(intro music) >> Good afternoon guys and gals. Welcome back to The Strip, Las Vegas. It's "theCUBE" live day four of our coverage of "AWS re:Invent". Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, we've had some awesome conversations the last four days. I can't believe how many people are still here. The AWS ecosystem seems stronger than ever. >> Yeah, last year we really noted the ecosystem, you know, coming out of the isolation economy 'cause everybody had this old pent up demand to get together and the ecosystem, even last year, we were like, "Wow." This year's like 10x wow. >> It really is 10x wow, it feels that way. We're going to have a 10x wow conversation next. We're bringing back DataStax to "theCUBE". Please welcome Thomas Bean, it's CMO. Thomas welcome to "theCUBE". >> Thanks, thanks a lot, thanks for having me. >> Great to have you, talk to us about what's going on at DataStax, it's been a little while since we talked to you guys. >> Indeed, so DataStax, we are the realtime data company and we've always been involved in technology such as "Apache Cassandra". We actually created to support and take this, this great technology to the market. And now we're taking it, combining it with other technologies such as "Apache Pulse" for streaming to provide a realtime data cloud. Which helps our users, our customers build applications faster and help them scale without limits. So it's all about mobilizing all of this information that is going to drive the application going to create the awesome experience, when you have a customer waiting behind their mobile phone, when you need a decision to take place immediately to, that's the kind of data that we, that we provide in the cloud on any cloud, but especially with, with AWS and providing the performance that technologies like "Apache Cassandra" are known for but also with market leading unit economics. So really empowering customers to operate at speed and scale. >> Speaking of customers, nobody wants less data slower. And one of the things I think we learned in the in the pan, during the pandemic was that access to realtime data isn't nice to have anymore for any business. It is table stakes, it's competitive advantage. There's somebody right behind in the rear view mirror ready to take over. How has the business model of DataStax maybe evolved in the last couple of years with the fact that realtime data is so critical? >> Realtime data has been around for some time but it used to be really niches. You needed a lot of, a lot of people a lot of funding actually to, to implement these, these applications. So we've adapted to really democratize it, made super easy to access. Not only to start developing but also scaling. So this is why we've taken these great technologies made them serverless cloud native on the cloud so that developers could really start easily and scale. So that be on project products could be taken to the, to the market. And in terms of customers, the patterns is we've seen enterprise customers, you were talking about the pandemic, the Home Depot as an example was able to deliver curbside pickup delivery in 30 days because they were already using DataStax and could adapt their business model with a real time application that combines you were just driving by and you would get the delivery of what exactly you ordered without having to go into the the store. So they shifted their whole business model. But we also see a real strong trend about customer experiences and increasingly a lot of tech companies coming because scale means success to them and building on, on our, on our stack to, to build our applications. >> So Lisa, it's interesting. DataStax and "theCUBE" were started the same year, 2010, and that's when it was the beginning of the ascendancy of the big data era. But of course back then there was, I mean very little cloud. I mean most of it was on-prem. And so data stacks had, you know, had obviously you mentioned a number of things that you had to do to become cloud friendly. >> Thomas: Yes. >> You know, a lot of companies didn't make it, make it through. You guys just raised a bunch of dough as well last summer. And so that's been quite a transformation both architecturally, you know, bringing the customers through. I presume part of that was because you had such a great open source community, but also you have a unique value problem. Maybe you could sort of describe that a little. >> Absolutely, so the, I'll start with the open source community where we see a lot of traction at the, at the moment. We were always very involved with, with the "Apache Cassandra". But what we're seeing right now with "Apache Cassandra" is, is a lot of traction, gaining momentum. We actually, we, the open source community just won an award, did an AMA, had a, a vote from their readers about the top open source projects and "Apache Cassandra" and "Apache Pulse" are part of the top three, which is, which is great. We also run a, in collaboration with the Apache Project, the, a series of events around the, around the globe called "Cassandra Days" where we had tremendous attendance. We, some of them, we had to change venue twice because there were more people coming. A lot of students, a lot of the big users of Cassandra like Apple, Netflix who spoke at these, at these events. So we see this momentum actually picking up and that's why we're also super excited that the Linux Foundation is running the Cassandra Summit in in March in San Jose. Super happy to bring that even back with the rest of the, of the community and we have big announcements to come. "Apache Cassandra" will, will see its next version with major advances such as the support of asset transactions, which is going to make it even more suitable to more use cases. So we're bringing that scale to more applications. So a lot of momentum in terms of, in terms of the, the open source projects. And to your point about the value proposition we take this great momentum to which we contribute a lot. It's not only about taking, it's about giving as well. >> Dave: Big committers, I mean... >> Exactly big contributors. And we also have a lot of expertise, we worked with all of the members of the community, many of them being our customers. So going to the cloud, indeed there was architectural work making Cassandra cloud native putting it on Kubernetes, having the right APIs for developers to, to easily develop on top of it. But also becoming a cloud company, building customer success, our own platform engineering. We, it's interesting because actually we became like our partners in a community. We now operate Cassandra in the cloud so that all of our customers can benefit from all the power of Cassandra but really efficiently, super rapidly, and also with a, the leading unit economies as I mentioned. >> How will the, the asset compliance affect your, you know, new markets, new use cases, you know, expand your TAM, can you explain that? >> I think it will, more applications will be able to tap into the power of, of "NoSQL". Today we see a lot on the customer experience as IOT, gaming platform, a lot of SaaS companies. But now with the ability to have transactions at the database level, we can, beyond providing information, we can go even deeper into the logic of the, of the application. So it makes Cassandra and therefore Astra which is our cloud service an even more suitable database we can address, address more even in terms of the transaction that the application itself will, will support. >> What are some of the business benefits that Cassandra delivers to customers in terms of business outcomes helping businesses really transform? >> So Cassandra brings skill when you have millions of customers, when you have million of data points to go through to serve each of the customers. One of my favorite example is Priceline, who runs entirely on our cloud service. You may see one offer, but it's actually everything they know about you and everything they have to offer matched while you are refreshing your page. This is the kind of power that Cassandra provide. But the thing to say about "Apache Cassandra", it used to be also a database that was a bit hard to manage and hard to develop with. This is why as part of the cloud, we wanted to change these aspects, provide developers the API they like and need and what the application need. Making it super simple to operate and, and, and super affordable, also cost effective to, to run. So the the value to your point, it's time to market. You go faster, you don't have to worry when you choose the right database you're not going to, going to have to change horse in the middle of the river, like sixth month down the line. And you know, you have the guarantee that you're going to get the performance and also the best, the best TCO which matters a lot. I think your previous person talking was addressing it. That's also important especially in the, in a current context. >> As a managed service, you're saying, that's the enabler there, right? >> Thomas: Exactly. >> Dave: That is the model today. I mean, you have to really provide that for customers. They don't want to mess with, you know, all the plumbing, right? I mean... >> Absolutely, I don't think people want to manage databases anymore, we do that very well. We take SLAs and such and even at the developer level what they want is an API so they get all the power. All of of this powered by Cassandra, but now they get it as a, and it's as simple as using as, as an API. >> How about the ecosystem? You mentioned the show in in San Jose in March and the Linux Foundation is, is hosting that, is that correct? >> Yes, absolutely. >> And what is it, Cassandra? >> Cassandra Summit. >> Dave: Cassandra Summit >> Yep. >> What's the ecosystem like today in Cassandra, can you just sort of describe that? >> Around Cassandra, you have actually the big hyperscalers. You have also a few other companies that are supporting Cassandra like technologies. And what's interesting, and that's been a, a something we've worked on but also the "Apache Project" has worked on. Working on a lot of the adjacent technologies, the data pipelines, all of the DevOps solutions to make sure that you can actually put Cassandra as part of your way to build these products and, and build these, these applications. So the, the ecosystem keeps on, keeps on growing and actually the, the Cassandra community keeps on opening the database so that it's, it's really easy to have it connect to the rest of the, the rest environment. And we benefit from all of this in our Astra cloud service. >> So things like machine learning, governance tools that's what you would expect in the ecosystem forming around it, right? So we'll see that in March. >> Machine learning is especially a very interesting use case. We see more and more of it. We recently did a, a nice video with one of our customers called Unifour who does exactly this using also our abstract cloud service. What they provide is they analyze videos of sales calls and they help actually the sellers telling them, "Okay here's what happened here was the customer sentiment". Because they have proof that the better the sentiment is, the shorter the sell cycle is going to be. So they teach the, the sellers on how to say the right things, how to control the thing. This is machine learning applied on video. Cassandra provides I think 200 data points per second that feeds this machine learning. And we see more and more of these use cases, realtime use cases. It happens on the fly when you are on your phone, when you have a, a fraud maybe to detect and to prevent. So it is going to be more and more and we see more and more of these integration at the open source level with technologies like even "Feast" project like "Apache Feast". But also in the, in, in the partners that we're working with integrating our Cassandra and our cloud service with. >> Where are customer conversations these days, given that every company has to be a data company. They have to be able to, to democratize data, allow access to it deep into the, into the organizations. Not just IT or the data organization anymore. But are you finding that the conversations are rising up the, up the stack? Is this, is this a a C-suite priority? Is this a board level conversation? >> So that's an excellent question. We actually ran a survey this summer called "The State of the Database" where we, we asked these tech leaders, okay what's top of mind for you? And real time actually was, was really one of the top priorities. And they explained for the one that who call themselves digital leaders that for 71% of them they could correlate directly the use of realtime data, the quality of their experience or their decision making with revenue. And that's really where the discussion is. And I think it's something we can relate to as users. We don't want the, I mean if the Starbucks apps take seconds to to respond there will be a riot over there. So that's, that's something we can feel. But it really, now it's tangible in, in business terms and now then they take a look at their data strategy, are we equipped? Very often they will see, yeah, we have pockets of realtime data, but we're not really able to leverage it. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> For ML use cases, et cetera. So that's a big trend that we're seeing on one end. On the other end, what we're seeing, and it's one of the things we discussed a lot at the event is that yeah cost is important. Growth at all, at all cost does not exist. So we see a lot of push on moving a lot of the workloads to the cloud to make them scale but at the best the best cost. And we also see some organizations where like, okay let's not let a good crisis go to waste and let's accelerate our innovation not at all costs. So that we see also a lot of new projects being being pushed but reasonable, starting small and, and growing and all of this fueled by, by realtime data, so interesting. >> The other big topic amongst the, the customer community is security. >> Yep. >> I presume it's coming up a lot. What's the conversation like with DataStax? >> That's a topic we've been working on intensely since the creation of Astra less than two years ago. And we keep on reinforcing as any, any cloud provider not only our own abilities in terms of making sure that customers can manage their own keys, et cetera. But also integrating to the rest of the, of the ecosystem when some, a lot of our customers are running on AWS, how do we integrate with PrivateLink and such? We fit exactly into their security environment on AWS and they use exactly the same management tool. Because this is also what used to cost a lot in the cloud services. How much do you have to do to wire them and, and manage. And there are indeed compliance and governance challenges. So that's why making sure that it's fully connected that they have full transparency on what's happening is, is a big part of the evolution. It's always, security is always something you're working on but it's, it's a major topic for us. >> Yep, we talk about that on pretty much every event. Security, which we could dive into, but we're out of time. Last question for you. >> Thomas: Yes. >> We're talking before we went live, we're both big Formula One fans. Say DataStax has the opportunity to sponsor a team and you get the whole side pod to, to put like a phrase about DataStax on the side pod of this F1 car. (laughter) Like a billboard, what does it say? >> Billboard, because an F1 car goes pretty fast, it will be hard to, be hard to read but, "Twice the performance at half the cost, try Astra a cloud service." >> Drop the mike. Awesome, Thomas, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank for having me. >> Pleasure having you guys on the program. For our guest, Thomas Bean and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching "theCUBE" live from day four of our coverage. "theCUBE", the leader in live tech coverage. (outro music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBES Wall-To-Wall coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual reinvented our coverage over three weeks over cloud. We're looking into the next decade of innovation. And with me are two great guests, Chris Wiborg is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph is the General Manager for Americas Technology for Partners AWS. Folks, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you. >> Great to be here today. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. It's great to see you and Chris, before we get into the partnership, I want to ask kind of what you've seen in the market, with the increased focus on data, digital business, obviously the last nine months, people have really shifted their priorities. How have you seen customers responding? >> Yeah, it's sort of strange to say this at a time. It's really hard for all of us dealing with a global pandemic, but the market has picked up in many ways and perhaps that's not surprising given a lot of folks have started to shift things to more virtual way of working and the data hasn't slowed down. And so with that we've also seen a little bit of a shift and this is part of the reason behind the announcement we're making of trying to accelerate for many organizations projects that had originally been planned to put in a data center to moving more towards the cloud. Part of this as a CapEx to OpEX shift. But I think it also in some cases all is under this umbrella of digital transformation, where they're trying to accelerate new ways of doing things while in some cases, people can't even get into data centers in some cases anymore. And so how can you do that more remotely? How can you go to a model to loot more Self-Help? And all that leads up to part of what we're going to be talking about today. So the market has been very busy because again, data growth hasn't slowed down. I think the one thing that I'd add to that is you'd see an uptake in terms of focus and interest in some of the things that we do because of all the ransomware attacks that are out there. That's another piece of it. >> I want to get into the announcement as well, but I mean, you're right, Chris, it's a very hexy, it's tough as it is for the climate. It's a good time to be in tech. It's even better if you're in cloud. So Sabina, I wonder if you'd had... I think you must have a lot of people in the ecosystem really wanting to work with you. >> We do, I think with the proliferation of data. And data across many different silos I think the key is, how do we provide customers more value from this data, that way they can make it optimal for their business. So, yes, we do have a lot of different partners wanting to work. >> Okay, so we're all busy. I feel like we've never worked so hard in our lives, but so Cohesity and AWS, you've announced a strategic collaboration. Tell me more about it. Why did you choose to collaborate together Chris, other than AWS is the number one cloud platform. What were some of the other factors that we should be focused on? >> I think it's the Sabina, please do chime in here as well. I think the big portion of it, Dave has to do with this shared vision that we have around. Really what we believe is the next chapter in data management. And so how do we make it simple for organizations to not only protect and secure and manage their data, but also get more value out of it and derive more value from that data, which is kind of what Sabina was hinting at. And a lot of the reasons that we think this is such a good match, given all the varying services Amazon has, that you can build off, given what Cohesity does. So Sabina, I know you going to start with customers. You always interviewed enough Amazon, and it was only us to know that's really the starting point, the prison from which you looked, but so from that prison, from your perspective, what's the collaboration? Why the collaboration? What does it bring for customers? >> So, you know, I've the saying here. I think there was a lot of alignment, both in terms of culture and working backwards from customers, customers session. And really kind of understand, what can we do right into the Intelligent Data Management Solution to enterprise and mid-sized customers and provide simplicity, flexibility, and reduced total cost of ownership. And that's where Cohesity and AWS, we really shared that vision. I would say over the last couple of years, Cohesity of course, has been a partner of AWS for quite some time now. And then when we started to talk to each other, we understood that these were some of the things we wanted to not just address, but also provide an opportunity for customers. So that's why we collaborated in this unique way to bring forward a Data Management as a service solution for our customers. >> All right, Chris, I really want to dig into this a little bit more because I've talked to a number of CEOs that have said, boy, our business resilience strategy was way to focused on DRA maybe too much focus on backup. We're now a digital business, because every business, so you're out of business, if you're not a digital business overnight. And so this notion of data management and data management as a service, what problems are you really focused on solving there? >> I think two things, Dave and let's go back to a Cohesity after solving as a company. And that's the problem with what we call mass data fragmentation, where you have data stored in many different locations, prem, cloud, edge, et cetera, typically in many different pieces of infrastructure. So there's a lot of silos going on there, and it's really hard to get your hands around the entirety of what you have. And first of all, make sure it is protected. And there's some compliance implications to that and so on. And then also again, how can you not only protected, but do more with it and get better transparency and more value out of that data that today might be dark, might be opaque because a, do you know where it is? And b, even if you do, what more can you do with it? And so that's kind of the first problem we're setting out to solve. And why as we look at moving to doing what we're doing with AWS, providing an alternate consumption option is also really important, we think. So some people have staff and skills to roll their own, to do their selves and cohesively we'll continue to support those customers, obviously, as we do today. But what we also want to provide a new option for those that want to make that shift from CapEx to OpEX, and more from a management of their environment doing it themselves to having somebody else manage it for them, and really reducing that cost and overhead associated with running your own data center effectively. And so bringing valuable Cohesity leaders to the cloud is the second piece of that, where we want to make sure we carry that bigger vision along where we're not just doing one thing, we're doing multiple things. And so Data Management in our sense is not just about backup, although that's the first thing you'll see. We're also going to tackle that dr problem, you raised as well. If you look closely a couple of weeks ago, we made an announcement around what we're doing with a product we call Site Continuity on the on-prem world, guess what that's going to come real soon to AWS. And then beyond that files and objects, test data management and as we'll get to a little bit later more when we start leveraging the value and the power of some of the advanced services, AWS hasn't been to the table for things like compliance and so on. >> Great, thank you for that. And so Sabina, I mean, we run on AWS, we're small, but still we go into the console and there's this buffet of services and we have a lot of options. So, I wonder if you could talk about customer choice, your philosophy around that, why that's important, how you're providing different deployment models. And the example I would use is why is backup as a service? Not enough, why do we need to go beyond that? >> First of all, thank you very much for being our customer. >> Welcome. >> And I think the key behind this solution that Cohesity is building on top of AWS is to really provide one platform and one user interface. Yes, backup as a service is the first service that we will start with and we are starting with, but I think we all realize that customers do many different things, but get data. They do disaster recovery, they have file services, Dev and test, and then the value add services, which we'll talk about in a bit around analytics compliance, machine learning and so on. So those are all the different value, at least we want to provide the date with that data. In addition of course, backup as a service disaster recovery, as a service file services and so on. Well the backup services comprehensive that we are launching with and provide some rich protection across all of this data, but at the end of the day, it's customer's choice whether they want to manage your own data and infrastructure or Cohesity kind of manage this across the infrastructure for them both in a hybrid model and in a cloud model. And we have many customers kind of wanting to look at both options because they had both environments. I don't know Chris, if you want to talk about Dolby a little bit, but I can certainly get into it. I don't know if you want to get a little bit into Dolby and how they're using it. >> Yeah, that's a great example, actually Sabina. So, I think Dave, Sabina is suggesting, one of our early design partners on this was Dolby and they're an existing Cohesity customer. Today they're very happy what we're doing on-prem. And so I asked them why would you be interested in managing data also in the cloud? And his answer was, well, "look for me, it's really all about the self-help option. "I have a lot of clients, I do well centrality, "I have a lot of clients in my organization, "but I want to point to do their own thing "and not have to directly manage them. "This is going to be the perfect option for them. "They can just go sign up, connect and protect "to get started. All right, Step one." >> I talked to another customer who commented well in this sort of hybrid configuration that Sabina suggests the stuff that they have on-prem today. They'll probably protect on-prem, but workloads like let's say Microsoft 365, mailboxes or something like that, it's in the cloud. Why would they back haul that into their data center? Why not just protect it there in the cloud itself? It just seems to make sense. And then we also have customers we're talking to that, there are large distributed organizations where maybe the stuff that's in the branch office, the remote office, they want to backup to the cloud because of land back, haul costs and so on. It's easier to do it that way. And then the central stuff is still central. So we going to give as Sabina said, customers that choice. You can do cloud only if you want to, you can do prem only with us, or you can do both. And we expect a lot of customers loaded up in a third bucket and that sort of hybrid scenario and let them choose why they do it and use that combination. The great thing is when you go to Cohesity Helio's, that's going to be the control center, if you will, for both things on-prem and also in this new DevOps offering in cloud. So one experience from a manageability standpoint, that's just the only thing I'd add to Sabina's answer about what's great about this and why you want to do more than just one thing. Well, if you sort of solve this problem of infrastructure silos and in your traditional data center, and now you're bringing in the cloud, why we create silos and best of breed things all over again, don't you want to consolidate some of that for ease of use and lower cost of ownership as well. And so that's one of the things we think we're going to bring to the table. It's pretty unique versus letting customers pick and choose, five or 10 different solutions and trying to merge those together. We think we've got a better way. >> Got it. So then let's come back to some of the comments you were making about added value. So what the customers really do with data, with data management as a service and AWS that maybe they couldn't do before. >> So the way I look at it, Cohesity and AWS are custodians of this data, on behalf of the customer, ultimately it is their data, but we want to unlock the value from this data versus having it being in different silos, different locations and so on. So the vision that we have, which we are on the road right now, in terms of unlocking this data is to really add additional services, maybe compliance as a service, analytics as a service, machine learning as a service. So let's just kind of walk through these three things, So if you think about compliance as a service, using Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to really kind of discover, classify and protect sensitive data. And if you think about analytics as a service, using AWS Glue to run ETL on this data, Amazon Athena to run sequel queries and then potentially create data warehouse using Amazon Redshift. Then if you really start thinking about other machine learning services, right across the AWS machine learning stack, if you look at it at a high level, customers could use Amazon text tracks, Amazon transcribe to extract value from the Metadata to allow deeper business specific content that they need for their different solutions they have to end customers. For example, another logical use case could be Amazon comprehend medical using that to kind of distract extract medical information from this data. And then finally customers can also use Amazon SageMaker to build advanced machine learning models, to really start deriving even additional value and gain business insights from this data. So those are kind of the things we have in our mind, in terms of compliance to service, machine learning as the service, analytics as a service. And then of course, I want to bring in Chris here to talk a little bit about what they plan to do with their MarketPlace, the Cohesity Marketplace. >> Yeah, no, I think, it's a great Sabina. So we've always had this concept at Cohesity, Dave, of being able to do more with your data. And you've seen express so far in our marketplace, which is still going to be there. We just think plugging some of the additional services that Sabina mentioned. When you have a center of gravity for your data in the cloud is going to make that concept even more powerful. And so day one, when we GA just right now, actually during re:Invent you going to be able to do it yourself. You'll have data backed up into the cloud. For example, you can apply those services if you have the skill to do that. But over time, working in conjunction with Amazon, the goal is to be able to make those services something that you would just go in again to Helios and say, for example, turn on the compliance service. And behind the scenes we're invoking and it was on Macie doing all right thing with all the data under management like Cohesity already. And so you just get them to report back out if that's what you're aiming to do. And so we going to try and make this as simple and easy to use as possible, leveraging the power of all the great things that Amazon has does through the API that they have combined with what we do in an engineering effort that we'll be driving with our guidance, to really give a great value, add customers far beyond the insurance policy you get with backup and being able to do more with that data and add value to your organization. >> And that's okay. So you've announced at re:Invent GA of Cohesity dataprotect how should customers think about getting started? >> Well, they can get started today, since we're an LGA I just go to www.queasy.com and I have the ability to go ahead there and actually join in on a free trial and to get started. And if they decided to convert them, then they can go from there. So risk-free gone in, check it out. We welcome feedback as always from our customers and then stay tuned because right around the corner after we're done with one offer as part of the bigger DevOps umbrella, you'll see disaster recovery and additional services, really the whole value of the Cohesity platform over time delivered through AWS. >> As a service bring it on guys, Sabina and Chris, thanks so much, really appreciate you coming on and thank you for watching everyone. Keep it right there with digging deep into AWS and the re:Invent ecosystem. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World-Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Sam Groccot. Who's the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, great to see you. Welcome. >> Great to be here, Dave. >> All right, we're going to talk generally about cloud in the coming decade. And really how the cloud model is evolving. But I want to specifically ask Sam about the as a service news that Dell's making at DTW. What those solutions look like. How they're going to evolve. Maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Does that sound good? >> Yeah, sounds great. Let's dive right in. >> All right, let's do that. So look, you've come from the world of disrupter. When you joined Isilon, they got acquired by EMC and then Dell. So, you've been on both sides of the competitive table. And cloud is obviously a major force actually I'd say the major disruptive force in our industry. Let's talk about how Dell is responding to the cloud trend generally. Then we'll get into the announcements. >> Yeah, certainly. And you're right I've been on both sides of this. There is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so. How customers and partners are really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the value of moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen it happen over the last decade or so. And it's happening at a more frequent pace. There's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. Kind of a new lifestyle so to speak, around as a service. Because when you go to the cloud, that's the only way they roll. Is you get an as a service experience. So, that really has started to come into the data center. As organizations are moving specific workloads or applications to the cloud. Of hey, how do I get that in an on-premise experience? I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic and COVID-19. Has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker and more agilely by moving some applications to the cloud. Because frankly on-prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they'd like to see. We're seeing that macrotrend accelerate. I think we're in good shape to take advantage of that as we go forward. >> Well, that brings us to the hard news of what you're calling Project Apex i.e your as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >> Yeah. So, Project Apex is one of our big announcements and that's really where we're targeting. How we're bringing together and unifying our product development. Our sales go-to-market. Our marketing go-to-market. Everything coming together underneath Project Apex. Which is our as a service and cloud like experience. Look, we know in that world where customers we're constantly evaluating which applications stay on-prem. Which applications and workloads should go to the cloud. I think the market has certainly voted clearly that it's going to be both. It's going to be a hybrid multicloud world. But what they absolutely are clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience. Regardless of if they're on-prem or off-prem. And that's where really the traditional on-prem solutions fall down. Because it's just too darn complex still. They've got many different tools, managing many different applications that oversee their cloud operations, their various infrastructure, whether it's server or compute or networking. They all run different tools. So, it gets very, very complex. It also very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast as the cloud. It can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention to buy more. You typically got to get a sales rep in-house to come in and extend your environment and grow your environment. And then of course, the traditional method is very CapEx heavy. In a world where organizations are really trying to preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility traditionally or going forward that they'd like to see on that front. So, what they want to see is a consistent operating experience for their on and off-prem environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage, report and grow and do commerce across that environment. Regardless of if it's on or off-prem. They want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on-prem, it's not going to be a click of a button. But you should be able to buy and procure that with a click of a button. And then very quickly, within less than a handful of days. That equipment should be stood up deployed and running in their environment. And then finally, it's got to deliver this more flexible finance model. Whether it's leveraging a flexible subscription models or OPEX friendly models. Customers are really looking for that more OPEX friendly approach. Which we're going to be providing with Project Apex. So very, very excited about kind of the goals and the aspirations of Project Apex. We're going to see a lot of it come to market early next year. I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >> So, when I was looking through the announcement and sort of squinting through it. The three things jumped out and you've definitely hit on those. One is choice. But sometimes you don't want to give customers too much choice. So, it's got to be simple and it's got to be consistent. So, it feels like you're putting this abstraction layer over your entire portfolio and trying to hit on those three items. Which is somewhat of a balancing act. Is that right? >> Yeah. No, you're exactly right. The kind of the pillars of the Project Apex value proposition so to speak, is simplicity choice and consistency. So, we've got to deliver that simple kind of end to end journey view of their entire cloud and as a service experience. It needs to span our entire portfolio. So, whether it's servers, storage or networking or PCs or cloud. All of that needs to be integrated into essentially a large, single web interface that gives you visibility across all of that. And of course, the ease of scale up and frankly scaled down. Should be able to do that in real time through the system. Choice is a big, big factor for us. We've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure any way they want. Clearly they can consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure customers only pay for what they use. So, highly metered environment. Pay as they go. You leverage subscriptions. Essentially give them that OPEX flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the real key differentiator is that consistent operating experience. So, whether you move workloads on or off-prem. It's got to be in a single environment that doesn't require you to jump around between different application and management experiences. >> Alright, so I've got to ask you the tough question. I want to hear your answer to it. I mean, we've seen the cloud model. Everybody knows it very well. But why now? People are going to say, okay, you're just responding to HPE. What's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >> Yeah. So, I think it really comes down to the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're going to provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what will really define ourselves against them and shine ourselves against them is, that consistent operating experience. We've got that opportunity to provide both an on-prem, Edge and cloud experience. That doesn't require them to move out of that operating experience to jump between different tools. So, whether you're running a Storage as a service environment. Which we'll have in the first half of next year. Looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year as well. You're going to be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. And also be able to move workloads from on-prem and off-prem without breaking that consistent experience. I think that is probably the biggest differentiator we're going to have. When you ladder that onto just the general Dell Technologies value of being able to meet and deliver our solutions anywhere in the world at any point of the data center, at the Edge, or even cloud-native. We've got the broadest portfolio to meet our customer needs wherever we need to go. >> So, my understanding is the offerings, it's designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio. >> That's right. >> From client solutions, ISG, et cetera. Not VMware specifically. It's really that whole Dell Technologies portfolio. Correct? >> Yeah and look, over time we totally expect to be able to transact to VMware through this. We do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. So yeah, it is across, PC as a service, Storage as a service, Infrastructure as a service. Our cloud offers all of our services, traditional services that are helping to deliver this as a service experience. And even our traditional financial flexible consumption models will be included in this. Because again, we want to offer ultimate choice and flexibility. We're not going to force our customers to go down any of these paths. But what we want to do is present these paths and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breadth of the portfolio and the offers to get them there. >> Oh, okay. So, it's really a journey. You mentioned Storage as a service coming out first and then as well. If I understand it, the idea is to, I'm going to have visibility and control over my entire state on-prem, cloud, Edge, kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the shoot, but that's the vision. >> Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue to iterate over time and bring more environments, more applications, more cloud environments into this. But that is absolutely the vision of Project Apex is to deliver that fully integrated core, Edge, cloud partner experience. To all of the environments our customers could be running in. >> I want to put my customer hat on my CFO, CIO hat. Okay, what's the fine print. What are the minimum bars to get in? What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are some of those nuances? >> Yeah. So, both the Storage as a service, which will be our first offer of many in our portfolio. And the cloud console, which will give you that single web interface to kind of manage, report and kind of thrive in this as a service experience. All that will be released in the first half of the next year. So, we're still frankly defining what that will look like. But we want to make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments. From small business to medium business, to the biggest enterprises out there. Globally goal expansion through our channel partners. We're going to have Geos and channel partners fully integrated as well. Service providers as well. As a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience to our customers. So, the fine print Dave will be out early next year. As we GA these releases and bring into market. But ultimate flexibility and choice, up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal and the intent we plan to deliver that. >> Can you add any color to the sort of product journey, if you will? I even hesitate Sam, to use the word product. Because you're really sort of transferring your mindset into a platform mindset and a services mindset. As opposed to bolting services on top of a price. You sell a product and say okay, service guys you take it from here. You have to sort of rethink, how you deliver. And so you're saying, you start with storage. And then so what can we expect over the next midterm-longterm? >> Yeah. I'll give you an example. Look, we sell a ton of as a service and flexible consumption today. We've been at it for 10 years. In fact in Q2, we sold our annual recurring revenue rate is 1.3 billion growing at 30% very, very pleased. So, this is not new to us. But how you described it Dave is right. We adopt products, customers then pick their product. They pick their service that they want to bolt on. Then they pick their financial payment model they bolted on. So, it's a very good, customized way to build it. That's great. And customers are going to continue to want that and will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of it as the big easy button. They want to focus on an outcome. Storage as a service is a great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is part of that. They want it fully managed by Dell Technologies or one of our partners. They don't want to manage it themselves. And of course they want it to be pay-for-use on an OPEX plan that works for their business and gives them that flexibility. So, when customers going forward want to go down this as a service outcome driven path. They're simply going to say, hey, what data service do I want? I want file or block unified object. They pick their data service based on their workload. They pick their performance and capacity tier. There is a term limit, right now we're planning one to five years. Depending on the amount of terms you want to do. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies and it's of course leveraging our great technology portfolio to bring that service and that experience to our customers. So, the service is the product now. It really is making that shift. We are moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio and solutions for our customers. >> So, you actually have a lot of data on this. I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business. Maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers. But I'm really interested in the learnings and the feedback and how that's informed your strategy? >> Yeah. I mean, you're right. Again, we've been at this for many, many years. We have over 2000 customers today that have chosen to take advantage of our flexible consumption and as a service offers that we have today. Nevermind kind of as we move into these kind of turn-key, easy button as a service offers that are to come that early next year. So, we've leveraged all of that learnings and we've heard all of that feedback. It's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the Project Apex strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest PowerMax or the latest PowerStore. They want to choose their network. They want to choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service. They want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they want to maybe leverage additional, more traditional means to acquire that based on their business goals. That feedback has been loud and clear. But there is that segment that is like, no, no, no. I need to focus more on my business and not my infrastructure. And that's where you're going to see these more turn-key as a service solutions fit that need. Where they want to just define SLAs, outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them. So, they can really focus on their applications and their business, not their infrastructure. So, things like metering. Tons of feedback on how we'll want to meter this. Tons of feedback on the types of configurations and scale they're looking for. The applications and workloads that they're targeting for this world. Is very different than the more traditional world. So, we're leveraging all of that information to make sure we deliver our Infrastructure as a service and then eventually Solutions as a service. You think about SAP as a service, VDI as a service. AI machine learning as a service. We'll be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >> So, I want to ask you. You've given us a couple of data points there, billion dollar plus business. A couple thousand customers. You've got decent average contract values if I do my math right. So, it's not just the little guys. I'm sorry, it's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle as well that are taking this up. Is that fair to say? >> Totally. I mean, I would say frankly in the enterprise space. It's the mid to larger sides historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best of breed apart. Best of breed of products, Best of breed services. Best of breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape there. We're very confident or competitive and competing in that space today. I think going into the turn-key as a service space that will play up-market. But it will really play down-market, mid-market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there. Where they don't have the resources to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or a backup infrastructure or compute infrastructure. They're going to frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think our as a service offers will really play stronger in that mid and kind of lower end of the market. >> So, tell us again. The sort of availability of like the console, for example. When can I actually get-- >> Yeah. >> I can do as a service today. I can buy subscriptions from you. >> Absolutely. >> This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and rollout details? >> Sure. As we look to move to our integrated kind of turn-key as a service offers. The console we're announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So, for organizations, customers that want to start using it. They can start using it now. The Storage as a service offer is going to be available in the first half of next year. So, we're rapidly kind of working on that now. Looking to early next year to bring that to market. So, you'll see the console and the first as a service offer with storage as a service available in the first half of next year. Readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. We're not that far off right now. But we felt it was really, really important to make sure our customers. Our partners and the industry really understands how important this transformation to as a service and cloud is for Dell Technologies. That's why frankly, externally and internally Project Apex will be that north star to bring our end to end value together across the business. Across our customers, across our teams. And that's why we're really making sure that everybody understands Project Apex and as a services is the future for Dell. And we're very much focused on that. >> As the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset, a cultural change really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing in a way. How are you guys thinking about that mindset shift? >> Well really, it's how am I thinking about it? How is the broader marketing organization thinking about it? How is engineering clearly thinking about it? How is finance thinking about it? How is sale? Like this is transformative across every single function within Dell technologies has a role to play, to do things very differently. Now it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Various estimates have this as a fairly small percentage of business today in our segments. But we do expect that to start to, and it has started to accelerate ramp. We're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires changes in how we sell. Changes in how we market clearly. Changes in how we build products and so forth. And then ultimately, how we account for this has to change. So, we're approaching it I think the right way Dave. Where we're looking at this truly end to end. This isn't a tweak in how we do things or an evolution. This is a revolution. For us to kind of move faster to this model. Again, building on the learnings that we have today with our strong customer base and experience we've built up over the years. But this is a big shift. This isn't an incremental turn of the crank. We know that. I think you expect that. Our customers expect that. And that's the mission we're on with Project Apex. >> Well, I mean, with 30% growth. I mean, that's a clear indicator and people like growth. No doubt. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. I think many folks want to buy this way, and I think increasingly that's how they buy SaaS. That's how they buy cloud. Why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts Sam. What are the big takeaways? >> Yeah. The big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together our as a service and cloud capabilities into a easy to consume, simple, flexible offer. That provides ultimate choice to our customers. Look, the market has spoken. We're going to be living in a hybrid multicloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak. That they want that to be an as a service experience, regardless if it's on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that ease. That simplicity and elegance to the on-prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. So, that's the mission that we're on with Project Apex. I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're going to be after this, for the next couple of years. To refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >> Wow, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to theCUBE. We're seeing the cloud model. It's extending on-prem, cloud, multicloud it's going to the Edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same direction. So, Sam good luck with this and thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Thanks everyone. Take care. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. The virtual CUBE. We'll be right back right after this short break. (gentle music)

(upbeat tech music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas of Dell Technologies World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my esteemed co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC and Muneyb Minhazuddin, who is the VP solutions of product marketing at VMware. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE. You guys are veterans. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're going to talk about the VMware, Dell EMC storage portfolio. It is better together, which sounds like it's a theme for a political campaign. Walk our viewers through, give us some examples of how you are jointly coming up with solutions. >> Yeah, I'll start if that's all right. I think that a lot of what we've seen is that the Dell Technologies cloud strategy is such an important thing about what we're talking about today, but what we've also seen is that when we're looking to use the cloud, external storage is an important part of that strategy, so what we've already done is we've collaborated together to validate VCF with both unity and power max. And that's really the beginning of our journey together, to enable that external storage to be part of the workload domain, to have SDDC manager not just manage the other parts of the infrastructure, but to manage external storage and that you can have resiliency and performance for those workloads that need it, those kind of high value workloads that need it, and that's really the beginning. We think it's going to get much broader, much deeper integration as we continue to work together. >> Yeah and I think as a continued theme, and our solutions as, you know, Caitlin was pointing out, again, you know, what's most important and what's customers want out of this and their evolution of, you know, workloads, which are very data center centric and, you know, clients of our architecture with a very specific infrastructure, design, application, shifting towards more cloud native and public cloud hybrid applications. So, that has a different nature of storage requirements that got to evolve from block storage, file storage, object storage. That evolution needs to happen and not only happens better together with VMware and Dell EMC, so. >> So, Caitlin, I think back to this is the 10th year we're having theCUBE here, what used to be EMC World and it used to be you talked about VMware and storage and it was okay, let's go through the integration points that we had and EMC would say "we're as good or better "than everybody out there" and check all the boxes here. There's a shift today when we're talking about not just working with it, but, you know, integrations of products really it looks more like joint solutions. We know in VxRail, there's, you know, joint development that happens on, so give us a little bit about that difference about, you know, 2019 storage with Dell EMC and VMware versus the past. >> Yeah, and there is a shift, right? We're here together. (laughs) >> Absolutely. And our teams, our product management teams, our organizations are coming together, they're spending a lot of time together collaborating on what our strategy is together. How do we best approach that so we can bring solutions to our customers that provide that level that Dell Technologies can really provide that no one else can? And it's truly something unique and differentiated and what we're talking about today is really just the beginning. There's a lot more to come on that front. >> And you know, I think also the integrations in the past where I would call them API, interface driven, now like you point out, it's co-engineered starting with the solutions like VxRail, cloud foundation, and the co-engineering makes a big difference because we're sharing road maps. We're sharing hey, what are we thinking about performance? What are we thinking about, you know, application requirements? And that's very different to just, I'm going to partner with you, I'm going to pass from APIs, you going to call some APIs, and that has an impact on like ready solutions, it is cloud foundation, a full stack with life cycle, SDDC Manager. That kind of integration only happens with co-engineering. >> Talk a little bit about the partnership and this better together. We talked about the products and the solutions, but I want to hear about the cultural, the cultures of the two companies. We know, I mean they're both technology powerhouse, both technology optimists. How would you describe the different cultures and how you can reflect each other and collaborate with each other in different ways? >> You want to start with that one? >> Sure, I think it's very interesting coming from, you know, west coast software, agile, we're like hey, we'll have VMworld in a few months, but you know, we're still from a software agile world. We're coming out with new services for Vmworld, we're not defined yet. And then working with, you know, Dell EMC folks who are, you're already looking at performance, infrastructure, planning, so the road map alignment of, you know, every three months, I'm going to come out with software innovation, whereas you have to put a lot of thought process into how to do this. It's actually had been quite interesting. You know, it's I would call it interesting because it was tough. It was tough initially to kind of figure out how do you kind of, you know, bring a cohesive road map where you're making 12 months, you know, infrastructure, investment in road map to three months of software cycle, but I think it's actually come together really well. >> And at the end of the day, we're talking the same customers and we're solving the same problems and in a lot of ways, that kind of legacy Dell EMC's side has come from the infrastructure, from the bottom up, and then the VMware kind of has come from the top down, and bringing those two together, although our development cycles have a different kind of time span against them, we're trying to solve the same problems for our customers and that's really where a lot of those innovations are going to continue to come. >> One of those interesting points you talk about from the bottom down and the top, bottom down and bottom up and top down. Sorry, >> (laughter) it's been a long day so far. >> We forgive you. We forgive you. >> These new waves of technology, you know, remember back to, you know, when flash rolled out. There were things that needed to do the infrastructure layer and there's stuff that happens on the application side. We are seeing a real renaissance in what's happening in the storage industry. Talk about NVMe, storage class memory. It's not just okay I have some new gear and I have to redo it, but, you know, it dramatically changes, you know, we're getting ready to scuzzy stack when you talk about the applications side, so, you know, I'd love to hear how this comes together and, you know, what's in the product today and how are you developing these together? >> Another interesting example that almost crosses those two is CloudIQ. So CloudIQ is something that we've developed in-house. It's an agile developed software application that is a cloud native app developed with pivotal, runs on a Dell EMC cloud. That's run out of our side of the house and it came out actually with Unity three years ago today. We now have that not just across our core storage portfolio, but we have that now with VM health insights, as well, where we've actually taken that approach where we can give that impact as well, and I think that that just shows you kind of how we do have those pieces of the culture too coming together and trying to bring these solutions together. >> I know, and I think again, you know, thinking customers first, right. We talk about this, you know, multi cloud, hybrid cloud environments where people are taking their workloads, they compute storage, networking requirement, and they're trying to migrate their workloads back and forth, but, you know, there's a more important part of the workload migration is also the data migration, right, so how do you take, you know, data migration and look at different data sources, look at your data bases, look at your, you know, different kind of data migration, and that's where, you know, storage is so critical. It's easy to take a snapshot of a workload and move it across, but then, if you have to pin it on a very seamless data migration pad, you have to have really clear storage strategies, which will support your, you know, hyper converge, your hybrid cloud, your external storage strategies that you got to map to that migration pad. >> Yeah and a service that we're going to announce tomorrow I started to kind of address that too, of like, how do you combine some of the public cloud compute and the agility of that with using these native array-based replication to get the data there, right, and combining not just that simple data movement, but having that application awareness and that application consistency, which is so critical for things like disaster recovery, which is one of the main things we certainly hear from our customers, how do I used the public cloud as my DR site? They don't want to run their own disaster recovery data centers. Customers of all shapes and sizes are really going there and something that we're announcing tomorrow is another example of that so we'll talk more about that one tomorrow, but we've got some more news on that one as well. >> So, in talking about the trends in cloud, we know that it's a multi cloud world, it's a hybrid cloud world. You were just talking about the different ways in which customers want to do their work and the different places they want to do it, public, private. What are some other trends that you're seeing and where do you think we're going to be talking about it in the years to come on this? >> Sure, like, you know, I think the traditional workloads is breaking out into two things. One is do I migrate into the cloud? And the second is I'm rewriting the application to be more cloud native. And it's not the entire application, and it's a classic example, I'm sure all of you do mobile banking, right? And guess what? I've worked with, lot of financial companies are doing this. It's a really cool, cloud native mobile application where I'm doing all my mobile banking, but then, my query goes to a main frame in a banking ledger, which is still, you know, where your banking ledgers maintain. And then pull through a three tier application through a web and database tier, pushed out to the cloud, and accessed by a cloud native environment. Where I'm coming at is even though it looks very modern, a lot of customers are maintaining this computer history museum, which all these apps are scaling through and that's not going away in our lifetime, because, you know, there's a lot of complexity in there, and it's really how we help our customers in the journey to pay off their technical debt and move over to newer technologies, be it cloud, cloud native, and get a clean start. You know, if you're a startup, you don't have all these technical debt, but unfortunately a lot of the large companies have these technical debt and how we help customers, because they're really lost. They're like I don't know what to do, there's so much coming at me, and they need the help, and I think that that's where the power of Dell Technologies comes together in giving them that journey. >> Yeah and the bank is a really good example. We have a customer who's exactly that example where everything from the main frame that runs all their transaction processing that they've always run to their mobile applications all run off of a power max, and part of this journey for them is that they absolutely need that infrastructure, but they also need to simplify their operations as much as possible and I think one platform to consolidate all that on is true in banks, and governments, and hospitals around the world and I think that that's part of where we see a lot of this pull of how do I get that cloud experience, but how do I still use that infrastructure that I have? >> Caitlin, everybody's trying to squint through the new announcement of the Dell Technologies cloud there and what does this mean to the storage people, you know, what storage is underneath that? Is that something that they see it, will they recognize it? I was wondering if you can help eliminate that some. >> Yeah and some of this will be a little clearer too tomorrow as we talk through a little bit more of the details, but if you think through the Dell Technologies cloud strategy essentially as two parts, the Dell Technologies cloud announced today and then Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure that we'll talk through tomorrow. So the Dell Technologies cloud, what we announced today, essentially has two different flavors announced today and then one that we kind of said where we're going in the future. One is the Dell Technologies cloud platform, which is essentially the VxRail infrastructure and that's that first offer, and then there's the data center as service, the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. The third one, which was only mentioned quickly today, is that validated design. So that's leveraging our best of breed three tier architecture, including storage with that. The term that Jeff used today was VCF ready. Right, it validated with VCF, that's with Unity and Power max today. Again, that's the beginning, but you can picture what we're doing with validated design, is really enabling us to offer our three tier architecture, best of breed, across all three tiers, and leveraging VCF for that life cycle management, etc. >> And again, it's giving customers those choices to say hey, do I want to keep and maintain my, modernize my infrastructure, or do I have, you know, and this is the trend shifting where hybrid, you know, people will be talking about that, it's just the trend shifted only in the last couple of years for hybrid in, shut down my data center and go to the cloud. Now it's really kind of gone two way. The streets changed from not just going from data center to the cloud, but also coming from cloud to the data center, so the interesting challenges become about not just taking the requirements of your, you know, client server architecture and migrating it to, you know, elastic cloud architecture, which also taking that elastic EC2, you know, Azure environment and landing them into your data center environments managed a service, so that comes with its own challenges, but that's where customers want it to be, because you know, they're going "I've built so much IP, natively in my cloud, "applications that I've built over the years "and now I have a need for it closer to my data center "or my users or my edge and I really need to bring it back" And that's, you know, having challenges from a storage perspective. Now, they were not designed for client server, they were designed for cloud native elasticity, so I go to build storage architecture that's supposed there. >> And I think the other pieces that, and we'll talk some about this tomorrow, but this Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure is kind of a, the other side of the coin, where we think about Dell Technologies cloud, that's really transforming into a cloud operating model and you're purchasing infrastructure to really transform that, but a lot of our customers want to use the cloud for very specific use cases. They want to replace tape and they want to archive to the cloud, right, so we have the capabilities and we'll continue and the vast capabilities of simply moving data from your infrastructure into public cloud, converting into object and putting in there, so you've met the cost profile, and you can maybe finally get rid of tape. I think I've for 14 years been trying to get rid of tape in the industry. Haven't gotten there yet. But then there's things like offering your data services, storage, data protection, data services in a cloud, so offer to find assets in the cloud or even as a service consumption of our infrastructure. So again, more on that tomorrow. And then there's the how do you manage that infrastructure and the data itself? Having that visibility on that and that's really that kind of cloud data insights piece of that. So that's really the cloud enabled infrastructure piece is really about getting to how do I leverage the cloud for disaster recovery, for archiving, for analytics? That type of thing. So, a lot of the things we'll talk about tomorrow more focus on those types of cases as well. >> Well you've given us a lot of tantalizing tidbits about what we're going to hear tomorrow, so thank you-- >> So now you have to tune in. >> We will be here. You better be here too. >> I know where to find you. >> Caitlin, Muneyb, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was great. >> Thanks. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have a lot more of our, theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat tech music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the queue covering Sisqo, Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, Everyone Live here in Barcelona, Spain's two Cubes Coverage of Sisqo Live Europe. Twenty nineteen. I'm John Foreal echoes David Lock. Our next guest is Liz Santoni, senior vice president general manager of the Eye Okay Group at Cisco, formerly is part of the engineering team Cube Alumni. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming >> on. Great to be here, >> so you're >> just good to see you guys. >> You're in the centre. A lot of news. I ot of the network redefining networking on stage. We heard that talk about your role in the organization of Sisko and the product that you now have and what's going on here. >> So run R I O T business group similar to what we do with the end data center off that it has the engineering team product management team. We build products solutions that includes hardware, software, silicon. Take him out to market. Really an eye. OT It's about, you know, the technology conversation comes second. It's like, What can you deliver in terms of use, case and business outcomes that comes first, and it's more about what technology can enable that. So the conversations we have with customers are around. How can he really solve my kind of real problems? Everything from one a girl, my top line? I want to get closer to my customers because the closer I get to my customers, I know them better. So obviously can turn around and grow my top line. And I want to optimize everything from internal process to external process because just improves my bottom line at the end >> of the day. So you a lot of news happening here around your team. But first talk about redefining networking in context to your part, because edge of the network has always been what is, you know the edge of the network. Now it's extending further. I. O. T. Is one of those things that people are looking at a digit digitization standpoint, turning on Mohr intelligence with the factory floor or other areas. How how are how is I ot changing and what is it today? >> So you gave an example of, you know, digitizing something like a factory floor, right? So let's talk about that. So what customers in the factory floor want to do. They've already automated a number of this factory floors, but what they want to do is get more efficient. They want better eo. They want better quality. They want to bring security all the way down to the plant floor because the more and more you connect things, the more you just expanded your threat surface out pretty significantly so they want to bring security down to the plant floor. Because the's are environments that are not brand new, they have brown feel equipment there, green field equipment. They want to be able to have control of where what device gets in the network. With things like device profiling, they want to be able to do things like create zones so that they could do that with things like network segmentation. So when and if an attack does happen, they can contain the attack as much as possible. All right now what you need in terms ofthe a factory floor, automation, security, to be able to scale tohave that flexibility That's no different than what you have in the Enterprise already. I mean, we've been working with our idea and enterprise customers for years, and, you know, they it's about automation and security. It's about simplicity. Why not extend that out? The talent that it has, the capability that has it really is a connective tissue, that you're extending your network from that carpeted space, or you're clean space into outside of the office or into the non carpeted space. So it's perfect in terms of saying it's about extending the network into the nontraditional space that probably it doesn't go into today. >> Well, right. And it's a new constituency, right? So how are you sort of forging new relationships, new partnerships? What is described, what that's like with operations technology? >> I mean, that Cisco. We have great partnerships with the Tea organisation. I mean, we've got more than eight hundred forty thousand customers and our sales teams are product. Teams do a good job in terms of listening to customers. We're talking more and more to the line of business. We're talking more and more to the operational teams >> because of the end of >> the day. I want to be candid. You know, going to a manufacturing floor. I've never run a plan. Floor right? There are not very many people in the team who conceived in a plant manager before they know they're processes. They're concerned about twenty four seven operation. Hey, I want to be in compliance with the fire marshal, physical safety of my workers. We come in with that. I p knowledge that security knowledge that they need it's a partnership. I mean, people talk about, you know, t convergence. Usually convergence means that somebody's going to lose their job. This is Maura Night, an OT partnership, and most of these digitization efforts usually come in for the CEO level. Laura Chief Digitization Officer. We've got good relationships there already. Second part is Sister has been in this. We're quite some time. Our team's already have relationships at the plant level at the grid level operator level. You know, in the in the oil and gas area what we need to build more and more of that because building more and more that is really understanding. What business problems are they looking to solve? Then we can bring the technology to it. >> Liz, what's that in the Enable Menu? Mission Partnership? That's a good point. People, you know, someone wins, someone loses. The partnership is you're enabling your bringing new capability into the physical world, from wind wind farms to whatever What is the enablement look like? What are some of the things that happen when you guys come into these environments that are being redefined and reimagined? Or for the first time, >> Yeah, I would say, you know, I use what our customers said this morning and what he said was, it has the skills that I >> need, all right. >> They have the eyepiece skills. They have a security seals. These are all the things that I need. I want my guys to focus on kind of business processes around things that they know best. And so we're working with a CZ part of what we're putting this extended enterprise extending in ten based networking to the i o T edge means ight. Hee already knows our tools are capabilities. We're now saying we can extend that Let's go out, figure out what those use cases are together. This is why we're working with the not just the working with our channel partners as well. Who can enable these implementations on i o t implementations work? Well, >> part of >> this is also a constant, you know learning from each other. We learned from the operational teams is that hey, you can start a proof of concept really well, but he can really take it to deployment unless you address things around the complexity, the scale and the security. That's where we can come in and help. >> And you can't just throw your switches and routers over the fence. And so okay, here you go. You have to develop specific solutions for this world, right? And when you talk about that a little bit, absolutely. So >> if you look at the networking industrial networking portfolio that we have, it's built on the same catalysts, itis our wireless, a peace, our firewall. But they're more customized for this non carpeted space, right? You've got to take into consideration that these air not sitting in a controlled environment, so we test them for temperature, for shock, for vibration. But it's also built on the same software. So we're talking about the same software platform. You get the same automation features you get, the same analytics features. It's managed by DNA center. So even though we're customizing the hardware for this environment, the software platform that you get is pretty much the same, so it can come in and manage both those environments. But it also needs an understanding of what, What's the operational team looking to solve for? >> Because I want to ask you about the psychology of the buyer in this market because OT there run stuff that's just turn it on. But in the light ball, make it work. Well, I got to deploy something, so they're kind of expectations might be different. Can you share what the expectations are for the kind of experience that they wanna have with Tech? >> I used a utility is a great example and our customer from energy. I think, explain this really well, this is thing that we learned from our customers, right? I haven't been in a substation. I've been in a data center multiple times, but I haven't been in a substation. So when they're talking about automating substation, we work with customers. We've been doing this over the last ten years. We've been working with that energy team for the last two years. They taught us, really, how they secure and managing these environments. You're not going to find a CC in this environment, So when you want to send somebody out to like sixty thousand substations and you want to check on Hey, do do I still have VPN connectivity? They're not going to be able to troubleshoot it. What we did is based on the customer's ask, put a green light on there and led that shines green. All the technician does is look at it and says it's okay. If not, they called back in terms of trouble shooting it. It was just a simple example of where it's. It's different in terms of how they secure and manage on the talent that they have is different than what's in the space. So you've got to make sure that your products also cover what the operational teams need because you're not dealing with the C. C A. Or the I P experts, >> a classic market fit product market fit for what they're expecting correct led to kick around with green light. I mean, >> you know, everybody goes that such an easy thing inside was >> not that perceptive to us. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned as you move from Cisco Engineering out to the new frontier on the edge here? What? What are the learnings that you've seen actually growing mark early. It's only going to get larger, more complicated, more automation. Morey, I'm or things. What's your learning? What have you seen so far? That's the takeaway. >> So I'll see, you know, be I'm still an Cisco Engineering. The reason we're in Coyote is that a secure and reliable network that it's the foundation of any eye. Ot deployment, right? You can go out and best buy the best sensor by the best application by the best middle where. But if you don't have that foundation that's secure and reliable, those, Iet projects are not going to take off. So it's pretty simple. Everyone's network is thie enabler of their business outcome, and that's why we're in it. So this is really about extending that network out, but at the same time, understanding. What are we looking to solve for, right? So in many cases we worked with third party party hers because some of them know these domains much better than we do. But we know the AIP wear the eye patch and the security experts, and we bring that to the table better than anybody else. >> And over the top, definite showing here for the second year that we've covered it here in definite zone, that when you have that secure network that's programmable really cool things and develop on top of it. That's what great opportunity >> this is. I'm super excited that we now have an i o. T. Definite in. You know, it's part of our entire Cisco. Definite half a million developers. You know, Suzy, we and team done a fabulous job. There's more and more developers going to be starting to develop at the I o. T edge at the edge of the network. Right. So when you look at that is our platforms today with dioxin saw on top of it. Make this a software platform that developers Khun can actually build applications to. It's really about, you know, that we're ready. Highest fees and developers unleashing those applications at the i o. T edge. And with Susie making that, you know, available in terms of the tools, the resource is the sand box that you can get. It's like we expect to see more and more developers building those applications at the >> edge. We gotta talk about your announcements, right? Oh, >> yeah. Exciting set >> of hard news. >> So we launch for things today as part of Extending Ibn or in ten based networking to the I. O. T. S. The first one is we've got three new Cisco validated design. So think of a validated design as enabling our customers to actually accelerate their deployments. So our engineering teams try to mimic a CZ muchas possible a customer's environment. And they do this pre integration, pre testing of our products, third party products and we actually put him out by industry. So we have three new ones out there for manufacturing, for utilities and for mode and mobile assets. That's one. The second one is we're launching two new hardware platforms on next generation catalysts Industrial Ethernet switch. It's got modularity of interfaces, and it's got nine expansion packs. The idea is making as flexible as possible for a customer's deployment, because these boxes might sit in an environment not just for three years, like in a campus, they could sit there for five for seven for ten years. So, as you know, they are adding on giving them that flexibility that concave a bit based system and just change the expansion modules. We also launch on next generation industrial router. Actually, is the industries probably first and only full six capable industrial router, and it's got again flexibility of interfaces. We have lt. We have fiber. We have copper. You want deal? Lt. You can actually slap an expansion pack right on top of it. When five G comes in, you just take the Lt Munch a lot. You put five G, so it's five G ready >> engines on there >> and it's based on Io Exit us sexy. It's managed by DNA center and its edge enabled. So they run dialects. You, Khun, build your applications and load him on so >> you can >> build them. Third >> parties have peace here. >> The definite pieces. That third one is where we now have, you know, and I OT developer center in the definite zone. So with all the tools that are available, it enables developers and IAS peas, too. Actually, we build on top of Io Axe today. In fact, we actually have more than a couple of three examples that are already doing that. And the fourth thing is we depend on a large ecosystem of channel partners, So we've launched an Io ti specialization training program to enable them to actually help our customers implementation go faster. So those are the four things that we brought together. The key thing for us was designing these for scale flexibility and security >> capabilities available today. Is that right? >> Absolutely. In fact, if you go in worshipping in two weeks and you can see them at the innovation showcase, it's actually very cool. >> I was going to mention you brought ecosystem. Glad you brought that. I was gonna ask about how that's developing. I could only imagine new sets of names coming out of the industry in terms of building on these coyotes since his demand for Io ti. It's an emerging market in terms of newness, with a lot of head room. So what's ecosystem look like? Missouri patterns and Aya's vsv ours as they take the shape of the classic ecosystem? Or is it a new set of characters? Or what's the makeup of the >> island's ecosystem, >> I would say is in many ways, if you've been in the eye ot world for sometime, you'll say, You know, it's not like there's a whole new set of characters. Yes, you have more cloud players in there, you You probably have more s eyes in there. But it's been like the distributor's Arvin there. The machine builders thie ot platforms. These folks have been doing this for a long time. It's more around. How do you partner and where do you monetize? We know where you know the value we bring in we rely on. We work very closely with this OT partners machine builders s eyes the cloud partners to go to market and deliver this. You're right. The market's going to evolve because the whole new conversation is around. Data. What do I collect? What do I computer the edge? Where do I go around it to? Should I take it to my own premises? Data centers. Should I take it to the cloud who gets control over the data? How do I make sure that I have control over the data as a customer and I have control over who gets to see it? So I think this will be a revolving conversation. This is something we're enabling with one of our Connecticut platforms, which are not launch. It's already launched in terms of enabling customers to have control over the data and managed to bring >> all the portfolio of Cisco Security Analytics management to the table that puts anything in the world that has power and connectivity to be a device to connect into its system. This is the way it's just I mean, how obvious going Beat commits a huge >> I'm grateful that it's great that you think it's obvious. That's exactly what we're trying to tell our customers. >> How to do is >> about extending >> the way >> we do. It's the playbook, right? Each business has its own unique. There's no general purpose. Coyote is their correct pretty much custom because, um, well, thanks for coming on this. Appreciate it when I ask you one final question. You know, I was really impressed with Karen. Had a great session on wall kind of session yesterday. Impact with women. We interviewed you a Grace offered twenty fifteen. Cisco's doing amazing work. You take a minute to talk about some of the things that Cisco's doing around women in computing. Women in stem. Just great momentum, great success story, great leadership. >> I would say Look at her leadership at Chuck's level, and I think that's a great example in terms of He brings people on, depending on what they can, what they bring to the table, right? They just happened to be a lot of women out there. And the reality is I work for a company that believes in inclusion, whether it's gender race, different experiences, different a different thoughts, different perspective because that's what truly in terms of you can bring in the culture that drives that innovation. I've been sponsoring our women in science and engineering, for I can't remember the last for five years. It's a community that continues to grow, and and the reality is we don't sit in there and talk about, you know, what was me and all the things they're happening. What we talk about is, What are the cool new technologies that are out there? How do I get my hands on him? And yeah, there we talk about some things where women are little reticent and shy to do so. What we learn from other people's experiences, many time the guy's air very interested. So what? You sit them there and talking to said, Trust me, it's not like a whining and moaning section. It's more in terms of where we learned from each other >> years talking and sharing ideas, >> absolute >> innovation and building things. >> And we've got, you know, you look we look around that's a great set of women leaders throughout the company. At every single level at every function. It's ah, it's It's great to be there. We continue to sponsor Grace offer. We have some of the biggest presence at Grace Offer. We do so many other things like connected women within the company. It's just a I would say fabulous place to be. >> You guys do a lot of great things for society. Great company, great leadership. Thank you for doing all that's phenomenal. We love covering it, too. So we'll be affect cloud now today in Silicon Valley. Women in data science at Stanford and among them the >> greatest passion of our things. Straight here. >> Thanks for coming on this. The Cube live coverage here in Barcelona. Francisco Live twenty eighteen back with more. After the short break, I'm jump area with evil Aunt. Be right back