest than have Dustin join us, who's had experiences in open source. He's worked across the industry from Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, Google, Canonical. Dustin, welcome back to the CUBE here remotely. Looking good. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks, John. Last time we talked, I was in the studio, and here we are talking over the internet. This is a lot of fun. >> Well, I really appreciate it. I know you've been in your new role since September. A lot's changed, but one of the things why I wanted to talk with you is because you and I have talked many times around DevOps. This has been the industry conversation. We've been inside the ropes. Now you're starting to see, with this new scale of work-at-home forcing all kinds of new pressure points, giving people the realization that the entire life with digital and with technology can be different, doesn't have to be augmented with their existing life. It's a full-on technology driven impact, and I think a lot of people are learning that, and certainly, healthcare and finance are two areas, in particular, that are impacted heavily. Obviously, people are worried about the economy, and we're worried about people's lives. These are two major areas, but even outside that, there's new entrepreneurs right now that I know who are working on new ventures. You're seeing people working on new solutions. This is kind of bringing the DevOps concept to areas that quite frankly weren't there. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, without a doubt, I mean, the whole world has changed in 30 short days. We knew something was amiss in China. We knew that there was a lot of danger for people. The danger for business, though, didn't become apparent until vast swathes of the work force got sent home. And there's a number of businesses and industries that are coping relatively well with this. Certainly those who have previously adopted, or have experienced, doing work remotely, doing business by video, teleconference, having resources in the cloud, having people and expertise who are able to continue working at nearly 100% capacity in 100% remote environments. There's a lot of technology behind that, and there are some industries, and in particular, some firms, some organizations, that were really adept and were able to make that shift almost overnight. Maybe there were a couple bumps along the way, some VPN settings needed to be tweaked, and Zoom settings needed to be changed a little bit, but for many, this was a relatively smooth transition, and we may be doing this for a very long time. >> Yeah, I want to get your thoughts, before we get into some of the product stuff that you guys are working on and some other things. What's your general reaction to people in your circles, inside industry and tech industry, and outside, what are you seeing a reaction to this new scale, work from home, social distancing, isolation, what are your observations? >> Yeah, you know, I think we're in for a long haul. This is going to be the new normal for quite some time. I think it's super important to check on the people you care about, and before we get into dev and tech, check on the people you care about, especially people who either aren't yet respecting the social distancing norms and impress upon them the importance that, hey, this is about you, this is about the people you care about, it's about people you don't even know, because there are plenty of people who can carry this and not even know. So definitely check on the people that you care about. And reach out to those people and stay in touch. We all need one another more than ever, right? I manage a team, and it's super important, I think, to understand how much stress everyone is under. I've got over a dozen people that report to me. Most of them have kids and families. We start out our weekly staff meeting now, and we bring the kids in. They're curious, they want to know what's going on. First five, 10 minutes of our meeting is meet the family. And that demystifies some of what we're doing, and actually keeps the other 50 minutes of the meeting pretty quiet in our experience. But it's really humanized an aspect of work from home that's always been a bit taboo. We laugh about the reporter in Korea whose kid and his wife came in during the middle of a live on-air interview. There's certainly, I've worked from home for almost 12 years, like, those are really uncomfortable situations. Until about a month ago, when that just became the norm. And from that perspective, I think there's a humanization that we're far more understanding of people who work from home now than ever before. >> It's funny, I've heard people say, you know, my wife didn't know what I did until I started working at home. And comments to seeing people's family, and saying, wow, that's awesome, and just bringing a personal connection, not just this software mechanism that connects people for some meeting, and we've all been on those meetings. They go long, and you're sitting there, and you're turning the camera off so you can sneeze. All those things are happening. But when you start to think about, beyond it being a software mechanism, that it's a social equation right now. People have shared experiences. It's been an interesting time. >> Yeah, and just sharing those experiences. We do a think internal on our Slack channel every day. We try to post a picture. We call it hashtag recess, and at recess we take a picture of walking the dogs, or playing with the kids, or gardening, or whatever it is, going for a run. Again, just trying to make the best of this, take advantage of, you know, it's hard working from home, but trying to take advantage of some of those once in a lifetime opportunities we have here. And my team has started pub quiz on Fridays, so we're mostly spread across, in the U.S., so we're able to do this at a reasonable hour, but the last couple of Fridays, we've jumped on a Zoom, downloaded a pub trivia game, most of us a crack a beer, or glass of wine, or a cocktail, and you know, it's just, it actually puts a punctuate mark on the end of the week, puts a period on the end of the week. Because that's the other thing about this, man, if you don't have some boundaries, it's easy to go from an eight or nine hour normal day to 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, Saturday bleeds into Sunday bleeds into Monday, and then the rat race takes over. >> You got to get the exercise. You have a routine. That's my experience. What's your advice for people who are working at home for the first time? Do you have any best practices? >> I actually had a blog post on this about two weeks ago and put up almost a shopping list of some of the things that I've assembled here in the work from home environment. It's something I've been doing since 2008, so it's been there for a good long while. It's a little bit hard to accumulate all the technology that you need, but I would say, most important, have a space, some kind of space. Some people have more room or less, but even just a corner in a master bedroom with a standup desk, some space that is your own, that the family understands and respects. The other best practice is set some time boundaries. I like to start my day early. I'll try to break more a little bit for that recess, see the family some, and then knock off at a reasonable hour, so establish those boundaries. Yeah, I've got a bunch of tips in that blog post I can shoot you after this, but it's the sort of thing that, be a bit understanding, too, of other people in this situation for the first time, perhaps. So you know, offer whatever help and assistance you can, and be understanding that, man, things just aren't like they used to be. >> That's great advice. Thanks for the insights. Want to get to something that I see happening, and this always kind of happens when you see these waves where there's a downturn, or there's some sort of an event. In this case it's catastrophic in the way it vectored in like this and the impact that we just discussed. But what comes out of it is creativity around entrepreneurial activity, and certainly reinvention, businesses reforming, retrenching, resetting, whatever word, pivot, digital transformation, there's plenty of words for it. But this is the time where people can actually get a lot done. I always comment, in my last interview I did, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was sheltering in place, and Isaac Newton invented calculus, so you can actually get some work done. And you're starting to see people look at the new technology and start disrupting old incumbent markets, because now more than ever, things are exposed. The opportunity of recognition becomes clearer. So I wanted to get your thoughts on this. You're a product person, you've got a lot of product management skills, and you're currently taking this DevOps to financial market with fintech and your business, so you're applying known principles and software and tech and disrupting an existing industry. I think this is going to be a common trend for the next five years. >> Yeah, so on that first note, I think you're exactly right. There will be a reckoning, and there will be a ton of opportunities that come out of this for the already or the rapidly transformed digital native, digital focused business. There will be some that survive and thrive here. I think you're seeing a lot of this with the popularity of Zoom that has spiked recently. I think you're going to see technologies like DocuSign being used in places that, some of those places that still require wet signatures, but you just can't get to the notary and sign a, I don't know, a refi on your mortgage or something like that. And so I think you're going to see a bunch of those. The biggest opportunities are really around our education system. I've got two kids at home, and I'm in a pretty forward thinking school district in Austin, Texas, you know, but that's not the norm where our teachers are conducting classes and assignments over Zoom. I've got a kindergartener and a second grader. There's somewhat limits to what they can do with technology. I think you're going to see a lot of entrepreneurial solutions that develop in that space, and that's going to go from K through 12, and then into college. You think about how universities have had to shift and cancel classes, and what's happening with graduation. I've got a six and an eight year old, and I've been told I need to save $200,000 apiece for each of them to go to college, which is just an astounding number, especially to someone like me, who went to an inexpensive public university on a scholarship. Saving that kind of money for college, and just thinking about how much more efficient our education system might be with a lot more digital, a lot more digital education, digital testing and classes, while still maintaining the college experience, what that's going to look like in 10 years. I think we're going to see a lot of changes over these next 18 months to our educational system. >> Dustin, talk about the event dynamics. Physical events don't exist currently. Certainly, when they do come back, they should, and they will, the role of the virtual space is going to be highlighted and new opportunities will emerge. You mentioned education. People learn, not just for school, whether they're kids, whether they're professionals, learning and collaboration, work tools are going to reshape. What's your take on that marketplace, because we got to do virtual events. You can't just replicate a physical event and move it to digital. It's a complex system. >> Yeah, you're talking about an entire industry. We saw the Google Events, Google Next, Google IO, the Microsoft Events, just across the, I'm here in Austin, Texas, all of South by Southwest was canceled, which is just, it's breathtaking. When does that come back, and what does it look like? Is it a year or two or more from now? Events is where I spend my time, and when I get on a plane, and I fly somewhere, I'm usually going to a conference or trade show. Think about the sports industry. People who get on a plane, they go to an NFL game. John, I don't have all the answers, man, but I'm telling you, that entire industry is rapidly, rapidly going to evolve. I hope and pray that one day we're back to a, I can go back to a college football game again. I hope I can sit in a CUBE studio at a CUBE Con or an Open Stack or some other conference again. >> Hey, we should do a rerun, because I was watching the Patriots game last night, Tom Brady beating the Chiefs, October from last year. It was one of the best games of the season, went down to the wire, and I watched it, and I'm like, okay, that's Tom Brady, he's still in the Patriot uniform on the TV. Do we do reruns? This is the question. Right now, there's a big void for the next three months. What do we do? Do we replay the highlights from the CUBE? Do we have physical get togethers with Zoom? What's your take on how people should think about these events? >> Yeah, you know, the reruns only go so far, right? I'm a Texas Aggie, man. I could watch Johnny Football in his prime anytime. But I know what happened, and those games are just not as exciting as something that's a surprise. I'm actually curious about e-sports for the first time. What would it look like to watch a couple of kids who are really good at Madden Football on a Playstation go at it? What would other games that I've never seen look like? In our space, it's a lot more about, I think, podcasts and live content and staying connected and apprised of what's going on, making-- Oh, we locked up there for a second. It's, I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm still following you guys. I certainly see you active on social media. I'm sort of more addicted than ever to the live news, and in fact, I'm ready to start seeing some stuff that doesn't involve COVID-19, so from that perspective, man, keep churning out good content, and good content that's pertinent to the rest of our industry. >> That's great stuff. Well, Dustin, take a minute to explain what you're doing at Apex Clearing, your mission, and what are you guys excited about. >> Yeah, so Apex Clearing, we're a fintech. We're a very forward-focused, digitally-focused fintech. We are well positioned to continue servicing the needs of our clients in this environment. We went fully remote the first week of March, long before it was mandatory, and our business shifted pretty seamlessly. We worked through a couple of hiccups, provisioning extra VPN IP addresses, and upgrading a couple of service plans on some of the softwares, the service we buy, but besides that, our team has done just a marvelous job transitioning to remote. We are in the broker, dealer, and registered advisor space, so we provide the clearing services, which handles stock trades, equity trades, in the back end, and the custodial services. We actually hold, safeguard, the equities that our correspondents, we call our clients correspondents, their retail customers end up holding. So we've been around in our current form since about 2012. This was a retread of a previous company that was bought and retooled as Apex Clearing in 2012. Very shortly after that, we helped Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, a whole bunch of really forward-looking companies reinvent what it meant to buy and sell and trade securities online, and to hold assets in a robo advisor like Betterment. Today, we are definitely well-known, well-respected for how quickly and seamlessly our APIs can be used by our correspondents in building really modern e-banking and e-brokerage experiences. >> So you guys-- >> So that went-- >> Are you guys like a DevOps platform-- >> We're more like software as a service for fintech and brokerage. So our products are largely APIs that our correspondents use their own credentials to interact with, and then using our APIs, they can open accounts, which means get an account number from the systems that allows them to then fund that account, connect via ACH and other bank connectivity platforms, transfer cash into those accounts, and then start conducting trades. Some of our correspondents have that down to a 60-second experience in a mobile app. From a mobile app, you can register for that account, if you need to, take a picture of an IED, have all of that imported, add your tax information, have that account number associated with your banking account, move a couple hundred dollars into that banking account, and then if the stock market's open, start buying and selling stock in that same window. >> Great, well, I wanted to talk about this, because to the earlier bigger picture, I think people are going to be applying DevOps principles, younger entrepreneurs, but also, reborn, if you will, professionals who are old school IT or whatever, moving faster. And you wrote a blog post I want to get your thoughts on. You wrote it on April second. How we've adapted Ubuntu's time-based release cycles to fintech and software as a service. What is that all about? What's the meaning behind this post? You guys are doing something new, unique, or-- >> To this industry and to many of the people around me, even our clients and customers around me, this is a whole new world. They've never seen anything like it. To those of us who have been around Linux, open source, certainly Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, it's just standard operating procedures. There's nothing surprising about it, necessarily. But either it's some combination of the financial services world, just the nature of proprietary software, but also the concept of software as a service, SaaS, which is very different than Ubuntu or Kubernetes or Open Stack, which is released software, right. We ship software at the end of an Ubuntu cycle or a Kubernetes cycle. It's very different when you're a software as a service platform, and it's a matter of rolling out to production some changes, and those changes then going live. So, I wrote a post mainly to give some transparency, largely to our clients, our correspondents. We've got a couple hundred customers that use the Apex platform. I've met with many of them in a sort of one-on-many, one-to-one, one-on-many basis, where I'll show up and deliver the product road map, a couple of product managers will come and do a deep dive. Part of what we communicate to those customers is around, now, around our release cycles, and to many of them, it's a foreign concept that they've just never seen or heard before, and so I put together the blog post. We shared it internally, and educated the teams, and it was well-received. We shared it externally privately with a number of customers, and it was well-received, and a couple of them, actually a couple of the Silicon Valley based customers said, hey, why don't you just put this out there on Medium or on your blog or under an Apex banner, because this actually would be really well-received by others in the family, other partners in the family. So I'm happy to kind of dive into a couple of the key principles here, and we can sort of talk through it if you're interested, John. >> Well, I think the main point is you guys have a release cycle that is the speed of open source to SaaS, and fintech, which again, proprietary stuff is slower, monolithic. >> Yeah, the key principle is that we've taken this, and we've made it predictable and transparent, and we commit to these cycles. You know, most people maybe familiar with Ubuntu releasing twice a year, right, April and October, Ubuntu has released every April and October since 2004. I was involved with Ubuntu between 2008 and 2018 as an engineer, an engineering manager, and then a product manager, and eventually a VP of product at Canonical, and that was very much my life for 10 years, oriented around that. In that time, I spent a lot of time around Open Stack, which adopted a very similar model. Open Stack's released every six months, just after the Ubuntu release. A number of the members of the technical team and the committee that formed Open Stack came out of either Ubuntu or Canonical or both, and really helped influence that community. It's actually quite similar in Kubernetes, which developed independent, generally, of Ubuntu. Kubernetes releases on a quarterly basis, about every three months, and again, it's the sort of thing where it's just a cycle. It happens like clockwork every three months. So when I joined Apex and took a look at a number of the needs that we had, our correspondents had, our relationship managers, our sales team, the client-facing people in the organization, one of the biggest items that bubbled straight to the top is our customers wanted more transparency into our road maps, tighter commitments on when we're going to deliver things, and the ability to influence those. And you know what, that's not dissimilar from any product managers plight anywhere in the industry. But what I was able to do is take some of those principles that are common around Ubuntu and Kubernetes and Open Stack, which by the way, are quite familiar. We use a lot of Ubuntu and Kubernetes inside of Apex, and many of our correspondents are quite familiar with those cycles, but they'd never really seen or heard of a software as a service, a SaaS vendor, using something like that. So that's what's new. >> You've got some cycles going now. You've got schedules, so just looking here, just to get this out there, 'cause I think it's data. You did it last year in October, November, mid-cycle in January of this year. You've got a couple summits coming up? >> Yeah, that's right, we've broken it down into three cycles per year, three 16-week cycles per year. So it's a little bit more frequent than the twice a year Ubuntu, not quite as frenetic as the quarterly Kubernetes cycles. 16 weeks time three is 48. That leaves us four weeks of slack, really to handle Thanksgiving and Christmas and end of year holidays, Chinese New Year, whatever might come up. I'll tell you from experience, that's always been a struggle in the Ubuntu and Open Stack and Kubernetes world, it's hard to plan around those cycles, so what we've done here is we've actually just allocated four weeks of a slush fund to take care of that. We're at three 16-week cycles per year. We version them according to the year and then an iterator. So 20A, 20B, 20C are our three cycles in 2020, and we'll do 21A, B, and C next year. Each of those cycles has three summits. So to your point about we get together, back in the before everyone stopped traveling, we very much enjoyed twice a year getting together for CUBE con. We very much enjoyed the Open Stack summits and the various Ubuntu summits. Inside of a small company like ours, these were physical. We'd get together in Dallas or New York or Chicago or Portland, which is the four places we have offices. We were doing that basically every six weeks or so for one of these summits. Now they're all virtual. We handle them over Zoom. When they were physical, we'd do the summit in about three days of packed agendas, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Now that we've gone to virtual, we've actually spread it a little bit thinner across the week, and so we've done, we've poked some holes in the day, which has been an interesting learning experience, and I think we're all much happier with the most recent summit we did, spreading it over the course of the week, accounting for time zones, giving ourself, everyone, lunch breaks and stuff. >> Well, we'll have to keep checking in. I want to certainly collaborate with you on the virtual digital, check your progress. We're all learning, and iterating, if you will, on the value that you can do with these digital ones. Try to get that success with physical, not always easy. Appreciate, and you're looking good, looking good and safe. Stay safe, and great to check in with you, and congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. Dustin Kirkland, chief product officer at Apex Clearing. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE, checking in with a remote interview during this time when we are getting all the information of best practices on how to deal with this new at-scale, the new shift that is digital, that is impacting, and opportunities are there, certainly a lot of challenges, and hopefully, the healthcare, the finance, and the business models of these companies can continue and get back to work soon. But certainly, the people are still sheltered in place, working hard, being creative, be the coverage here in the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright electronic music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music intro) (logo background tingles) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to day three of MWC23, my name is Dave Vellante and we're here live at the Theater of Barcelona, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson, John Furrier's in our studio in Palo Alto. Lot of buzz at the show, the Mobile World Daily Today, front page, Netflix chief hits back in fair share row, Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, talking about how, "Hey, you guys want to tax us, the telcos want to tax us, well, maybe you should help us pay for some of the content. Your margins are higher, you have a monopoly, you know, we're delivering all this value, you're bundling Netflix in, from a lot of ISPs so hold on, you know, pump the brakes on that tax," so that's the big news. Lockheed Martin, FOSS issues, AI guidelines, says, "AI's not going to take over your job anytime soon." Although I would say, your job's going to be AI-powered for the next five years. We're going to talk about data, we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco stack, part of that stack is a data layer. John Kreisa is here, the CMO of Couchbase, John, you know, we've talked about all week, the disaggregation of the telco stacks, they got, you know, Silicon and operating systems that are, you know, real time OS, highly reliable, you know, compute infrastructure all the way up through a telemetry stack, et cetera. And that's a proprietary block that's really exploding, it's like the big bang, like we saw in the enterprise 20 years ago and we haven't had much discussion about that data layer, sort of that horizontal data layer, that's the market you play in. You know, Couchbase obviously has a lot of telco customers- >> John: That's right. >> We've seen, you know, Snowflake and others launch telco businesses. What are you seeing when you talk to customers at the show? What are they doing with that data layer? >> Yeah, so they're building applications to drive and power unique experiences for their users, but of course, it all starts with where the data is. So they're building mobile applications where they're stretching it out to the edge and you have to move the data to the edge, you have to have that capability to deliver that highly interactive experience to their customers or for their own internal use cases out to that edge, so seeing a lot of that with Couchbase and with our customers in telco. >> So what do the telcos want to do with data? I mean, they've got the telemetry data- >> John: Yeah. >> Now they frequently complain about the over-the-top providers that have used that data, again like Netflix, to identify customer demand for content and they're mopping that up in a big way, you know, certainly Amazon and shopping Google and ads, you know, they're all using that network. But what do the telcos do today and what do they want to do in the future? They're all talking about monetization, how do they monetize that data? >> Yeah, well, by taking that data, there's insight to be had, right? So by usage patterns and what's happening, just as you said, so they can deliver a better experience. It's all about getting that edge, if you will, on their competition and so taking that data, using it in a smart way, gives them that edge to deliver a better service and then grow their business. >> We're seeing a lot of action at the edge and, you know, the edge can be a Home Depot or a Lowe's store, but it also could be the far edge, could be a, you know, an oil drilling, an oil rig, it could be a racetrack, you know, certainly hospitals and certain, you know, situations. So let's think about that edge, where there's maybe not a lot of connectivity, there might be private networks going in, in the future- >> John: That's right. >> Private 5G networks. What's the data flow look like there? Do you guys have any customers doing those types of use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what are they doing with the data? >> Yeah, absolutely, we've got customers all across, so telco and transportation, all kinds of service delivery and healthcare, for example, we've got customers who are delivering healthcare out at the edge where they have a remote location, they're able to deliver healthcare, but as you said, there's not always connectivity, so they need to have the applications, need to continue to run and then sync back once they have that connectivity. So it's really having the ability to deliver a service, reliably and then know that that will be synced back to some central server when they have connectivity- >> So the processing might occur where the data- >> Compute at the edge. >> How do you sync back? What is that technology? >> Yeah, so there's, so within, so Couchbase and Couchbase's case, we have an autonomous sync capability that brings it back to the cloud once they get back to whether it's a private network that they want to run over, or if they're doing it over a public, you know, wifi network, once it determines that there's connectivity and, it can be peer-to-peer sync, so different edge apps communicating with each other and then ultimately communicating back to a central server. >> I mean, the other theme here, of course, I call it the software-defined telco, right? But you got to have, you got to run on something, got to have hardware. So you see companies like AWS putting Outposts, out to the edge, Outposts, you know, doesn't really run a lot of database to mind, I mean, it runs RDS, you know, maybe they're going to eventually work with companies like... I mean, you're a partner of AWS- >> John: We are. >> Right? So do you see that kind of cloud infrastructure that's moving to the edge? Do you see that as an opportunity for companies like Couchbase? >> Yeah, we do. We see customers wanting to push more and more of that compute out to the edge and so partnering with AWS gives us that opportunity and we are certified on Outpost and- >> Oh, you are? >> We are, yeah. >> Okay. >> Absolutely. >> When did that, go down? >> That was last year, but probably early last year- >> So I can run Couchbase at the edge, on Outpost? >> Yeah, that's right. >> I mean, you know, Outpost adoption has been slow, we've reported on that, but are you seeing any traction there? Are you seeing any nibbles? >> Starting to see some interest, yeah, absolutely. And again, it has to be for the right use case, but again, for service delivery, things like healthcare and in transportation, you know, they're starting to see where they want to have that compute, be very close to where the actions happen. >> And you can run on, in the data center, right? >> That's right. >> You can run in the cloud, you know, you see HPE with GreenLake, you see Dell with Apex, that's essentially their Outposts. >> Yeah. >> They're saying, "Hey, we're going to take our whole infrastructure and make it as a service." >> Yeah, yeah. >> Right? And so you can participate in those environments- >> We do. >> And then so you've got now, you know, we call it supercloud, you've got the on-prem, you've got the, you can run in the public cloud, you can run at the edge and you want that consistent experience- >> That's right. >> You know, from a data layer- >> That's right. >> So is that really the strategy for a data company is taking or should be taking, that horizontal layer across all those use cases? >> You do need to think holistically about it, because you need to be able to deliver as a, you know, as a provider, wherever the customer wants to be able to consume that application. So you do have to think about any of the public clouds or private networks and all the way to the edge. >> What's different John, about the telco business versus the traditional enterprise? >> Well, I mean, there's scale, I mean, one thing they're dealing with, particularly for end user-facing apps, you're dealing at a very very high scale and the expectation that you're going to deliver a very interactive experience. So I'd say one thing in particular that we are focusing on, is making sure we deliver that highly interactive experience but it's the scale of the number of users and customers that they have, and the expectation that your application's always going to work. >> Speaking of applications, I mean, it seems like that's where the innovation is going to come from. We saw yesterday, GSMA announced, I think eight APIs telco APIs, you know, we were talking on theCUBE, one of the analysts was like, "Eight, that's nothing," you know, "What do these guys know about developers?" But you know, as Daniel Royston said, "Eight's better than zero." >> Right? >> So okay, so we're starting there, but the point being, it's all about the apps, that's where the innovation's going to come from- >> That's right. >> So what are you seeing there, in terms of building on top of the data app? >> Right, well you have to provide, I mean, have to provide the APIs and the access because it is really, the rubber meets the road, with the developers and giving them the ability to create those really rich applications where they want and create the experiences and innovate and change the way that they're giving those experiences. >> Yeah, so what's your relationship with developers at Couchbase? >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, talk about that a little bit- >> Yeah, yeah, so we have a great relationship with developers, something we've been investing more and more in, in terms of things like developer relations teams and community, Couchbase started in open source, continue to be based on open source projects and of course, those are very developer centric. So we provide all the consistent APIs for developers to create those applications, whether it's something on Couchbase Lite, which is our kind of edge-based database, or how they can sync that data back and we actually automate a lot of that syncing which is a very difficult developer task which lends them to one of the developer- >> What I'm trying to figure out is, what's the telco developer look like? Is that a developer that comes from the enterprise and somebody comes from the blockchain world, or AI or, you know, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of developer talk here, but there's a huge opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, you know, I feel like, the telcos kind of remind me of, you know, a traditional legacy company trying to get into the developer world, you know, even Oracle, okay, they bought Sun, they got Java, so I guess they have developers, but you know, IBM for years tried with Bluemix, they had to end up buying Red Hat, really, and that gave them the developer community. >> Yep. >> EMC used to have a thing called EMC Code, which was a, you know, good effort, but eh. And then, you know, VMware always trying to do that, but, so as you move up the stack obviously, you have greater developer affinity. Where do you think the telco developer's going to come from? How's that going to evolve? >> Yeah, it's interesting, and I think they're... To kind of get to your first question, I think they're fairly traditional enterprise developers and when we break that down, we look at it in terms of what the developer persona is, are they a front-end developer? Like they're writing that front-end app, they don't care so much about the infrastructure behind or are they a full stack developer and they're really involved in the entire application development lifecycle? Or are they living at the backend and they're really wanting to just focus in on that data layer? So we lend towards all of those different personas and we think about them in terms of the APIs that we create, so that's really what the developers are for telcos is, there's a combination of those front-end and full stack developers and so for them to continue to innovate they need to appeal to those developers and that's technology, like Couchbase, is what helps them do that. >> Yeah and you think about the Apples, you know, the app store model or Apple sort of says, "Okay, here's a developer kit, go create." >> John: Yeah. >> "And then if it's successful, you're going to be successful and we're going to take a vig," okay, good model. >> John: Yeah. >> I think I'm hearing, and maybe I misunderstood this, but I think it was the CEO or chairman of Ericsson on the day one keynotes, was saying, "We are going to monetize the, essentially the telemetry data, you know, through APIs, we're going to charge for that," you know, maybe that's not the best approach, I don't know, I think there's got to be some innovation on top. >> John: Yeah. >> Now maybe some of these greenfield telcos are going to do like, you take like a dish networks, what they're doing, they're really trying to drive development layers. So I think it's like this wild west open, you know, community that's got to be formed and right now it's very unclear to me, do you have any insights there? >> I think it is more, like you said, Wild West, I think there's no emerging standard per se for across those different company types and sort of different pieces of the industry. So consequently, it does need to form some more standards in order to really help it grow and I think you're right, you have to have the right APIs and the right access in order to properly monetize, you have to attract those developers or you're not going to be able to monetize properly. >> Do you think that if, in thinking about your business and you know, you've always sold to telcos, but now it's like there's this transformation going on in telcos, will that become an increasingly larger piece of your business or maybe even a more important piece of your business? Or it's kind of be steady state because it's such a slow moving industry? >> No, it is a big and increasing piece of our business, I think telcos like other enterprises, want to continue to innovate and so they look to, you know, technologies like, Couchbase document database that allows them to have more flexibility and deliver the speed that they need to deliver those kinds of applications. So we see a lot of migration off of traditional legacy infrastructure in order to build that new age interface and new age experience that they want to deliver. >> A lot of buzz in Silicon Valley about open AI and Chat GPT- >> Yeah. >> You know, what's your take on all that? >> Yeah, we're looking at it, I think it's exciting technology, I think there's a lot of applications that are kind of, a little, sort of innovate traditional interfaces, so for example, you can train Chat GPT to create code, sample code for Couchbase, right? You can go and get it to give you that sample app which gets you a headstart or you can actually get it to do a better job of, you know, sorting through your documentation, like Chat GPT can do a better job of helping you get access. So it improves the experience overall for developers, so we're excited about, you know, what the prospect of that is. >> So you're playing around with it, like everybody is- >> Yeah. >> And potentially- >> Looking at use cases- >> Ways tO integrate, yeah. >> Hundred percent. >> So are we. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always great to see you, my friend. >> Great, thanks very much. >> All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, theCUBE will be back live from Barcelona at the theater. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of MWC23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, theCUBE.net is where all the videos are, keep it right there. (cheerful upbeat music outro)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

(techno intro music) >> Hey everyone, good afternoon from sin city. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in full swing of theCUBE's four days of coverage of AWS re:invent 2022. North of 50,000 people are here. We're nearing hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been, this is a great event. We've had great conversations. We're going to be having more conversations. One of the things we love talking about on theCUBE is AWS and its ecosystem of partners, and we are going to do just that right now. Brian Henderson joins us, Director of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Marc Trimuschat, Director of Worldwide Storage Specialists at AWS is also here. Guys, it's great to have you. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here, yeah. Feeling the energy of the show. >> Isn't it great? >> Mark: I know, amazing. >> It's amazing. It started out high and it has not dropped since Monday night. Brian, talk a little bit about Dell, what you're doing with customers on their Cloud journeys. Every customer, every industry is on one at different points in their journey, but what's Dell helping out with there? >> What we're here to talk about is the progression that we've seen, right, Cloud has changed a lot over the years and Dell has really put out a strategy to help people with their Cloud journey, kind of wherever they are. So a lot of people have moved full shift. A lot of people see that as another location, and what we're showing at the booth is the idea of taking these enterprise capabilities that people know and trust from Dell, courting them to the Cloud. In some cases not courting, but just delivering that software in the Cloud, as well as taking some of the Kubernetes integrations, EKS Anywhere, bringing that on-prem. So we've got some storage, data protection, and our Kubernetes integration to talk about at the show. >> Awesome, Mark, talk about the role from Amazon's point of view that third party vendors like Dell Technologies plays in AWS's expanding vision of Cloud. >> Great, well, we're really excited to be partnering with Dell. What we see that historically is, you know, AWS is focused on builders, people, and really the developer community who are building those components themselves, putting together really resilient infrastructure and applications. What we're seeing today is a shift also to the type of customers that we're seeing, more traditional enterprise customers, who are demanding really performance, the scalability, also the resiliency of what they had on-premises, and they want that on the Cloud as well. So with Dell, and we've got some great solutions that we're partnering on, including Dell PowerFlex that provides that linear scalability and some of the high performance capabilities that customers are demanding. And also, another big trend that we're seeing is customers being affected by things like unfortunately malware events, right, and data protection. So Dell provides some great solutions in both those areas that allow enterprise customers to really experience that mission critical capability and resiliency that they have on-premises in the Cloud. >> You know, Brian, we've been at this a long time. >> Brian: Oh yeah, great to see you again. >> And I've been hearing my whole career that storage is going to get commoditized. And I guess if you're talking about spinning discs or flash drives, it's probably true, but as Mark was just saying if you want resilient storage and things that are recoverable, that don't go down all the time, they're not commodities. >> Brian: Yeah. >> It's real engineering. And you built the stack up, so talk about how that connection, what value you bring to the Cloud and your customers. >> Yeah, so what we see is people are always looking out for enterprise grade capabilities. So there's going to be a set of offerings, and AWS has a fantastic foundation for building on top of with the marketplace. So what we're able to do is really bring, in some cases, decades worth of investment in software engineering and put these advanced capabilities, whether it be PowerFlex with its linear scale. We'll have a file offering very soon. These products have been built from the ground up to do a very unique purpose. Giving that to people in the Cloud is just another location for us, AWS being the market leader. We're the market leader in storage. So us working together for the benefit of customers is really where it's at. >> Can you double click on that, Brian, what Dell and AWS? Give us all those juicy details. >> Sure, sure, sure, so what we've done right before this show is we put a product called PowerFlex, if you go back to 2018 scale IO, and you're taking this really linear scaling software defined architecture, and you're putting that in the Cloud. What that allows you to do is get that really advanced linear scale performance. You can even span clusters across AWS regions, as well as zones. So it's a really unique capability that allows us to be able to check in and do that. And in the data protection space, it's a whole separate category. We've been at this actually quite a while. We've got about 14 exo bytes of data that's already being protected on the AWS Cloud. So we've been at that for quite a while. And the two levels are really, do you want to back that up? Do you want to take a traditional back up application, maybe it's a lift and shift, and I want to back it up the way I used to, and you can do that in the Cloud now. Or we're seeing cyber resiliency come up a lot more, and we were just talking right before, it's a question of when, not if, and so we have to give our customers the option to not only detect that failure event early, but also to separate that copy with a logical air gap. >> The cyber resiliency is a topic we are talking more and more about. It's absolutely critical. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years. To your point, Brian, it's no longer, when we think of ransomware, it's no longer are we going to get hit? It's when, it's how often. What's the damage going to be? I think I saw a stat recently that there's one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. The average cost of reaches is in the millions, so what you're doing together on cyber resiliency for businesses in any industry is table stakes. >> Yeah, we just saw a survey that, it was done earlier this year survey, 66% unfortunately of corporations have experienced a malware attack. And that's an 80% increase from last year. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So again, I think that's an opportunity. It's a threat, but an opportunity, and so the partnership with Dell really helps bridge that and helps our customers, our mutual customers, recover from those incidents. >> A lot of people might say, this is interesting. A storage guy from Amazon, a storage guy from Dell, two leaders. And one might think, why didn't they just throw in a dash three, right, but you guys are both customer driven, customer obsessed. In the field, what are customers saying to you in terms of how they want you to work together? >> Well I think there's a place for everything. When you say throw in to S3, so S3 today, one of the big trends when you're looking here is just the amount of data, you know, we hear that rhetoric, you know, we've been in storage for many years, and the data has all increased up and to the right. But, you know, AWSI, S3 today, we have over 280 trillion objects in our, driving a hundred million transactions per second right now, so that's scale. So there's always a place for those really, we have hundreds of thousands of customers running their data links, so that's always going to be that really, you know, highly reliable, highly durable, high available solution for data links. But customers, there's a lot of different applications out there. So where customers are asking are those enterpise. So we have EBS, for example, which is our great, you know, scalable block search, elastic block store. We introduced some new volume types, like GP2, GP2, and IO2VX, which will have that performance. But there's still single availability zone. So what customers have done historically is they maybe the application layer, they put an application layer replication or resiliency across, but customers on-prem, they've relied on storage layers to do that work for them. So, with PowerFlex, that'll stand either using instant storage or EBS, building on that really strong foundation, but provide that additional layer to make it easy for customers to get that resiliency and that scalability that Brian talked about. >> Yep, yep. >> Anything you can add to that? >> Yeah, I mean to your question, how do we work together is really, it's all customer driven. So we see customers that are shifting workloads in the Cloud for the first time. And it might make sense to take an object, like PowerFlex or another storage technology, maybe you want to compress it a little bit before you send it to the Cloud. Maybe you don't want to lift and shift everything. So we have a team of people that works very closely with AWS to be able to determine how are you going to shift that workload out there? Does this make the right sense for you? So it's a very collaborative relationship. And it's all very customer driven because our customers are saying, I've got assets in the public Cloud, and I want them to be managed in a similar fashion to how I'm doing that on-prem. >> So customer obsession is clearly on both sides there. We know that. >> It's where it starts. >> Exactly, exactly. Going back to PowerFlex for a second, Brian, and I'd love to get an example of a joint customer that really is showing the value of what Dell and AWS are doing together. The question for you on PowerFlex, talk about the value that it offers to the public Cloud. And why should customers start there if they are early in this journey? >> All right, yeah, so the two angles are basically, are you coming from PowerFlex or you're coming from Cloud. If you're Cloud native, the advantage would be things like a really, really advanced block file system that has been built from the ground up to be software defined and pretty much Cloud native. What you're getting is that really linear scale up to about 1,000 nodes. You can span that across regions, across availability zones, so it's highly resilient. So if there's a node failure in one site, you're going to rebuild really fast, depending on the size of that cluster. So it's a very advanced architecture that's been built to run, you know, we didn't have to change a single line of code to run this product in the Cloud because it was Cloud native by default, so. >> Well that's the thing. We also see, and you've seen that with some of the other solutions, but customers really want that. Enterprise customers are, they want us to make sure those mission critical applications are working and stay up. So they also want to use the same environment. So we were talking before, we also see use cases where maybe they're using PowerFlex on-premises today and they want to be able to replicate that to PowerFlex that's in the Cloud. So we're seeing those, and the familiarity with that infrastructure really is that easy path, if you will, for those more conservative mission critical customers. >> We've learned a lot over the years from AWS's entry into the marketplace. Two recent teams working backwards. We talk about customer obsession. And also the Cloud experience. It brings me to APEX. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: How does APEX fit in here? >> Yeah, so APEX is the categorization for all the things that we're doing around a modern Cloud experience for Dell customers. So we're taking them also on a journey, kind of as a service model. There's a do-it-yourself model. And anything that we do that touches Cloud is now being kind of put under that APEX moniker. So everything that we're doing around Project Alpine, enterprise software capabilities in the Cloud. Do you want someone else to manage it for you? Do you want it in a polo? That might be the right fit for you. It's all under that APEX umbrella and journey. So we're kind of still just getting started there, but we're seeing a lot of great traction. People want to pay as they go, you know, it's a very popular model that AWS has pretty much set the foundation for. So pay as you go, utility based pricing, this is all things our customers have been asking for. >> Yeah, so APEX, you basically set a baseline. You can dial it up, dial it down, very much pay by the drink. >> Absolutely. >> And, you know, like you said, it's early days. >> Brian: Yeah. >> But that's, again, AWS has influenced the business in a lot of different ways. >> Again, with the Dell, you know, the trust customers that Dell has built over the years and having those customers come in. We obviously are getting, again, it's an accelerated option for financial services to healthcare and all these customers that have relied on Dell for years, moving to the Cloud, having that trusted name and also that infrastructure that's similar and familiar to them. And then the resilience of the foundation that we have at AWS, I think it works really well together for those customers. >> I think it underscores to the majority of both AWS and in a lot of ways Dell, right. In the early days of Cloud, it was like uh oh, and now it's like oh, actually big market. Customers are demanding this. There's new value that we can create working together. Let's do it. >> Yeah, I mean, it didn't take us that long to get to it, but I'd say we had little fits and starts over the years, and now we've recognized like, this is where the future is. It's going to be Cloud, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be Edge, it's going to be everything. It's going to be an and world. And so just doing the right thing for customers I think is exactly where we landed. It's a great partnership. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really shines the light on the value of the Dell AWS partnership in terms of the business impact they're making? >> We have several large customers that I can't always like drop the names, but one of them is a very large video game production company. And we do a lot of work together where they're rendering maybe in house, they're sending to a shared location. They're copying data over to S3. They're able to let all their editors access that. They bring it back when it's compressed down a little bit and deliver that. We're also doing a lot of work with, I think I can say this, Amazon Thursday night football games. So what they've done there, it's a partner of ours working with AWS. All the details inside of that roaming truck that they drive around, there's a lot of Dell gear within there, and then everything connects back to AWS for that exact same kind of model. We need to get to the editors on a nightly basis. They're also streaming directly form that truck while they're enabling the editors to access a shared copy of it, so it's really powerful stuff. >> Thursday night prime is pretty cool. You know, some people are complaining cause I can't just switch channels during the commercials. It's like, first of all, you can. Second of all, the stats are unbelievable, right. You can just do your own replay when you want to. There's some cool innovations there. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Very cool innovations. I've got one more question for each of you before we wrap. Marc, a question for you, we're making a fun Instagram reel. So think about a sizzle reel of if you were to summarize the show so far, what is AWS's message to its massive audience this year? >> Well, that's a big question. Because we have such a wide, as we mentioned, such a wide ranging audience. I really see a couple key trends that we're trying to address. One is, again don't forget, I'm a storage guy, so it's going to come from an angle from data, right. So, I think it's just this volume of data and that customers are bringing into the Cloud, either moving in from enterprises today or organically, just growing. You know, a couple years ago, megabytes were a lot, and now, you know, we're talking about petabytes every day. Soon it's going to be exo bytes are going to become the norm. So the big, I'd say, point one is the trend that I see is just the volume of data. And so what we're doing to address that is obviously we talked a little bit about S3 and being able to manage volumes of data, but also things like DataZone that we introduced because customers are looking to make sure that the right governance and controls to be able to access that data. So I think that's one big thing that I see the theme for the show today. The second thing is around, as I said, really these enterprise customers really wanted to move in these mission critical applications into the Cloud, and having that infrastructure to be able to support that easily from what they're doing today and move in quickly. The third area is around data protection, making sure the data protection and malware recovery, that's the theme that we see is really unfortunately that's today. But being able to recover quickly, both having native services and native offerings just built in resiliency into the core platforms, like S3 with object application, et cetera. And also partnering with Dell with cyber recovery and some of the solutions with Dell. >> Excellent, and Brian, last question for you. A bumper sticker that succinctly and powerfully describes why Dell and AWS are such awesome partners for customer issues. >> Best of both worlds, right? >> Lisa: Mic drop. >> Mic drop, done. >> That's awesome. You said that a lot more succinctly. (people laughing) >> Enterprise in Cloud, Cloud comin' to enterprise. >> Yeah, leader meets leader, right? >> Yeah, right. >> Love it, leader meets leader. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. We appreciate hearing the latest from AWS and Dell from a storage perspective and from a Cloud perspective and how you're helping customers manage the explosion of data that's not going to slow down. We really appreciate you coming by the set. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> My pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (techno music)

>>We're back at Super Computing, 22 in Dallas, winding down the final day here. A big show floor behind me. Lots of excitement out there, wouldn't you say, Dave? Just >>Oh, it's crazy. I mean, any, any time you have NASA presentations going on and, and steampunk iterations of cooling systems that the, you know, it's, it's >>The greatest. I've been to hundreds of trade shows. I don't think I've ever seen NASA exhibiting at one like they are here. Dave Nicholson, my co-host. I'm Paul Gell, in which with us is Satish Ier. He is the vice president of emerging services at Dell Technologies and Satit, thanks for joining us on the cube. >>Thank you. Paul, >>What are emerging services? >>Emerging services are actually the growth areas for Dell. So it's telecom, it's cloud, it's edge. So we, we especially focus on all the growth vectors for, for the companies. >>And, and one of the key areas that comes under your jurisdiction is called apex. Now I'm sure there are people who don't know what Apex is. Can you just give us a quick definition? >>Absolutely. So Apex is actually Dells for a into cloud, and I manage the Apex services business. So this is our way of actually bringing cloud experience to our customers, OnPrem and in color. >>But, but it's not a cloud. I mean, you don't, you don't have a Dell cloud, right? It's, it's of infrastructure as >>A service. It's infrastructure and platform and solutions as a service. Yes, we don't have our own e of a public cloud, but we want to, you know, this is a multi-cloud world, so technically customers want to consume where they want to consume. So this is Dell's way of actually, you know, supporting a multi-cloud strategy for our customers. >>You, you mentioned something just ahead of us going on air. A great way to describe Apex, to contrast Apex with CapEx. There's no c there's no cash up front necessary. Yeah, I thought that was great. Explain that, explain that a little more. Well, >>I mean, you know, one, one of the main things about cloud is the consumption model, right? So customers would like to pay for what they consume, they would like to pay in a subscription. They would like to not prepay CapEx ahead of time. They want that economic option, right? So I think that's one of the key tenets for anything in cloud. So I think it's important for us to recognize that and think Apex is basically a way by which customers pay for what they consume, right? So that's a absolutely a key tenant for how, how we want to design Apex. So it's absolutely right. >>And, and among those services are high performance computing services. Now I was not familiar with that as an offering in the Apex line. What constitutes a high performance computing Apex service? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, this conference is great, like you said, you know, I, there's so many HPC and high performance computing folks here, but one of the things is, you know, fundamentally, if you look at high performance computing ecosystem, it is quite complex, right? And when you call it as an Apex HPC or Apex offering offer, it brings a lot of the cloud economics and cloud, you know, experience to the HPC offer. So fundamentally, it's about our ability for customers to pay for what they consume. It's where Dell takes a lot of the day to day management of the infrastructure on our own so that customers don't need to do the grunge work of managing it, and they can really focus on the actual workload, which actually they run on the CHPC ecosystem. So it, it is, it is high performance computing offer, but instead of them buying the infrastructure, running all of that by themself, we make it super easy for customers to consume and manage it across, you know, proven designs, which Dell always implements across these verticals. >>So what, what makes the high performance computing offering as opposed to, to a rack of powered servers? What do you add in to make it >>Hpc? Ah, that's a great question. So, I mean, you know, so this is a platform, right? So we are not just selling infrastructure by the drink. So we actually are fundamentally, it's based on, you know, we, we, we launch two validated designs, one for life science sales, one for manufacturing. So we actually know how these PPO work together, how they actually are validated design tested solution. And we also, it's a platform. So we actually integrate the softwares on the top. So it's just not the infrastructure. So we actually integrate a cluster manager, we integrate a job scheduler, we integrate a contained orchestration layer. So a lot of these things, customers have to do it by themself, right? If they're buy the infrastructure. So by basically we are actually giving a platform or an ecosystem for our customers to run their workloads. So make it easy for them to actually consume those. >>That's Now is this, is this available on premises for customer? >>Yeah, so we, we, we make it available customers both ways. So we make it available OnPrem for customers who want to, you know, kind of, they want to take that, take that economics. We also make it available in a colo environment if the customers want to actually, you know, extend colo as that OnPrem environment. So we do both. >>What are, what are the requirements for a customer before you roll that equipment in? How do they sort of have to set the groundwork for, >>For Well, I think, you know, fundamentally it starts off with what the actual use case is, right? So, so if you really look at, you know, the two validated designs we talked about, you know, one for, you know, healthcare life sciences, and one other one for manufacturing, they do have fundamentally different requirements in terms of what you need from those infrastructure systems. So, you know, the customers initially figure out, okay, how do they actually require something which is going to require a lot of memory intensive loads, or do they actually require something which has got a lot of compute power. So, you know, it all depends on what they would require in terms of the workloads to be, and then we do havet sizing. So we do have small, medium, large, we have, you know, multiple infrastructure options, CPU core options. Sometimes the customer would also wanna say, you know what, as long as the regular CPUs, I also want some GPU power on top of that. So those are determinations typically a customer makes as part of the ecosystem, right? And so those are things which would, they would talk to us about to say, okay, what is my best option in terms of, you know, kind of workloads I wanna run? And then they can make a determination in terms of how, how they would actually going. >>So this, this is probably a particularly interesting time to be looking at something like HPC via Apex with, with this season of Rolling Thunder from various partners that you have, you know? Yep. We're, we're all expecting that Intel is gonna be rolling out new CPU sets from a powered perspective. You have your 16th generation of PowerEdge servers coming out, P C I E, gen five, and all of the components from partners like Invidia and Broadcom, et cetera, plugging into them. Yep. What, what does that, what does that look like from your, from your perch in terms of talking to customers who maybe, maybe they're doing things traditionally and they're likely to be not, not fif not 15 G, not generation 15 servers. Yeah. But probably more like 14. Yeah, you're offering a pretty huge uplift. Yep. What, what do those conversations look >>Like? I mean, customers, so talking about partners, right? I mean, of course Dell, you know, we, we, we don't bring any solutions to the market without really working with all of our partners, whether that's at the infrastructure level, like you talked about, you know, Intel, amd, Broadcom, right? All the chip vendors, all the way to software layer, right? So we have cluster managers, we have communities orchestrators. So we usually what we do is we bring the best in class, whether it's a software player or a hardware player, right? And we bring it together as a solution. So we do give the customers a choice, and the customers always want to pick what you they know actually is awesome, right? So they that, that we actually do that. And, you know, and one of the main aspects of, especially when you talk about these things, bringing it as a service, right? >>We take a lot of guesswork away from our customer, right? You know, one of the good example of HPC is capacity, right? So customers, these are very, you know, I would say very intensive systems. Very complex systems, right? So customers would like to buy certain amount of capacity, they would like to grow and, you know, come back, right? So give, giving them the flexibility to actually consume more if they want, giving them the buffer and coming down. All of those things are very important as we actually design these things, right? And that takes some, you know, customers are given a choice, but it actually, they don't need to worry about, oh, you know, what happens if I actually have a spike, right? There's already buffer capacity built in. So those are awesome things. When we talk about things as a service, >>When customers are doing their ROI analysis, buying CapEx on-prem versus, versus using Apex, is there a point, is there a crossover point typically at which it's probably a better deal for them to, to go OnPrem? >>Yeah, I mean, it it like specifically talking about hpc, right? I mean, why, you know, we do have a ma no, a lot of customers consume high performance compute and public cloud, right? That's not gonna go away, right? But there are certain reasons why they would look at OnPrem or they would look at, for example, Ola environment, right? One of the main reasons they would like to do that is purely have to do with cost, right? These are pretty expensive systems, right? There is a lot of ingress, egress, there is a lot of data going back and forth, right? Public cloud, you know, it costs money to put data in or actually pull data back, right? And the second one is data residency and security requirements, right? A lot of these things are probably proprietary set of information. We talked about life sciences, there's a lot of research, right? >>Manufacturing, a lot of these things are just, just in time decision making, right? You are on a factory floor, you gotta be able to do that. Now there is a latency requirement. So I mean, I think a lot of things play, you know, plays into this outside of just cost, but data residency requirements, ingress, egress are big things. And when you're talking about mass moments of data you wanna put and pull it back in, they would like to kind of keep it close, keep it local, and you know, get a, get a, get a price >>Point. Nevertheless, I mean, we were just talking to Ian Coley from aws and he was talking about how customers have the need to sort of move workloads back and forth between the cloud and on-prem. That's something that they're addressing without posts. You are very much in the, in the on-prem world. Do you have, or will you have facilities for customers to move workloads back and forth? Yeah, >>I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, Dell's cloud strategy is multi-cloud, right? So we basically, so it kind of falls into three, I mean we, some customers, some workloads are suited always for public cloud. It's easier to consume, right? There are, you know, customers also consume on-prem, the customers also consuming Kohler. And we also have like Dell's amazing piece of software like storage software. You know, we make some of these things available for customers to consume a software IP on their public cloud, right? So, you know, so this is our multi-cloud strategy. So we announced a project in Alpine, in Delta fold. So you know, if you look at those, basically customers are saying, I love your Dell IP on this, on this product, on the storage, can you make it available through, in this public environment, whether, you know, it's any of the hyper skill players. So if we do all of that, right? So I think it's, it shows that, you know, it's not always tied to an infrastructure, right? Customers want to consume the best thumb and if we need to be consumed in hyperscale, we can make it available. >>Do you support containers? >>Yeah, we do support containers on hpc. We have, we have two container orchestrators we have to support. We, we, we have aner similarity, we also have a container options to customers. Both options. >>What kind of customers are you signing up for the, for the HPC offerings? Are they university research centers or is it tend to be smaller >>Companies? It, it's, it's, you know, the last three days, this conference has been great. We probably had like, you know, many, many customers talking to us. But HC somewhere in the range of 40, 50 customers, I would probably say lot of interest from educational institutions, universities research, to your point, a lot of interest from manufacturing, factory floor automation. A lot of customers want to do dynamic simulations on factory floor. That is also quite a bit of interest from life sciences pharmacies because you know, like I said, we have two designs, one on life sciences, one on manufacturing, both with different dynamics on the infrastructure. So yeah, quite a, quite a few interest definitely from academics, from life sciences, manufacturing. We also have a lot of financials, big banks, you know, who wants to simulate a lot of the, you know, brokerage, a lot of, lot of financial data because we have some, you know, really optimized hardware we announced in Dell for, especially for financial services. So there's quite a bit of interest from financial services as well. >>That's why that was great. We often think of Dell as, as the organization that democratizes all things in it eventually. And, and, and, and in that context, you know, this is super computing 22 HPC is like the little sibling trailing around, trailing behind the super computing trend. But we definitely have seen this move out of just purely academia into the business world. Dell is clearly a leader in that space. How has Apex overall been doing since you rolled out that strategy, what, two couple? It's been, it's been a couple years now, hasn't it? >>Yeah, it's been less than two years. >>How are, how are, how are mainstream Dell customers embracing Apex versus the traditional, you know, maybe 18 months to three year upgrade cycle CapEx? Yeah, >>I mean I look, I, I think that is absolutely strong momentum for Apex and like we, Paul pointed out earlier, we started with, you know, making the infrastructure and the platforms available to customers to consume as a service, right? We have options for customers, you know, to where Dell can fully manage everything end to end, take a lot of the pain points away, like we talked about because you know, managing a cloud scale, you know, basically environment for the customers, we also have options where customers would say, you know what, I actually have a pretty sophisticated IT organization. I want Dell to manage the infrastructure, but up to this level in the layer up to the guest operating system, I'll take care of the rest, right? So we are seeing customers who are coming to us with various requirements in terms of saying, I can do up to here, but you take all of this pain point away from me or you do everything for me. >>It all depends on the customer. So we do have wide interest. So our, I would say our products and the portfolio set in Apex is expanding and we are also learning, right? We are getting a lot of feedback from customers in terms of what they would like to see on some of these offers. Like the example we just talked about in terms of making some of the software IP available on a public cloud where they'll look at Dell as a software player, right? That's also is absolutely critical. So I think we are giving customers a lot of choices. Our, I would say the choice factor and you know, we are democratizing, like you said, expanding in terms of the customer choices. And I >>Think it's, we're almost outta our time, but I do wanna be sure we get to Dell validated designs, which you've mentioned a couple of times. How specific are the, well, what's the purpose of these designs? How specific are they? >>They, they are, I mean I, you know, so the most of these valid, I mean, again, we look at these industries, right? And we look at understanding exactly how would, I mean we have huge embedded base of customers utilizing HPC across our ecosystem in Dell, right? So a lot of them are CapEx customers. We actually do have an active customer profile. So these validated designs takes into account a lot of customer feedback, lot of partner feedback in terms of how they utilize this. And when you build these solutions, which are kind of end to end and integrated, you need to start anchoring on something, right? And a lot of these things have different characteristics. So these validated design basically prove to us that, you know, it gives a very good jump off point for customers. That's the way I look at it, right? So a lot of them will come to the table with, they don't come to the blank sheet of paper when they say, oh, you know what I'm, this, this is my characteristics of what I want. I think this is a great point for me to start from, right? So I think that that gives that, and plus it's the power of validation, really, right? We test, validate, integrate, so they know it works, right? So all of those are hypercritical. When you talk to, >>And you mentioned healthcare, you, you mentioned manufacturing, other design >>Factoring. We just announced validated design for financial services as well, I think a couple of days ago in the event. So yep, we are expanding all those DVDs so that we, we can, we can give our customers a choice. >>We're out of time. Sat ier. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. At the center of the move to subscription to everything as a service, everything is on a subscription basis. You really are on the leading edge of where, where your industry is going. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you, Paul. Thank you Dave. >>Paul Gillum with Dave Nicholson here from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, wrapping up the show this afternoon and stay with us for, they'll be half more soon.

(bright 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 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 manager 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 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, and 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, you know, 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, it's 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 cure 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 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 involve 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, 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 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 you're keeping a 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- >> So, I'll start and then, pitch me, you know, Travis, 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 great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> 80%? >> 80%. >> That's a big number. Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, 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 provide solutions that helps support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives, Edge core to cloud. The other thing that we're here, as a big differentiator for Dell and Jeff touched 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 customer 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 you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera that an end-to-end capability that 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, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your R&D, and 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 have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate and 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 a 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 (indistinct). >> Thank you, sir. Thanks, 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 and collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music) >> 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 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. >> PowerProtects Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted we chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been on 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 transition from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> Got installed it by myself, learn it by myself, with very intuitive >> While restoring a machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage PowerProtect 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 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. >> 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 extreme important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager. >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection and cyber security 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. Specifically, address these customer concerns. 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 all the 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 Multi-cloud Protection." Made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat 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 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)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The technology spending outlook is not pretty and very much unpredictable right now. The negative sentiment is of course being driven by the macroeconomic factors in earnings forecasts that have been coming down all year in an environment of rising interest rates. And what's worse, is many people think earnings estimates are still too high. But it's understandable why there's so much uncertainty. I mean, technology is still booming, digital transformations are happening in earnest, leading companies have momentum and they got cash runways. And moreover, the CEOs of these leading companies are still really optimistic. But strong guidance in an environment of uncertainty is somewhat risky. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we share takeaways from ETR'S latest spending survey, which was released to their private clients on October 21st. Today, we're going to review the macro spending data. We're going to share where CIOs think their cloud spend is headed. We're going to look at the actions that organizations are taking to manage uncertainty and then review some of the technology companies that have the most positive and negative outlooks in the ETR data set. Let's first look at the sample makeup from the latest ETR survey. ETR captured more than 1300 respondents in this latest survey. Its highest figure for the year and the quality and seniority of respondents just keeps going up each time we dig into the data. We've got large contributions as you can see here from sea level executives in a broad industry focus. Now the survey is still North America centric with 20% of the respondents coming from overseas and there is a bias toward larger organizations. And nonetheless, we're still talking well over 400 respondents coming from SMBs. Now ETR for those of you who don't know, conducts a quarterly spending intention survey and they also do periodic drilldowns. So just by the way of review, let's take a look at the expectations in the latest drilldown survey for IT spending. Before we look at the broader technology spending intentions survey data, followers of this program know that we reported on this a couple of weeks ago, spending expectations that peaked last December at 8.3% are now down to 5.5% with a slight uptick expected for next year as shown here. Now one CIO in the ETR community said these figures could be understated because of inflation. Now that's an interesting comment. Real GDP in the US is forecast to be around 1.5% in 2022. So these figures are significantly ahead of that. Nominal GDP is forecast to be significantly higher than what is shown in that slide. It was over 9% in June for example. And one would interpret that survey respondents are talking about real dollars which reflects inflationary factors in IT spend. So you might say, well if nominal GDP is in the high single digits this means that IT spending is below GDP which is usually not the case. But the flip side of that is technology tends to be deflationary because prices come down over time on a per unit basis, so this would be a normal and even positive trend. But it's mixed right now with prices on hard to find hardware, they're holding more firms. Software, you know, software tends to be driven by lock in and competition and switching costs. So you have those countervailing factors. Services can be inflationary, especially now as wages rise but certain sectors like laptops and semis and NAND are seeing less demand and maybe even some oversupply. So the way to look at this data is on a relative basis. In other words, IT buyers are reporting 280 basis point drop in spending sentiment from the end of last year. Now, something that we haven't shared from the latest drilldown survey which we will now is how IT bar buyers are thinking about cloud adoption. This chart shows responses from 419 IT execs from that drilldown and depicts the percentage of workloads their organizations have in the cloud today and what the expectation is through years from now. And you can see it's 27% today and it's nearly 50% in three years. Now the nuance is if you look at the question, that ETRS, it's they asked about IaaS and PaaS, which to some could include on-prem. Now, let me come back to that. In particular, financial services, IT, telco and retail and services industry cited expectations for the future for three years out that we're well above the average of the mean adoption levels. Regardless of how you interpret this data there's most certainly plenty of public cloud in the numbers. And whether you believe cloud is an operating environment or a place out there in the cloud, there's plenty of room for workloads to move into a cloud model well beyond mid this decade. So you know, as ho hum as we've been toward recent as-a-service models announced from the likes of HPE with GreenLake and Dell with APEX, the timing of those offerings may be pretty good actually. Now let's expand on some of the data that we showed a couple weeks ago. This chart shows responses from 282 execs on actions their organizations are taking over the next three months. And the Deltas are quite traumatic from the early part of this charter than the left hand side. The brown line is hiring freezes, the black line is freezing IT projects, and the green line is hiring increases and that red line is layoffs. And we put a box around the sort of general area of the isolation economy timeframe. And you can see the wild swings on this chart. By mid last summer, people were kickstarting things and more hiring was going on and the black line shows IT project freezes, you know, came way down. And now, or on the way back up as our hiring freezes. So we're seeing these wild swings in organizational actions and strategies which underscores the lack of predictability. As with supply chains around the world, this is likely due to the fact that organizations, pre pandemic they were optimized for efficiency, not a lot of waste rather than business resilience. Meaning, you know, there's again not a lot of fluff in the system or if there was it got flushed out during the pandemic. And so the need for productivity and automation is becoming increasingly important, especially as actions that solely rely on headcount changes are very, very difficult to manage. Now, let's dig into some of the vendor commentary and take a look at some of the names that have momentum and some of the others possibly facing headwinds. Here's a list of companies that stand out in the ETR survey. Snowflake, once again leads the pack with a positive spending outlook. HashiCorp, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Freshworks and ServiceNow, they round out the top six. Microsoft, they seem to always be in the mix, as do a number of other security and related companies including CyberArk, Zscaler, CloudFlare, Elastic, Datadog, Fortinet, Tenable and to a certain extent Akamai, you can kind of put them sort of in that group. You know, CDN, they got to worry about security. Everybody worries about security, but especially the CDNs. Now the other software names that are highlighted here include Workday and Salesforce. On the negative side, you can see Dynatrace saw some negatives in the latest survey especially around its analytics business. Security is generally holding up better than other sectors but it's still seeing greater levels of pressure than it had previously. So lower spend. And defections relative to its observability peers, that's really for Dynatrace. Now the other one that was somewhat surprising is IBM. You see the IBM was sort of in that negative realm here but IBM reported an outstanding quarter this past week with double digit revenue growth, strong momentum in software, consulting, mainframes and other infrastructure like storage. It's benefiting from the Kyndryl restructuring and it's on track IBM to deliver 10 billion in free cash flow this year. Red Hat is performing exceedingly well and growing in the very high teens. And so look, IBM is in the midst of a major transformation and it seems like a company that is really focused now with hybrid cloud being powered by Red Hat and consulting and a decade plus of AI investments finally paying off. Now the other big thing we'll add is, IBM was once an outstanding acquire of companies and it seems to be really getting its act together on the M&A front. Yes, Red Hat was a big pill to swallow but IBM has done a number of smaller acquisitions, I think seven this year. Like for example, Turbonomic, which is starting to pay off. Arvind Krishna has the company focused once again. And he and Jim J. Kavanaugh, IBM CFO, seem to be very confident on the guidance that they're giving in their business. So that's a real positive in our view for the industry. Okay, the last thing we'd like to do is take 12 of the companies from the previous chart and plot them in context. Now these companies don't necessarily compete with each other, some do. But they are standouts in the ETR survey and in the market. What we're showing here is a view that we like to often show, it's net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis. And it's a measure, that's a measure of the net percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular platform. So ETR asks, are you spending more or less? They subtract less from the mores. I mean I'm simplifying, but that's what net score is. Now in the horizontal axis, that is a measure of overlap which is which measures presence or pervasiveness in the dataset. So bigger the better. We've inserted a table that informs how the dots in the companies are positioned. These companies are all in the green in terms of net score. And that right most column in the table insert is indicative of their presence in the dataset, the end. So higher, again, is better for both columns. Two other notes, the red dotted line there you see at 40%. Anything over that indicates an highly elevated spending momentum for a given platform. And we purposefully took Microsoft out of the mix in this chart because it skews the data due to its large size. Everybody else would cluster on the left and Microsoft would be all alone in the right. So we take them out. Now as we noted earlier, Snowflake once again leads with a net score of 64%, well above the 40% line. Having said that, while adoption rates for Snowflake remains strong the company's spending velocity in the survey has come down to Earth. And many more customers are shifting from where they were last year and the year before in growth mode i.e. spending more year to year with Snowflake to now shifting more toward flat spending. So a plus or minus 5%. So that puts pressure on Snowflake's net score, just based on the math as to how ETR calculates, its proprietary net score methodology. So Snowflake is by no means insulated completely to the macro factors. And this was seen especially in the data in the Fortune 500 cut of the survey for Snowflake. We didn't show that here, just giving you anecdotal commentary from the survey which is backed up by data. So, it showed steeper declines in the Fortune 500 momentum. But overall, Snowflake, very impressive. Now what's more, note the position of Streamlit relative to Databricks. Streamlit is an open source python framework for developing data driven, data science oriented apps. And it's ironic that it's net score and shared in is almost identical to those of data bricks, as the aspirations of Snowflake and Databricks are beginning to collide. Now, however, the Databricks net score has held up very well over the past year and is in the 92nd percentile of its machine learning and AI peers. And while it's seeing some softness, like Snowflake in the Fortune 500, Databricks has steadily moved to the right on the X axis over the last several surveys even though it was unable to get to the public markets and do an IPO during the lockdown tech bubble. Let's come back to the chart. ServiceNow is impressive because it's well above the 40% mark and it has 437 shared in on this cut, the largest of any company that we chose to plot here. The only real negative on ServiceNow is, more large customers are keeping spending levels flat. That's putting a little bit pressure on its net score, but that's just conservatives. It's kind of like Snowflakes, you know, same thing but in a larger scale. But it's defections, the ServiceNow as in Snowflake as well. It's defections remain very, very low, really low churn below 2% for ServiceNow, in fact, within the dataset. Now it's interesting to also see Freshworks hit the list. You can see them as one of the few ITSM vendors that has momentum and can potentially take on ServiceNow. Workday, on this chart, it's the other big app player that's above the 40% line and we're only showing Workday HCM, FYI, in this graphic. It's Workday Financials, that offering, is below the 40% line just for reference. Now let's talk about CrowdStrike. We attended Falcon last month, CrowdStrike's user conference and we're very impressed with the product visio, the company's execution, it's growing partnerships. And you can see in this graphic, the ETR survey data confirms the company's stellar performance with a net score at 50%, well above the 40% mark. And importantly, more than 300 mentions. That's second only to ServiceNow, amongst the 12 companies that we've chosen to highlight here. Only Microsoft, which is not shown here, has a higher net score in the security space than CrowdStrike. And when it comes to presence, CrowdStrike now has caught up to Splunk in terms of pervasion in the survey. Now CyberArk and Zscaler are the other two security firms that are right at that 40% red dotted line. CyberArk for names with over a hundred citations in the security sector, is only behind Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Zscaler for its part in the survey is seeing strong momentum in the Fortune 500, unlike what we said for Snowflake. And its pervasion on the X-axis has been steadily increasing. Again, not that Snowflake and CrowdStrike compete with each other but they're too prominent names and it's just interesting to compare peers and business models. Cloudflare, Elastic and Datadog are slightly below the 40% mark but they made the sort of top 12 that we showed to highlight here and they continue to have positive sentiment in the survey. So, what are the big takeaways from this latest survey, this really quick snapshot that we've taken. As you know, over the next several weeks we're going to dig into it more and more. As we've previously reported, the tide is going out and it's taking virtually all the tech ships with it. But in many ways the current market is a story of heightened expectations coming down to Earth, miscalculations about the economic patterns and the swings and imperfect visibility. Leading Barclays analyst, Ramo Limchao ask the question to guide or not to guide in a recent research note he wrote. His point being, should companies guide or should they be more cautious? Many companies, if not most companies, are actually giving guidance. Indeed, when companies like Oracle and IBM are emphatic about their near term outlook and their visibility, it gives one confidence. On the other hand, reasonable people are asking, will the red hot valuations that we saw over the last two years from the likes of Snowflake, CrowdStrike, MongoDB, Okta, Zscaler, and others. Will they return? Or are we in for a long, drawn out, sideways exercise before we see sustained momentum? And to that uncertainty, we add elections and public policy. It's very hard to predict right now. I'm sorry to be like a two-handed lawyer, you know. On the one hand, on the other hand. But that's just the way it is. Let's just say for our part, we think that once it's clear that interest rates are on their way back down and we'll stabilize it under 4% and we have clarity on the direction of inflation, wages, unemployment and geopolitics, the wild swings and sentiment will subside. But when that happens is anyone's guess. If I had to peg, I'd say 18 months, which puts us at least into the spring of 2024. What's your prediction? You know, it's almost that time of year. Let's hear it. Please keep in touch and let us know what you think. Okay, that's it for now. Many thanks to Alex Myerson. He is on production and he manages the podcast for us. Ken Schiffman as well is our newest addition to the Boston Studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoff is our EIC, editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE. He does some wonderful editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. Or feel free to comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. If you haven't checked that out, you should. It'll give you an advantage. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (soft upbeat music)

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

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

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