okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris are good at he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies pastor welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust uh advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer uh how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening and other of of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity and the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in this rich infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency at storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know network isolation um immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave right at the data storage level we have come up with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing is there any mass deletion that is happening or a mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for i.t teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and my huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys uh emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean power max more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency um dell storage uh this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and a source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises um and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is uh delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could adjust because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an or it's an and how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and you know for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so the customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure delta dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know risk being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and and compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we are doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high uh against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are being buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as uh respond to threats that have been detected elsewhere uh through the api that's great all right api for power skill is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell uh storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation um with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having ripple mechanisms um with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the very we configure and architect these systems cyber security and protection is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off but as i was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching the cube [Music] you

the cyber security landscape has changed dramatically over the past 24 to 36 months rapid cloud migration has created a new layer of security defense sure but that doesn't mean csos can relax in many respects it further complicates or at least changes the ciso's scope of responsibilities in particular the threat surface has expanded and that creates more seams and cisos have to make sure their teams pick up where the hyperscaler clouds leave off application developers have become a critical execution point for cyber assurance shift left is the kind of new buzz phrase for devs but organizations still have to shield right meaning the operational teams must continue to partner with secops to make sure infrastructure is resilient so it's no wonder that in etr's latest survey of nearly 1500 cios and it buyers that business technology executives cite security as their number one priority well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software cloud computing and analytics rounding out the top four but budgets are under pressure and csos have to prioritize it's not like they have an open checkbook they have to contend with other key initiatives like those just mentioned to secure the funding and what about zero trust can you go out and buy xero trust or is it a framework a mindset in a series of best practices applied to create a security consciousness throughout the organization can you implement zero trust in other words if a machine or human is not explicitly allowed access then access is denied can you implement that policy without constricting organizational agility the question is what's the most practical way to apply that premise and what role does infrastructure play as the enforcer how does automation play in the equation the fact is that today's approach to cyber resilient type resilience can't be an either or it has to be an and conversation meaning you have to ensure data protection while at the same time advancing the mission of the organization with as little friction as possible and don't even talk to me about the edge that's really going to keep you up at night hello and welcome to the special cube presentation a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by dell technologies in this program we explore the critical role that trusted infrastructure plays in cyber security strategies how organizations should think about the infrastructure side of the cyber security equation and how dell specifically approaches securing infrastructure for your business we'll dig into what it means to transform and evolve toward a modern security infrastructure that's both trusted and agile first up are pete gear and steve kenniston they're both senior cyber security consultants at dell technologies and they're going to talk about the company's philosophy and approach to trusted infrastructure and then we're going to speak to paris arcadi who's a senior consultant for storage at dell technologies to understand where and how storage plays in this trusted infrastructure world and then finally rob emsley who heads product marketing for data protection and cyber security he's going to take a deeper dive with rob into data protection and explain how it has become a critical component of a comprehensive cyber security strategy okay let's get started pete gear steve kenniston welcome to the cube thanks for coming into the marlboro studios today great to be here dave thanks dave good to see you great to see you guys pete start by talking about the security landscape you heard my little rap up front what are you seeing i thought you wrapped it up really well and you touched on all the key points right technology is ubiquitous today it's everywhere it's no longer confined to a monolithic data center it lives at the edge it lives in front of us it lives in our pockets and smartphones along with that is data and as you said organizations are managing sometimes 10 to 20 times the amount of data that they were just five years ago and along with that cyber crime has become a very profitable enterprise in fact it's been more than 10 years since uh the nsa chief actually called cyber crime the biggest transfer of wealth in history that was 10 years ago and we've seen nothing but accelerating cyber crime and really sophistication of how those attacks are perpetrated and so the new security landscape is really more of an evolution we're finally seeing security catch up with all of the technology adoption all the build out the work from home and work from anywhere that we've seen over the last couple of years we're finally seeing organizations and really it goes beyond the i t directors it's a board level discussion today security's become a board level discussion yeah i think that's true as well it's like it used to be the security was okay the secops team you're responsible for security now you've got the developers are involved the business lines are involved it's part of onboarding for most companies you know steve this concept of zero trust it was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic and i feel like i've often said it's now become a mandate but it's it's it's still fuzzy to a lot of people how do you guys think about zero trust what does it mean to you how does it fit yeah i thought again i thought your opening was fantastic in in this whole lead into to what is zero trust it had been a buzzword for a long time and now ever since the federal government came out with their implementation or or desire to drive zero trust a lot more people are taking a lot more seriously because i don't think they've seen the government do this but ultimately let's see ultimately it's just like you said right if if you don't have trust to those particular devices uh applications or data you can't get at it the question is and and you phrase it perfectly can you implement that as well as allow the business to be as agile as it needs to be in order to be competitive because we're seeing with your whole notion around devops and the ability to kind of build make deploy build make deploy right they still need that functionality but it also needs to be trusted it needs to be secure and things can't get away from you yeah so it's interesting we attended every uh reinforce since 2019 and the narrative there is hey everything in this in the cloud is great you know and this narrative around oh security is a big problem is you know doesn't help the industry the fact is that the big hyperscalers they're not strapped for talent but csos are they don't have the the capabilities to really apply all these best practices they're they're playing whack-a-mole so they look to companies like yours to take their r your r d and bake it into security products and solutions so what are the critical aspects of the so-called dell trusted infrastructure that we should be thinking about yeah well dell trusted infrastructure for us is a way for us to describe uh the the work that we do through design development and even delivery of our it system so dell trusted infrastructure includes our storage it includes our servers our networking our data protection our hyper converged everything that infrastructure always has been it's just that today customers consume that infrastructure at the edge as a service in a multi-cloud environment i mean i view the cloud as really a way for organizations to become more agile and to become more flexible and also to control costs i don't think organizations move to the cloud or move to a multi-cloud environment to enhance security so i don't see cloud computing as a panacea for security i see it as another attack surface and another uh aspect in front that organizations and and security organizations and departments have to manage it's part of their infrastructure today whether it's in their data center in a cloud or at the edge i mean i think it's a huge point because a lot of people think oh data's in the cloud i'm good it's like steve we've talked about oh why do i have to back up my data it's in the cloud well you might have to recover it someday so i don't know if you have anything to add to that or any additional thoughts on it no i mean i think i think like what pete was saying when it comes to when it comes to all these new vectors for attack surfaces you know people did choose the cloud in order to be more agile more flexible and all that did was open up to the csos who need to pay attention to now okay where can i possibly be attacked i need to be thinking about is that secure and part of the part of that is dell now also understands and thinks about as we're building solutions is it is it a trusted development life cycle so we have our own trusted development life cycle how many times in the past did you used to hear about vendors saying you got to patch your software because of this we think about what changes to our software and what implementations and what enhancements we deliver can actually cause from a security perspective and make sure we don't give up or or have security become a whole just in order to implement a feature we got to think about those things yeah and as pete alluded to our secure supply chain so all the way through knowing what you're going to get when you actually receive it is going to be secure and not be tampered with becomes vitally important and pete and i were talking earlier when you have tens of thousands of devices that need to be delivered whether it be storage or laptops or pcs or or whatever it is you want to be you want to know that that that those devices are can be trusted okay guys maybe pete you could talk about the how dell thinks about it's its framework and its philosophy of cyber security and then specifically what dell's advantages are relative to the competition yeah definitely dave thank you so we've talked a lot about dell as a technology provider but one thing dell also is is a partner in this larger ecosystem we realize that security whether it's a zero trust paradigm or any other kind of security environment is an ecosystem uh with a lot of different vendors so we look at three areas one is protecting data in systems we know that it starts with and ends with data that helps organizations combat threats across their entire infrastructure and what it means is dell's embedding security features consistently across our portfolios of storage servers networking the second is enhancing cyber resiliency over the last decade a lot of the funding and spending has been in protecting or trying to prevent cyber threats not necessarily in responding to and recovering from threats right we call that resiliency organizations need to build resiliency across their organization so not only can they withstand a threat but they can respond recover and continue with their operations and the third is overcoming security complexity security is hard it's more difficult because of the things we've talked about about distributed data distributed technology and and attack surfaces everywhere and so we're enabling organizations to scale confidently to continue their business but know that all all the i.t decisions that they're making um have these intrinsic security features and are built and delivered in a consistent security so those are kind of the three pillars maybe we could end on what you guys see as the key differentiators that people should know about that that dell brings to the table maybe each of you could take take a shot at that yeah i think first of all from from a holistic portfolio perspective right the uh secure supply chain and the secure development life cycle permeate through everything dell does when building things so we build things with security in mind all the way from as pete mentioned from from creation to delivery we want to make sure you have that that secure device or or asset that permeates everything from servers networking storage data protection through hyper converge through everything that to me is really a key asset because that means you can you understand when you receive something it's a trusted piece of your infrastructure i think the other core component to think about and pete mentioned as dell being a partner for making sure you can deliver these things is that even though those are that's part of our framework these pillars are our framework of how we want to deliver security it's also important to understand that we are partners and that you don't need to rip and replace but as you start to put in new components you can be you can be assured that the components that you're replacing as you're evolving as you're growing as you're moving to the cloud as you're moving to a more on-prem type services or whatever that your environment is secure i think those are two key things got it okay pete bring us home yeah i think one of one of the big advantages of dell is our scope and our scale right we're a large technology vendor that's been around for decades and we develop and sell almost every piece of technology we also know that organizations are might make different decisions and so we have a large services organization with a lot of experienced services people that can help customers along their security journey depending on whatever type of infrastructure or solutions that they're looking at the other thing we do is make it very easy to consume our technology whether that's traditional on-premise in a multi-cloud environment uh or as a service and so the best of breed technology can be consumed in any variety of fashion and know that you're getting that consistent secure infrastructure that dell provides well and dell's forgot the probably top supply chain not only in the tech business but probably any business and so you can actually take take your dog food and then and allow other billionaire champagne sorry allow other people to you know share share best practices with your with your customers all right guys thanks so much for coming thank you appreciate it okay keep it right there after this short break we'll be back to drill into the storage domain you're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure on the cube the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage be right back concern over cyber attacks is now the norm for organizations of all sizes the impact of these attacks can be operationally crippling expensive and have long-term ramifications organizations have accepted the reality of not if but when from boardrooms to i.t departments and are now moving to increase their cyber security preparedness they know that security transformation is foundational to digital transformation and while no one can do it alone dell technologies can help you fortify with modern security modern security is built on three pillars protect your data and systems by modernizing your security approach with intrinsic features and hardware and processes from a provider with a holistic presence across the entire it ecosystem enhance your cyber resiliency by understanding your current level of resiliency for defending your data and preparing for business continuity and availability in the face of attacks overcome security complexity by simplifying and automating your security operations to enable scale insights and extend resources through service partnerships from advanced capabilities that intelligently scale a holistic presence throughout it and decades as a leading global technology provider we'll stop at nothing to help keep you secure okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris sarcadi he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies parasaur welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and the application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer uh how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening and other ways of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity of the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in the switch infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency and storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know network isolation immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave right at the data storage level um we have come with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing uh is there any mass deletion that is happening or a mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for it teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and a huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean powermax more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency dell storage this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and the source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could adjust because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an ore it's an end how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and uh for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so that customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure dell infra dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and in compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we're doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility uh for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are being buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody could you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as respond to threats that have been detected elsewhere um uh through the api that's great all right hey api for power skill is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation um with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having rigor mechanisms with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the way we we configure and architect these systems um cyber security and protection is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off but that was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching thecube data is the currency of the global economy it has value to your organization and cyber criminals in the age of ransomware attacks companies need secure and resilient it infrastructure to safeguard their data from aggressive cyber attacks [Music] as part of the dell technologies infrastructure portfolio powerstor and powermax combine storage innovation with advanced security that adheres to stringent government regulations and corporate compliance requirements security starts with multi-factor authentication enabling only authorized admins to access your system using assigned roles tamper-proof audit logs track system usage and changes so it admins can identify suspicious activity and act with snapshot policies you can quickly automate the protection and recovery process for your data powermax secure snapshots cannot be deleted by any user prior to the retention time expiration dell technologies also make sure your data at rest stays safe with power store and powermax data encryption protects your flash drive media from unauthorized access if it's removed from the data center while adhering to stringent fips 140-2 security requirements cloud iq brings together predictive analytics anomaly detection and machine learning with proactive policy-based security assessments monitoring and alerting the result intelligent insights that help you maintain the security health status of your storage environment and if a security breach does occur power protect cyber recovery isolates critical data identifies suspicious activity and accelerates data recovery using the automated data copy feature unchangeable data is duplicated in a secure digital vault then an operational air gap isolates the vault from the production and backup environments [Music] architected with security in mind dell emc power store and powermax provides storage innovation so your data is always available and always secure wherever and whenever you need it [Music] welcome back to a blueprint for trusted infrastructure we're here with rob emsley who's the director of product marketing for data protection and cyber security rob good to see a new role yeah good to be back dave good to see you yeah it's been a while since we chatted last and you know one of the changes in in my world is that i've expanded my responsibilities beyond data protection marketing to also focus on uh cyber security marketing specifically for our infrastructure solutions group so certainly that's you know something that really has driven us to you know to come and have this conversation with you today so data protection obviously has become an increasingly important component of the cyber security space i i don't think necessarily of you know traditional backup and recovery as security it's to me it's an adjacency i know some companies have said oh yeah now we're a security company they're kind of chasing the valuation for sure bubble um dell's interesting because you you have you know data protection in the form of backup and recovery and data management but you also have security you know direct security capability so you're sort of bringing those two worlds together and it sounds like your responsibility is to to connect those those dots is that right absolutely yeah i mean i think that uh the reality is is that security is a a multi-layer discipline um i think the the days of thinking that it's one uh or another um technology that you can use or process that you can use to make your organization secure uh are long gone i mean certainly um you actually correct if you think about the backup and recovery space i mean people have been doing that for years you know certainly backup and recovery is all about the recovery it's all about getting yourself back up and running when bad things happen and one of the realities unfortunately today is that one of the worst things that can happen is cyber attacks you know ransomware malware are all things that are top of mind for all organizations today and that's why you see a lot of technology and a lot of innovation going into the backup and recovery space because if you have a copy a good copy of your data then that is really the the first place you go to recover from a cyber attack and that's why it's so important the reality is is that unfortunately the cyber criminals keep on getting smarter i don't know how it happens but one of the things that is happening is that the days of them just going after your production data are no longer the only challenge that you have they go after your your backup data as well so over the last half a decade dell technologies with its backup and recovery portfolio has introduced the concept of isolated cyber recovery vaults and that is really the you know we've had many conversations about that over the years um and that's really a big tenant of what we do in the data protection portfolio so this idea of of cyber security resilience that definition is evolving what does it mean to you yeah i think the the analyst team over at gartner they wrote a very insightful paper called you will be hacked embrace the breach and the whole basis of this analysis is so much money has been spent on prevention is that what's out of balance is the amount of budget that companies have spent on cyber resilience and cyber resilience is based upon the premise that you will be hacked you have to embrace that fact and be ready and prepared to bring yourself back into business you know and that's really where cyber resiliency is very very different than cyber security and prevention you know and i think that balance of get your security disciplines well-funded get your defenses as good as you can get them but make sure that if the inevitable happens and you find yourself compromised that you have a great recovery plan and certainly a great recovery plan is really the basis of any good solid data protection backup and recovery uh philosophy so if i had to do a swot analysis we don't have to do the wot but let's focus on the s um what would you say are dell's strengths in this you know cyber security space as it relates to data protection um one is we've been doing it a long time you know we talk a lot about dell's data protection being proven and modern you know certainly the experience that we've had over literally three decades of providing enterprise scale data protection solutions to our customers has really allowed us to have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't as i mentioned to you one of the unique differentiators of our solution is the cyber recovery vaulting solution that we introduced a little over five years ago five six years parapatek cyber recovery is something which has become a unique capability for customers to adopt uh on top of their investment in dell technologies data protection you know the the unique elements of our solution already threefold and it's we call them the three eyes it's isolation it's immutability and it's intelligence and the the isolation part is really so important because you need to reduce the attack surface of your good known copies of data you know you need to put it in a location that the bad actors can't get to it and that really is the the the the essence of a cyber recovery vault interestingly enough you're starting to see the market throw out that word um you know from many other places but really it comes down to having a real discipline that you don't allow the security of your cyber recovery vault to be compromised insofar as allowing it to be controlled from outside of the vault you know allowing it to be controlled by your backup application our cyber recovery vaulting technology is independent of the backup infrastructure it uses it but it controls its own security and that is so so important it's like having a vault that the only way to open it is from the inside you know and think about that if you think about you know volts in banks or volts in your home normally you have a keypad on the outside think of our cyber recovery vault as having its security controlled from inside of the vault so nobody can get in nothing can get in unless it's already in and if it's already in then it's trusted exactly yeah exactly yeah so isolation is the key and then you mentioned immutability is the second piece yeah so immutability is is also something which has been around for a long time people talk about uh backup immunoability or immutable backup copies so immutability is just the the the additional um technology that allows the data that's inside of the vault to be unchangeable you know but again that immutability you know your mileage varies you know when you look across the uh the different offers that are out there in the market especially in the backup industry you make a very valid point earlier that the backup vendors in the market seems to be security washing their marketing messages i mean everybody is leaning into the ever-present danger of cyber security not a bad thing but the reality is is that you have to have the technology to back it up you know quite literally yeah no pun intended and then actually pun intended now what about the intelligence piece of it uh that's that's ai ml where does that fit for sure so the intelligence piece is delivered by um a solution called cybersense and cybersense for us is what really gives you the confidence that what you have in your cyber recovery vault is a good clean copy of data so it's looking at the backup copies that get driven into the cyber vault and it's looking for anomalies so it's not looking for signatures of malware you know that's what your antivirus software does that's what your endpoint protection software does that's on the prevention side of the equation but what we're looking for is we're looking to ensure that the data that you need when all hell breaks loose is good and that when you get a request to restore and recover your business you go right let's go and do it and you don't have any concern that what you have in the vault has been compromised so cyber sense is really a unique analytic solution in the market based upon the fact that it isn't looking at cursory indicators of of um of of of malware infection or or ransomware introduction it's doing full content analytics you know looking at you know has the data um in any way changed has it suddenly become encrypted has it suddenly become different to how it was in the previous scan so that anomaly detection is very very different it's looking for um you know like different characteristics that really are an indicator that something is going on and of course if it sees it you immediately get flagged but the good news is is that you always have in the vault the previous copy of good known data which now becomes your restore point so we're talking to rob emsley about how data protection fits into what dell calls dti dell trusted infrastructure and and i want to come back rob to this notion of and not or because i think a lot of people are skeptical like how can i have great security and not introduce friction into my organization is that an automation play how does dell tackle that problem i mean i think a lot of it is across our infrastructure is is security has to be built in i mean intrinsic security within our servers within our storage devices uh within our elements of our backup infrastructure i mean security multi-factor authentication you know elements that make the overall infrastructure secure you know we have capabilities that you know allow us to identify whether or not configurations have changed you know we'll probably be talking about that a little bit more to you later in the segment but the the essence is is um security is not a bolt-on it has to be part of the overall infrastructure and that's so true um certainly in the data protection space give us the the bottom line on on how you see dell's key differentiators maybe you could talk about dell of course always talks about its portfolio but but why should customers you know lead in to dell in in this whole cyber resilience space um you know staying on the data protection space as i mentioned the the the work we've been doing um to introduce this cyber resiliency solution for data protection is in our opinion as good as it gets you know the you know you've spoken to a number of our of our best customers whether it be bob bender from founders federal or more recently at delton allergies world you spoke to tony bryson from the town of gilbert and these are customers that we've had for many years that have implemented cyber recovery vaults and at the end of the day they can now sleep at night you know that's really the the peace of mind that they have is that the insurance that a data protection from dell cyber recovery vault a parapatex cyber recovery solution gives them you know really allows them to you know just have the assurance that they don't have to pay a ransom if they have a an insider threat issue and you know all the way down to data deletion is they know that what's in the cyber recovery vault is good and ready for them to recover from great well rob congratulations on the new scope of responsibility i like how you know your organization is expanding as the threat surface is expanding as we said data protection becoming an adjacency to security not security in and of itself a key component of a comprehensive security strategy rob emsley thank you for coming back in the cube good to see you again you too dave thanks all right in a moment i'll be back to wrap up a blueprint for trusted infrastructure you're watching the cube every day it seems there's a new headline about the devastating financial impacts or trust that's lost due to ransomware or other sophisticated cyber attacks but with our help dell technologies customers are taking action by becoming more cyber resilient and deterring attacks so they can greet students daily with a smile they're ensuring that a range of essential government services remain available 24 7 to citizens wherever they're needed from swiftly dispatching public safety personnel or sending an inspector to sign off on a homeowner's dream to protecting restoring and sustaining our precious natural resources for future generations with ever-changing cyber attacks targeting organizations in every industry our cyber resiliency solutions are right on the money providing the security and controls you need we help customers protect and isolate critical data from ransomware and other cyber threats delivering the highest data integrity to keep your doors open and ensuring that hospitals and healthcare providers have access to the data they need so patients get life-saving treatment without fail if a cyber incident does occur our intelligence analytics and responsive team are in a class by themselves helping you reliably recover your data and applications so you can quickly get your organization back up and running with dell technologies behind you you can stay ahead of cybercrime safeguarding your business and your customers vital information learn more about how dell technology's cyber resiliency solutions can provide true peace of mind for you the adversary is highly capable motivated and well equipped and is not standing still your job is to partner with technology vendors and increase the cost of the bad guys getting to your data so that their roi is reduced and they go elsewhere the growing issues around cyber security will continue to drive forward thinking in cyber resilience we heard today that it is actually possible to achieve infrastructure security while at the same time minimizing friction to enable organizations to move quickly in their digital transformations a xero trust framework must include vendor r d and innovation that builds security designs it into infrastructure products and services from the start not as a bolt-on but as a fundamental ingredient of the cloud hybrid cloud private cloud to edge operational model the bottom line is if you can't trust your infrastructure your security posture is weakened remember this program is available on demand in its entirety at thecube.net and the individual interviews are also available and you can go to dell security solutions landing page for for more information go to dell.com security solutions that's dell.com security solutions this is dave vellante thecube thanks for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by dell we'll see you next time

[Music] okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris our godaddy he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies parasite welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust uh advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and the application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening in other words of of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity and the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in the switch infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency and storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know um in network isolation um immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave um right at the data storage level um we have come with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure-wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing is there any mass deletion that is happening or mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for iot teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and my huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys uh emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean powermax more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency um dell storage uh this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and a source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises um and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could address because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an ore it's an end how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and uh for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so that customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure dell infra dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and and compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we are doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical uh business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility uh for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high uh against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody could you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as uh respond to uh threats that have been detected elsewhere um through the api that's great all right api for power scale is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having rigor mechanisms with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the way we we configure and architect these systems uh cyber security and protection uh is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off that was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching the cube [Music] you

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The rapid pace of cloud adoption has changed the way organizations approach cybersecurity. Specifically, the cloud is increasingly becoming the first line of cyber defense. As such, along with communicating to the board and creating a security aware culture, the chief information security officer must ensure that the shared responsibility model is being applied properly. Meanwhile, the DevSecOps team has emerged as the critical link between strategy and execution, while audit becomes the free safety, if you will, in the equation, i.e., the last line of defense. Hello, and welcome to this week's, we keep on CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we'll share the latest data on hyperscale, IaaS, and PaaS market performance, along with some fresh ETR survey data. And we'll share some highlights and the puts and takes from the recent AWS re:Inforce event in Boston. But first, the macro. It's earning season, and that's what many people want to talk about, including us. As we reported last week, the macro spending picture is very mixed and weird. Think back to a week ago when SNAP reported. A player like SNAP misses and the Nasdaq drops 300 points. Meanwhile, Intel, the great semiconductor hope for America misses by a mile, cuts its revenue outlook by 15% for the year, and the Nasdaq was up nearly 250 points just ahead of the close, go figure. Earnings reports from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and some others underscored cautious outlooks, especially those exposed to the advertising revenue sector. But at the same time, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, were, let's say less bad than expected. And that brought a sigh of relief. And then there's Amazon, which beat on revenue, it beat on cloud revenue, and it gave positive guidance. The Nasdaq has seen this month best month since the isolation economy, which "Breaking Analysis" contributor, Chip Symington, attributes to what he calls an oversold rally. But there are many unknowns that remain. How bad will inflation be? Will the fed really stop tightening after September? The Senate just approved a big spending bill along with corporate tax hikes, which generally don't favor the economy. And on Monday, August 1st, the market will likely realize that we are in the summer quarter, and there's some work to be done. Which is why it's not surprising that investors sold the Nasdaq at the close today on Friday. Are people ready to call the bottom? Hmm, some maybe, but there's still lots of uncertainty. However, the cloud continues its march, despite some very slight deceleration in growth rates from the two leaders. Here's an update of our big four IaaS quarterly revenue data. The big four hyperscalers will account for $165 billion in revenue this year, slightly lower than what we had last quarter. We expect AWS to surpass 83 billion this year in revenue. Azure will be more than 2/3rds the size of AWS, a milestone from Microsoft. Both AWS and Azure came in slightly below our expectations, but still very solid growth at 33% and 46% respectively. GCP, Google Cloud Platform is the big concern. By our estimates GCP's growth rate decelerated from 47% in Q1, and was 38% this past quarter. The company is struggling to keep up with the two giants. Remember, both GCP and Azure, they play a shell game and hide the ball on their IaaS numbers, so we have to use a survey data and other means of estimating. But this is how we see the market shaping up in 2022. Now, before we leave the overall cloud discussion, here's some ETR data that shows the net score or spending momentum granularity for each of the hyperscalers. These bars show the breakdown for each company, with net score on the right and in parenthesis, net score from last quarter. lime green is new adoptions, forest green is spending up 6% or more, the gray is flat, pink is spending at 6% down or worse, and the bright red is replacement or churn. Subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score. One note is this is for each company's overall portfolio. So it's not just cloud. So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but there are a couple points worth noting. First, anything above 40% or 40, here as shown in the chart, is considered elevated. AWS, as you can see, is well above that 40% mark, as is Microsoft. And if you isolate Microsoft's Azure, only Azure, it jumps above AWS's momentum. Google is just barely hanging on to that 40 line, and Alibaba is well below, with both Google and Alibaba showing much higher replacements, that bright red. But here's the key point. AWS and Azure have virtually no churn, no replacements in that bright red. And all four companies are experiencing single-digit numbers in terms of decreased spending within customer accounts. People may be moving some workloads back on-prem selectively, but repatriation is definitely not a trend to bet the house on, in our view. Okay, let's get to the main subject of this "Breaking Analysis". TheCube was at AWS re:Inforce in Boston this week, and we have some observations to share. First, we had keynotes from Steven Schmidt who used to be the chief information security officer at Amazon on Web Services, now he's the CSO, the chief security officer of Amazon. Overall, he dropped the I in his title. CJ Moses is the CISO for AWS. Kurt Kufeld of AWS also spoke, as did Lena Smart, who's the MongoDB CISO, and she keynoted and also came on theCUBE. We'll go back to her in a moment. The key point Schmidt made, one of them anyway, was that Amazon sees more data points in a day than most organizations see in a lifetime. Actually, it adds up to quadrillions over a fairly short period of time, I think, it was within a month. That's quadrillion, it's 15 zeros, by the way. Now, there was drill down focus on data protection and privacy, governance, risk, and compliance, GRC, identity, big, big topic, both within AWS and the ecosystem, network security, and threat detection. Those are the five really highlighted areas. Re:Inforce is really about bringing a lot of best practice guidance to security practitioners, like how to get the most out of AWS tooling. Schmidt had a very strong statement saying, he said, "I can assure you with a 100% certainty that single controls and binary states will absolutely positively fail." Hence, the importance of course, of layered security. We heard a little bit of chat about getting ready for the future and skating to the security puck where quantum computing threatens to hack all of the existing cryptographic algorithms, and how AWS is trying to get in front of all that, and a new set of algorithms came out, AWS is testing. And, you know, we'll talk about that maybe in the future, but that's a ways off. And by its prominent presence, the ecosystem was there enforced, to talk about their role and filling the gaps and picking up where AWS leaves off. We heard a little bit about ransomware defense, but surprisingly, at least in the keynotes, no discussion about air gaps, which we've talked about in previous "Breaking Analysis", is a key factor. We heard a lot about services to help with threat detection and container security and DevOps, et cetera, but there really wasn't a lot of specific talk about how AWS is simplifying the life of the CISO. Now, maybe it's inherently assumed as AWS did a good job stressing that security is job number one, very credible and believable in that front. But you have to wonder if the world is getting simpler or more complex with cloud. And, you know, you might say, "Well, Dave, come on, of course it's better with cloud." But look, attacks are up, the threat surface is expanding, and new exfiltration records are being set every day. I think the hard truth is, the cloud is driving businesses forward and accelerating digital, and those businesses are now exposed more than ever. And that's why security has become such an important topic to boards and throughout the entire organization. Now, the other epiphany that we had at re:Inforce is that there are new layers and a new trust framework emerging in cyber. Roles are shifting, and as a direct result of the cloud, things are changing within organizations. And this first hit me in a conversation with long-time cyber practitioner and Wikibon colleague from our early Wikibon days, and friend, Mike Versace. And I spent two days testing the premise that Michael and I talked about. And here's an attempt to put that conversation into a graphic. The cloud is now the first line of defense. AWS specifically, but hyperscalers generally provide the services, the talent, the best practices, and automation tools to secure infrastructure and their physical data centers. And they're really good at it. The security inside of hyperscaler clouds is best of breed, it's world class. And that first line of defense does take some of the responsibility off of CISOs, but they have to understand and apply the shared responsibility model, where the cloud provider leaves it to the customer, of course, to make sure that the infrastructure they're deploying is properly configured. So in addition to creating a cyber aware culture and communicating up to the board, the CISO has to ensure compliance with and adherence to the model. That includes attracting and retaining the talent necessary to succeed. Now, on the subject of building a security culture, listen to this clip on one of the techniques that Lena Smart, remember, she's the CISO of MongoDB, one of the techniques she uses to foster awareness and build security cultures in her organization. Play the clip >> Having the Security Champion program, so that's just, it's like one of my babies. That and helping underrepresented groups in MongoDB kind of get on in the tech world are both really important to me. And so the Security Champion program is purely purely voluntary. We have over 100 members. And these are people, there's no bar to join, you don't have to be technical. If you're an executive assistant who wants to learn more about security, like my assistant does, you're more than welcome. Up to, we actually, people grade themselves when they join us. We give them a little tick box, like five is, I walk on security water, one is I can spell security, but I'd like to learn more. Mixing those groups together has been game-changing for us. >> Now, the next layer is really where it gets interesting. DevSecOps, you know, we hear about it all the time, shifting left. It implies designing security into the code at the dev level. Shift left and shield right is the kind of buzz phrase. But it's getting more and more complicated. So there are layers within the development cycle, i.e., securing the container. So the app code can't be threatened by backdoors or weaknesses in the containers. Then, securing the runtime to make sure the code is maintained and compliant. Then, the DevOps platform so that change management doesn't create gaps and exposures, and screw things up. And this is just for the application security side of the equation. What about the network and implementing zero trust principles, and securing endpoints, and machine to machine, and human to app communication? So there's a lot of burden being placed on the DevOps team, and they have to partner with the SecOps team to succeed. Those guys are not security experts. And finally, there's audit, which is the last line of defense or what I called at the open, the free safety, for you football fans. They have to do more than just tick the box for the board. That doesn't cut it anymore. They really have to know their stuff and make sure that what they sign off on is real. And then you throw ESG into the mix is becoming more important, making sure the supply chain is green and also secure. So you can see, while much of this stuff has been around for a long, long time, the cloud is accelerating innovation in the pace of delivery. And so much is changing as a result. Now, next, I want to share a graphic that we shared last week, but a little different twist. It's an XY graphic with net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the dataset on the horizontal. With that magic 40% red line as shown. Okay, I won't dig into the data and draw conclusions 'cause we did that last week, but two points I want to make. First, look at Microsoft in the upper-right hand corner. They are big in security and they're attracting a lot of dollars in the space. We've reported on this for a while. They're a five-star security company. And every time, from a spending standpoint in ETR data, that little methodology we use, every time I've run this chart, I've wondered, where the heck is AWS? Why aren't they showing up there? If security is so important to AWS, which it is, and its customers, why aren't they spending money with Amazon on security? And I asked this very question to Merrit Baer, who resides in the office of the CISO at AWS. Listen to her answer. >> It doesn't mean don't spend on security. There is a lot of goodness that we have to offer in ESS, external security services. But I think one of the unique parts of AWS is that we don't believe that security is something you should buy, it's something that you get from us. It's something that we do for you a lot of the time. I mean, this is the definition of the shared responsibility model, right? >> Now, maybe that's good messaging to the market. Merritt, you know, didn't say it outright, but essentially, Microsoft they charge for security. At AWS, it comes with the package. But it does answer my question. And, of course, the fact is that AWS can subsidize all this with egress charges. Now, on the flip side of that, (chuckles) you got Microsoft, you know, they're both, they're competing now. We can take CrowdStrike for instance. Microsoft and CrowdStrike, they compete with each other head to head. So it's an interesting dynamic within the ecosystem. Okay, but I want to turn to a powerful example of how AWS designs in security. And that is the idea of confidential computing. Of course, AWS is not the only one, but we're coming off of re:Inforce, and I really want to dig into something that David Floyer and I have talked about in previous episodes. And we had an opportunity to sit down with Arvind Raghu and J.D. Bean, two security experts from AWS, to talk about this subject. And let's share what we learned and why we think it matters. First, what is confidential computing? That's what this slide is designed to convey. To AWS, they would describe it this way. It's the use of special hardware and the associated firmware that protects customer code and data from any unauthorized access while the data is in use, i.e., while it's being processed. That's oftentimes a security gap. And there are two dimensions here. One is protecting the data and the code from operators on the cloud provider, i.e, in this case, AWS, and protecting the data and code from the customers themselves. In other words, from admin level users are possible malicious actors on the customer side where the code and data is being processed. And there are three capabilities that enable this. First, the AWS Nitro System, which is the foundation for virtualization. The second is Nitro Enclaves, which isolate environments, and then third, the Nitro Trusted Platform Module, TPM, which enables cryptographic assurances of the integrity of the Nitro instances. Now, we've talked about Nitro in the past, and we think it's a revolutionary innovation, so let's dig into that a bit. This is an AWS slide that was shared about how they protect and isolate data and code. On the left-hand side is a classical view of a virtualized architecture. You have a single host or a single server, and those white boxes represent processes on the main board, X86, or could be Intel, or AMD, or alternative architectures. And you have the hypervisor at the bottom which translates instructions to the CPU, allowing direct execution from a virtual machine into the CPU. But notice, you also have blocks for networking, and storage, and security. And the hypervisor emulates or translates IOS between the physical resources and the virtual machines. And it creates some overhead. Now, companies like VMware have done a great job, and others, of stripping out some of that overhead, but there's still an overhead there. That's why people still like to run on bare metal. Now, and while it's not shown in the graphic, there's an operating system in there somewhere, which is privileged, so it's got access to these resources, and it provides the services to the VMs. Now, on the right-hand side, you have the Nitro system. And you can see immediately the differences between the left and right, because the networking, the storage, and the security, the management, et cetera, they've been separated from the hypervisor and that main board, which has the Intel, AMD, throw in Graviton and Trainium, you know, whatever XPUs are in use in the cloud. And you can see that orange Nitro hypervisor. That is a purpose-built lightweight component for this system. And all the other functions are separated in isolated domains. So very strong isolation between the cloud software and the physical hardware running workloads, i.e., those white boxes on the main board. Now, this will run at practically bare metal speeds, and there are other benefits as well. One of the biggest is security. As we've previously reported, this came out of AWS's acquisition of Annapurna Labs, which we've estimated was picked up for a measly $350 million, which is a drop in the bucket for AWS to get such a strategic asset. And there are three enablers on this side. One is the Nitro cards, which are accelerators to offload that wasted work that's done in traditional architectures by typically the X86. We've estimated 25% to 30% of core capacity and cycles is wasted on those offloads. The second is the Nitro security chip, which is embedded and extends the root of trust to the main board hardware. And finally, the Nitro hypervisor, which allocates memory and CPU resources. So the Nitro cards communicate directly with the VMs without the hypervisors getting in the way, and they're not in the path. And all that data is encrypted while it's in motion, and of course, encryption at rest has been around for a while. We asked AWS, is this an, we presumed it was an Arm-based architecture. We wanted to confirm that. Or is it some other type of maybe hybrid using X86 and Arm? They told us the following, and quote, "The SoC, system on chips, for these hardware components are purpose-built and custom designed in-house by Amazon and Annapurna Labs. The same group responsible for other silicon innovations such as Graviton, Inferentia, Trainium, and AQUA. Now, the Nitro cards are Arm-based and do not use any X86 or X86/64 bit CPUs. Okay, so it confirms what we thought. So you may say, "Why should we even care about all this technical mumbo jumbo, Dave?" Well, a year ago, David Floyer and I published this piece explaining why Nitro and Graviton are secret weapons of Amazon that have been a decade in the making, and why everybody needs some type of Nitro to compete in the future. This is enabled, this Nitro innovations and the custom silicon enabled by the Annapurna acquisition. And AWS has the volume economics to make custom silicon. Not everybody can do it. And it's leveraging the Arm ecosystem, the standard software, and the fabrication volume, the manufacturing volume to revolutionize enterprise computing. Nitro, with the alternative processor, architectures like Graviton and others, enables AWS to be on a performance, cost, and power consumption curve that blows away anything we've ever seen from Intel. And Intel's disastrous earnings results that we saw this past week are a symptom of this mega trend that we've been talking about for years. In the same way that Intel and X86 destroyed the market for RISC chips, thanks to PC volumes, Arm is blowing away X86 with volume economics that cannot be matched by Intel. Thanks to, of course, to mobile and edge. Our prediction is that these innovations and the Arm ecosystem are migrating and will migrate further into enterprise computing, which is Intel's stronghold. Now, that stronghold is getting eaten away by the likes of AMD, Nvidia, and of course, Arm in the form of Graviton and other Arm-based alternatives. Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others are all designing custom silicon, and doing so much faster than Intel can go from design to tape out, roughly cutting that time in half. And the premise of this piece is that every company needs a Nitro to enable alternatives to the X86 in order to support emergent workloads that are data rich and AI-based, and to compete from an economic standpoint. So while at re:Inforce, we heard that the impetus for Nitro was security. Of course, the Arm ecosystem, and its ascendancy has enabled, in our view, AWS to create a platform that will set the enterprise computing market this decade and beyond. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Morrison, who is on production. And he does the podcast. And Ken Schiffman, our newest member of our Boston Studio team is also on production. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help spread the word on social media and in the community. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. He does some great, great work for us. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat theme music)

(electronic music) >> Hello everybody, welcome back to Boston. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Inforce 2022. We're here at the convention center in Boston where theCUBE got started in May of 2010. I'm really excited. Lena Smart is here, she's the chief information security officer at MongoDB rocket ship company We covered MongoDB World earlier this year, June, down in New York. Lena, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome, I enjoyed your keynote yesterday. You had a big audience, I mean, this is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> This is the cloud security conference, AWS, putting its mark in the sand back in 2019. Of course, a couple of years of virtual, now back in Boston. You talked in your keynote about security, how it used to be an afterthought, used to be the responsibility of a small group of people. >> Yeah. >> You know, it used to be a bolt on. >> Yep. >> That's changed dramatically and that change has really accelerated through the pandemic. >> Yep. >> Just describe that change from your perspective. >> So when I started at MongoDB about three and a half years ago, we had a very strong security program, but it wasn't under one person. So I was their first CISO that they employed. And I brought together people who were already doing security and we employed people from outside the company as well. The person that I employed as my deputy is actually a third time returnee, I guess? So he's worked for, MongoDB be twice before, his name is Chris Sandalo, and having someone of that stature in the company is really helpful to build the security culture that I wanted. That's why I really wanted Chris to come back. He's technically brilliant, but he also knew all the people who'd been there for a while and having that person as a trusted second in command really, really helped me grow the team very quickly. I've already got a reputation as a strong female leader. He had a reputation as a strong technical leader. So us combined is like indestructible, we we're a great team. >> Is your scope of responsibility, obviously you're protecting Mongo, >> Yeah. >> How much of your role extends into the product? >> So we have a product security team that report into Sahir Azam, our chief product officer. I think you even spoke to him. >> Yeah, he's amazing. >> He's awesome, isn't he? He's just fabulous. And so his team, they've got security experts on our product side who are really kind of the customer facing. I'm also to a certain extent customer facing, but the product folks are the absolute experts. They will listen to what our customers need, what they want, and together we can then work out and translate that. I'm also responsible for governance risk and compliance. So there's a large portion of our customers that give us input via that program too. So there's a lot of avenues to allow us to facilitate change in the security field. And I think that's really important. We have to listen to what our customers want, but also internally. You know, what our internal groups need as well to help them grow. >> I remember last year, Re:invent 2021, I was watching a talk on security. It was the, I forget his name, but it was the individual who responsible for data center security. And one of the things he said was, you know, look it's not at the end of the day, the technology's important but it's not the technology. It's how you apply the tools and the practices and the culture- >> Right. That you build in the organization that will ultimately determine how successful you are at decreasing the ROI for the bad guys. >> Yes. >> Let's put it that way. So talk about the challenges of building that culture, how you go about that, and how you sustain that cultural aspect. >> So, I think having the security champion program, so that's just, it's like one of my babies, that and helping underrepresented groups in MongoDB kind of get on in the tech world are both really important to me. And so the security champion program is purely voluntary. We have over a hundred members. And these are people, there's no bar to join. You don't have to be technical. If you're an executive assistant who wants to learn more about security, like my assistant does, you're more than welcome. Up to, we actually people grade themselves, when they join us, we give them a little tick box. Like five is, I walk in security water. One is, I can spell security but I'd like to learn more. Mixing those groups together has been game changing for us. We now have over a hundred people who volunteer their time, with their supervisors permission, they help us with their phishing campaigns, testing AWS tool sets, testing things like queryable encryption. I mean, we have people who have such an in-depth knowledge in other areas of the business that I could never learn, no matter how much time I had. And so to have them- And we have people from product as security champions as well, and security, and legal, and HR, and every department is recognized. And I think almost every geographical location is also recognized. So just to have that scope and depth of people with long tenure in the company, technically brilliant, really want to understand how they can apply the cultural values that we live with each day to make our security program stronger. As I say, that's been a game changer for us. We use it as a feeder program. So we've had five people transfer from other departments into the security and GRC teams through this Champions program. >> Makes a lot of sense. You take somebody who walks on water in security, mix them with somebody who really doesn't know a lot about it but wants to learn and then can ask really basic questions, and then the experts can actually understand better how to communicate. >> Absolutely. >> To that you know that 101 level. >> It's absolutely true. Like my mom lives in her iPad. She worships her iPad. Unfortunately she thinks everything on it is true. And so for me to try and dumb it down, and she's not a dumb person, but for me to try and dumb down the message of most of it's rubbish, mom, Facebook is made up. It's just people telling stories. For me to try and get that over to- So she's a one, and I might be a five, that's hard. That's really hard. And so that's what we're doing in the office as well. It's like, if you can explain to my mother how not everything on the internet is true, we're golden. >> My mom, rest her soul, when she first got a- we got her a Macintosh, this was years and years and years ago, and we were trying to train her over the phone, and said, mom, just grab the mouse. And she's like, I don't like mice. (Lena laughs) There you go. I know, I know, Lena, what that's like. Years ago, it was early last decade, we started to think about, wow, security really has to become a board level item. >> Yeah. >> And it really wasn't- 2010, you know, for certain companies. But really, and so I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Robert Gates, who was the defense secretary. >> Yes. >> We had this conversation, and he sits on a number, or sat on a number of boards, probably still does, but he was adamant. Oh, absolutely. Here's how you know, here. This is the criticality. Now it's totally changed. >> Right. >> I mean, it's now a board level item. But how do you communicate to the C-Suite, the board? How often do you do that? What do you recommend is the right regime? And I know there's not any perfect- there's got to be situational, but how do you approach it? >> So I am extremely lucky. We have a very technical board. Our chairman of the board is Tom Killalea. You know, Amazon alum, I mean, just genius. And he, and the rest of the board, it's not like a normal board. Like I actually have the meeting on this coming Monday. So this weekend will be me reading as much stuff as I possibly can, trying to work out what questions they're going to ask me. And it's never a gotcha kind of thing. I've been at board meetings before where you almost feel personally attacked and that's not a good thing. Where, at MongoDB, you can see they genuinely want us to grow and mature. And so I actually meet with our board four times a year, just for security. So we set up our own security meeting just with board members who are specifically interested in security, which is all of them. And so this is actually off cadence. So I actually get their attention for at least an hour once a quarter, which is almost unheard of. And we actually use the AWS memo format. People have a chance to comment and read prior to the meeting. So they know what we're going to talk about and we know what their concerns are. And so you're not going in like, oh my gosh, what what's going to happen for this hour? We come prepared. We have statistics. We can show them where we're growing. We can show them where we need more growth and maturity. And I think having that level of just development of programs, but also the ear of the board has has helped me mature my role 10 times. And then also we have the chance to ask them, well what are your other CISOs doing? You know, they're members of other boards. So I can say to Dave, for example, you know, what's so-and-so doing at Datadog? Or Tom Killelea, what's the CISO of Capital One doing? And they help me make a lot of those connections as well. I mean, the CISO world is small and me being a female in the world with a Scottish accent, I'm probably more memorable than most. So it's like, oh yeah, that's the Irish girl. Yeah. She's Scottish, thank you. But they remember me and I can use that. And so just having all those mentors from the board level down, and obviously Dev is a huge, huge fan of security and GRC. It's no longer that box ticking exercise that I used to feel security was, you know, if you heated your SOC2 type two in FinTech, oh, you were good to go. You know, if you did a HERC set for the power industry. All right, right. You know, we can move on now. It's not that anymore. >> Right. It's every single day. >> Yeah. Of course. Dev is Dev at the Chario. Dev spelled D E V. I spell Dave differently. My Dave. But, Lena, it sounds like you present a combination of metrics, so, the board, you feel like that's appropriate to dig into the metrics. But also I'm presuming you're talking strategy, potentially, you know, gaps- >> Road roadmaps, the whole nine yards. Yep. >> What's the, you know, I look at the budget scenario. At the macro level, CIOs have told us, they came into the year saying, hey we're going to grow spending at the macro, around eight percent, eight and a half percent. That's dialed down a little bit post Ukraine and the whole recession and Fed tightening. So now they're down maybe around six percent. So not dramatically lower, but still. And they tell us security is still the number one priority. >> Yes. >> That's been the case for many, many quarters, and actually years, but you don't have an unlimited budget. >> Sure >> Right. It's not like, oh, here is an open checkbook. >> Right. >> Lena, so, how does Mongo balance that with the other priorities in the organization, obviously, you know, you got to spend money on product, you got to spend money and go to market. What's the climate like now, is it, you know continuing on in 2022 despite some of the macro concerns? Is it maybe tapping the brakes? What's the general sentiment? >> We would never tap the breaks. I mean, this is something that's- So my other half works in the finance industry still. So we have, you know, interesting discussions when it comes to geopolitics and financial politics and you know, Dev, the chairman of the board, all very technical people, get that security is going to be taken advantage of if we're seeing to be tapping the brakes. So it does kind of worry me when I hear other people are saying, oh, we're, you know, we're cutting back our budget. We are not. That being said, you also have to be fiscally responsible. I'm Scottish, we're cheap, really frugal with money. And so I always tell my team: treat this money as if it's your own. As if it's my money. And so when we're buying tool sets, I want to make sure that I'm talking to the CISO, or the CISO of the company that's supplying it, and saying are you giving me the really the best value? You know, how can we maybe even partner with you as a database platform? How could we partner with you, X company, to, you know, maybe we'll give you credits on our platform. If you look to moving to us and then we could have a partnership, and I mean, that's how some of this stuff builds, and so I've been pretty good at doing that. I enjoy doing that. But then also just in terms of being fiscally responsible, yeah, I get it. There's CISOs who have every tool that's out there because it's shiny and it's new and they know the board is never going to say no, but at some point, people will get wise to that and be like, I think we need a new CISO. So it's not like we're going to stop spending it. So we're going to get someone who actually knows how to budget and get us what the best value for money. And so that's always been my view is we're always going to be financed. We're always going to be financed well. But I need to keep showing that value for money. And we do that every board meeting, every Monday when I meet with my boss. I mean, I report to the CFO but I've got a dotted line to the CTO. So I'm, you know, I'm one of the few people at this level that's got my feet in both camps. You know budgets are talked at Dev's level. So, you know, it's really important that we get the spend right. >> And that value is essentially, as I was kind of alluding to before, it's decreasing the value equation for the hackers, for the adversary. >> Hopefully, yes. >> Right? Who's the- of course they're increasingly sophisticated. I want to ask you about your relationship with AWS in this context. It feels like, when I look around here, I think back to 2019, there was a lot of talk about the shared responsibility model. >> Yes. >> You know, AWS likes to educate people and back then it was like, okay, hey, by the way, you know you got to, you know, configure the S3 bucket properly. And then, oh, by the way, there's more than just, it's not just binary. >> Right, right. >> There's other factors involved. The application access and identity and things like that, et cetera, et cetera. So that was all kind of cool. But I feel like the cloud is becoming the first line of defense for the CISO but because of the shared responsibility model, CISO is now the second line of defense >> Yes. Does that change your role? Does it make it less complicated in a way? Maybe, you know, more complicated because you now got to get your DevSecOps team? The developers are now much more involved in security? How is that shifting, specifically in the context of your relationship with AWS? >> It's honestly not been that much of a shift. I mean, these guys are very proactive when it comes to where we are from the security standpoint. They listen to their customers as much as we do. So when we sit down with them, when I meet with Steve Schmidt or CJ or you know, our account manager, its not a conversation that's a surprise to me when I tell them this is what we need. They're like, yep, we're on that already. And so I think that relationship has been very proactive rather than reactive. And then in terms of MongoDB, as a tech company, security is always at the forefront. So it's not been a huge lift for me. It's really just been my time that I've taken to understand where DevSecOps is coming from. And you know, how far are we shifting left? Are we actually shifting right now? It's like, you know, get the balance, right? You can't be too much to one side. But I think in terms of where we're teaching the developers, you know, we are a company by developers for developers. So, we get it, we understand where they're coming from, and we try and be as proactive as AWS is. >> When you obviously the SolarWinds hack was a a major mile- I think in security, there's always something in the headlines- >> Yes. But when you think of things like, you know, Stuxnet, you know, Log4J, obviously Solarwinds and the whole supply chain infiltration and the bill of materials. As I said before, the adversary is extremely capable and sophisticated and you know, much more automated. It's always been automated attacks, but you know island hopping and infiltrating and self-forming malware and really sophisticated techniques. >> Yep. >> How are you thinking about that supply chain, bill of materials from inside Mongo and ultimately externally to your customers? >> So you've picked on my third favorite topic to talk about. So I came from the power industry before, so I've got a lot of experience with critical infrastructure. And that was really, I think, where a lot of the supply chain management rules and regulations came from. If you're building a turbine and the steel's coming from China, we would send people to China to make sure that the steel we were buying was the steel we were using. And so that became the H bomb. The hardware bill of materials, bad name. But, you know, we remember what it stood for. And then fast forward: President Biden's executive order. SBOs front and center, cloud first front and center. It's like, this is perfect. And so I was actually- I actually moderated a panel earlier this year at Homeland Security Week in DC, where we had a sneak CISA, So Dr. Allen Friedman from CISA, and also Patrick Weir from OWASP for the framework, CISA for the framework as well, and just the general guidance, and Snake for the front end. That was where my head was going. And MongoDB is the back-end database. And what we've done is we've taken our work with Snake and we now have a proof of concept for SBOs. And so I'm now trying to kind of package that, if you like, as a program and get the word out that SBOs shouldn't be something to be afraid of. If you want to do business with the government you're going to have to create one. We are offering a secure repository to store that data, the government could have access to that repository and see that data. So there's one source of truth. And so I think SBOs is going to be really interesting. I know that, you know, some of my peers are like, oh, it's just another box to tick. And I think it's more than that. I definitely- I've just, there's something percolating in the back of my mind that this is going to be big and we're going to be able to use it to hopefully not stop things like another Log4j, there's always going to be another Log4j, we know that. we don't know everything, the unknown unknown, but at least if we're prepared to go find stuff quicker than we were then before Log4j, I think having SBOs on hand, having that one source of truth, that one repository, I think is going to make it so much easier to find those things. >> Last question, what's the CISO's number one challenge? Either yours or the CISO, generally. >> Keeping up with the fire hose that is security. Like, what do you pick tomorrow? And if you pick the wrong thing, what's the impact? So that's why I'm always networking and talking to my peers. And, you know, we're sometimes like meerkats, you know. there's meerkats, you see like this, it's like, what do we talk about? But there's always something to talk about. And you just have to learn and keep learning. >> Last question, part B. As a hot technology company, that's, you know, rising star, you know not withstanding the tech lash and the stock market- >> Yeah. >> But Mongo's growing, you know, wonderfully. Do you find it easier to attract talent? Like many CISOs will say, you know, lack of talent is my biggest, biggest challenge. Do you find that that's not the challenge for you? >> Not at all. I think on two fronts, one, we have the champions program. So we've got a whole internal ecosystem who love working there. So the minute one of my jobs goes on the board, they get first dibs at it. So they'd already phoning their friends. So we've got, you know, there's ripple effects out from over a hundred people internally. You know, I think just having that, that's been a game changer. >> I was so looking forward to interviewing you, Lena, thanks so much for coming. >> Thank you, this was a pleasure. >> It was really great to have you. >> Thank you so much. Thank you. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Villante for theCUBE. We'll be right back at AWS Re:inforce22 right after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> With cloud computing, programmable infrastructure, open source momentum with things like Terraform and software defined everything, people have been asking, "Does hardware still matter?" The obvious answer is software has to run on something but why does hardware still matter specifically? What customer value is there in advanced hardware architectures and what are some of the less frequently discussed nuances of hardware that make software run better and businesses run more efficiently and securely at scale. Welcome to the Cube's ongoing series where we explore the importance of hardware its evolution over the decades and its future outlook with me is longtime cubilam, Shannon Champion. Who's the vice president of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Welcome Shannon. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Yeah, it's always great to collaborate with you. Shannon, you've had a pretty impressive career. You've got this killer combination of you have an engineering degree, multiple engineering degrees actually combined with business education. You've worked as a semiconductor engineer, a quality engineer, product manager, product marketing exec, et cetera. And you now have responsibility for a variety of hardware and software led infrastructure at Dell. How have you seen hardware evolve over the years? >> Well, first of all, thank you. I appreciate that intro Dave. Yeah, it's been a fun journey. I think there's two things. I think there's a product led evolution and then there's customer evolution. And obviously those go hand in hand. If you think about the technology from a hardware perspective, it's become more advanced, more specialized and the diversification of chip architectures is really what's driving that. It's gone from general purpose CPUs to GPUs, to specialty processors like, DPUs and purpose-built accelerators. And with all that specialization, obviously more and more software is required to really knit it together. We believe Dell is uniquely positioned to do that. >> Awesome. So I want to just come right out and ask you, you know, with cloud and software defined and hyper-converged why specifically does hardware still matter? >> Well, if you know anything about Dell, you know we are driven by customer first mindset. So I'm going to go back to that customer evolution I talked about and from a customer perspective, purchase decisions used to be more about feature function, Like how much compute memory storage can you pack in and get the best performance characteristics. Of course, people still care about this and almost every customer, if you look at the widespread surveys that have been done in the industry projections are still going to be making data center infrastructure purchases for the foreseeable future, but more and more, these sort of like traditional hardware capabilities are table stakes. And what customers are making purchase decisions on are the software driven capabilities that provide the differentiating capabilities to allow them to do more with less. So with that sort of comes a refocusing of where IT adds value for their organizations. We know maintaining and managing the infrastructure is not what differentiates companies and makes them stand out from the crowd. So that's what this whole notion of IT Transformation is all about. Our customers are pulling us into a broader set of problems and their purchase criteria is moving away from hardware feature function to differentiated solution and software value decision making with more focus on how they can drive business value beyond the infrastructure. So it's really the combination of hardware with software that optimizes and delivers the best outcomes and the tighter the link we can create between them the more seamless the experience for customers. >> Gotcha and I mean, this is more important than ever with the push toward digital transformation. And everybody's trying to get digital right. Now thinking about Dell as a company and its broader strategy, the majority of revenue comes from what most people would think of as hardware but as Jeff Clark often points out, the vast majority of engineers are software engineers. Can you explain how that dynamic works and what role hardware plays in that equation? >> Yeah, totally. So if you think about IT transformation infrastructure is the enabler of that transformation, but infrastructure needs to be smarter, easier, more automated, more secure. And that's done with software and our software engineering focus is nothing new. I think Dave, we were together five years ago talking about the latest version of HCI on the 14th generation of power edge servers. And at that time we were talking about how our hardware platform engineers were working with the software engineers to design in software defined storage capabilities within the power edge platform. So, you know, we, that we are not new to this. We've been looking at ways we can use software to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities and do that in a differentiated way because it delivers value for customers. And honestly, they're willing to pay a premium for that. >> Yeah. I remember that well, 14G now 15G, soon we're going to be talking about 16G. Can you give me an example of where hardware differentiation has created value for your customers beyond, you know what a straight software only solution running on generic white boxes might bring? >> Yeah, I have a couple of examples. The first is easily VxRail, right? VxRail, our jointly engineered HCI system with VMware. It provides full stack integration of hardware and software for that consistent operations in VMware environments. And when you think about evolution of infrastructure VxRail is actually a cool story. When it was introduced six years ago its scalability and performance, you know had it be rapidly adopted mainly in the data center but customer demands have evolved and they wanted to extend that operational efficiency to a broader and broader set of workloads. Not only in the data center, but in the cloud at the edge. So VxRail grew and its portfolio today has maximum flexibility. You can choose the best platform to meet performance, storage, graphics, IO, cost requirements a range of processor types and NVMe drives and graphics cards. So it really is the most configurable HCI system to meet any workload demand. And we recently introduced some new node types. That's hardware based, right? VxRail dynamic nodes and satellite nodes and our customers and partners are really excited about these, the dynamic nodes, as you know add the capability to scale compute and storage independently and extend to primary storage like power store and the satellite nodes are single nodes for the edge. So that's all hardware stuff, but the secret to VxRail really is more about the software. So I'm going to go back there. The VxRail HCI system software is what makes VxRail more seamless and simple than any other HCI system. And when managing your environment is easier and more automated and your workloads can stay up and running, leveraging that intelligent life cycle management customers pay attention. So again, it's that combination of hardware and software and for VxRail customers it's how we're delivering that truly curated experience like we like to call it that they can't get anywhere else. >> Awesome. So last question. Anything else you want to bring into the discussion before we close? >> Yeah. Two things, actually I have another good example of hardware differentiation and how it creates value for customers. And this one is based upon PowerStore. So PowerStore inline data reduction uses Intel quick assist technology and it performs hardware accelerated compression. So it's basically handling data reduction in hardware. We offload the compute intensive workloads of compression and conserve the CPU cycles for storage IO tasks that save application and storage processing time, cycles and costs. So it's a more consistent way to do storage efficiency and leverage power storage advance inline compression and it's always on, and it doesn't compromise performance of other services. So, with PowerStore using this hardware differentiated approach to inline data reduction, customers get an average four to one data reduction across all their workloads, don't compromise performance or services. And honestly, a lot of times we see them achieving up to 20 to 1 or more depending on the data type. So yeah, I just wanted to throw out that other example. >> Great. >> The last thing I'll say is we just launched a trifecta storage innovation at Dell Technologies World. We have over 500 new high value software enhancements that bring out the best in our storage hardware platforms and that's across PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex. So I encourage folks to go check that out and you know obviously let us know what you think. >> Yeah. We can put a link to those in the show notes. And I was there at Dell Tech World. It was actually quite amazing. Shannon, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights really appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Good evening, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We've been here two and a half days. We've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. Itzik Reich, the VP of the Technologist ISG at Dell and Magi Kapoor Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> So great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. But Itzik we want to, we want to start with you VP of the Technologists. That sounds like a, like you need to wear a cape or something. >> Right? Yeah. I wish I do sometimes >> Talk about that role and what you do. >> Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences or customer calls or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine they're a very large company. Not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we are doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy which has started couple of years ago which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, that's-- >> Got a side gig. My goodness. >> That's right. >> Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days. Great attendance here. Seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue and FY 22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers storage bringing it to the hyperscalers? >> Yeah. No lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face to face meetings and, you know, see the customers, have presentations in person. Like I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been incredible. Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones, you know, so just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of pan-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so, you know, we're at this cusp where there are, you know, customers that are on this journey of, you know, developers coming up to speed with multicloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about, you know, a multicloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multicloud for design by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi from different multi clouds, right? And develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together. Really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and Edge and everything that we've talked about. So project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announce and Chuck brought that up on Monday was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.dell.com which we announced and launched in January of this year. Right? It's think of that as our one stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having a API first approach to everything we're doing be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one stop shop but standardizing on APIs, which is really key. >> We just spoke to Shannon Champion and Gemma from Salesforce. And we talked about how we entered last decade for visioning lungs. And now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy. How did it start? How was it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? You know, where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in >> 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon their CTO went on stage and they explained their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12 factor way, designed to fail, storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data. Especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually, at the time, work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business. But Google took over the some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI. Which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for container storage interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors in order to ensure that our stands outs are part of the CSI stand out. And we start to providing CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes similarly in a way to the open stock days is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So seed side itself is not just the end of it. Many customer wants day to be working with VMware (indistinct) with zoo or with red OpenShift or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today but also in the future as well. >> Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was, you know, pretty immature. We were focused on simplicity. You had Mesos doing, you know, more sophisticated things, you know, cluster HQ, obvious. And now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm tackling all those, a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resilient resiliency equation? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think storages are key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do really take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in? And they love, and they need. I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide, right? Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance, they want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itzik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides but yet take advantage of cloudifying, if I can say, the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that we also have what we call our CSM modules which is the container storage modules which is so, you know, going back again, we, CSI industry stack spec standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was, this is great but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions. But what we have realized is that they're, the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules which is an extension of CSI modules but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency. These are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSM modules just like CSI are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source waiting, you know, and wanting them to contribute to the court. So it's not just us doing, you know and writing what we want but we also want the community to contribute. >> You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source? >> Exactly. >> That's the contribution. >> And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board not just for Dell customers. >> Is that a project going, is that your ideal? It that becomes a project within CNCF or is it? >> That's our goal. Yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. >> More committers. Just keep throwing committers at it. >> Support these day is done via slack channel. So if we're changing the way that we run interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via slack channel. You don't need to call 100, 800 Dell to get a support case. >> So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine, and it was very interesting to me to see that. You know, you guys talk about multicloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud and that's this abstraction layer. You know, some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multivendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, Jamoc Degani kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a defacto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? >> I think it is. So for example, Katie Gordon, which I believe you interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly power part of the its rational, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So, yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. >> Dell meeting the developers where they are. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Speaking of unpacking, Lisa. We're unpacking Dell tech world. >> They're packing up around us. Exactly. We better go. We want to thank you for watching The Cube's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies world. Dave it's been great to co-host with you, be back in person. >> Thank you Lisa. It was really a pleasure. >> Of course. My pleasure too. >> Let's do more of this. >> Let's do it! >> All right. >> We want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on replay on thecube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time. (soft music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin and Dave Vale are live in Las Vegas. We are covering our third day of covering Dell technologies world 2022. The first live in-person event since 2019. It's been great to be here. We've had a lot of great conversations about all the announcements that Dell has made in the last couple of days. And we're gonna unpack a little bit more of that. Now. One of our alumni is back with us. Shannon champion joins us again, vice president product marketing at Dell technologies, and she's a company by Pete Robinson, the director of infrastructure engineering at Salesforce. Welcome. Thank >>You. >>So Shannon, you had a big announcement yesterday. I run a lot of new software innovations. Did >>You hear about that? I heard a little something >>About that. Unpack that for us. >>Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it's so exciting to be here in person and have such a big moment across our storage portfolio, to see that on the big stage, the boom to announce major updates across power store, PowerMax and power flex all together, just a ton of innovation across the storage portfolio. And you probably also heard a ton of focus on our software driven innovation across those products, because our goal is really to deliver a continuously modern storage experience. That's what our customers are asking us for that cloud experience. Let's take the most Val get the most value from data no matter where it lives. That's on premises in the public clouds or at the edge. And that's what we, uh, unveil. That's what we're releasing. And that's what we're excited to talk about. >>Now, Pete, you, Salesforce is a long time Dell customer, but you're also its largest PowerMax customer. The biggest in the world. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing with PowerMax and your experience. >>Yeah, so, um, for Salesforce, trust is our number one value and that carries over into the infrastructure that we develop, we test and, and we roll out and Parex has been a key part of that. Um, we really like the, um, the technology in terms of availability, reliability, um, performance. And it, it has allowed us to, you know, continue to grow our customers, uh, continue needs for more and more data. >>So what was kind of eye popping to me was the emphasis on security. Not that you've not always emphasized security, but maybe Shannon, you could do a rundown of, yeah. Maybe not all the features, but give us the high level. And at Pete, I, I wonder how I, if you could comment on how, how you think about that as a practitioner, but please give us that. >>Sure. Yeah. So, you know, PowerMax has been leading for, uh, a long time in its space and we're continuing to lean into that and continue to lead in that space. And we're proud to say PowerMax is the world's most secure mission, critical storage platform. And the reason we can say that is because it really is designed for comprehensive cyber resiliency. It's designed with a zero trust security architecture. And in this particular release, there's 19 different security features really embedded in there. So I'm not gonna unpack all 19, but a couple, um, examples, right? So multifactor authentication also continuous ransomware anomaly detection, a leveraging cloud IQ, which is, uh, huge. Um, and last but not least, um, we have the industry's most granular cyber recovery at scale PowerMax can do up to 65 million imutable snapshots per array. So just, uh, and that's 30 times more than our next nearest competitor. So, you know, really when you're talking about recovery point objectives, power max can't be beat. >>So what does that mean to you, Pete? >>Uh, well, it's it's same thing that I was mentioning earlier about that's a trust factor. Uh, security is a big, a big part of that. You know, Salesforce invests heavily into the securing our customer data because it really is the, the core foundation of our success and our customers trust us with their data. And if we, if we were to fail at that, you know, we would lose that trust. And that's simply not, it's not an option. >>Let's talk about that trust for a minute. We know we've heard a lot about trust this week from Michael Dell. Talk to us about trust, your trust, Salesforce's trust and Dell technologies. You've been using them a long time, but cultural alignment yeah. Seems to be pretty spot on. >>I, I would agree. Um, you know, both companies have a customer first mentality, uh, you know, we, we succeed if the customer succeeds and we see that going back and forth in that partnership. So Dell is successful when Salesforce is successful and vice versa. So, um, when we've it's and it goes beyond just the initial, you know, the initial purchase of, of hardware or software, you know, how you operate it, how you manage it, um, how you continue to develop together. You know, our, you know, we work closely with the Dell engineering teams and we've, we've worked closely in development of the new, new PowerMax lines to where it's actually able to help us build our, our business. And, and again, you know, continue to help Dell in the process. So you've >>Got visibility on the new, a lot of these new features you're playing around with them. What I, I, I obviously started with security cuz that's on top of everybody's mind, but what are the things are important to you as a customer? And how do these features the new features kind of map into that? Maybe you could talk about your experience with the, I think you're in beta, maybe with these features. Maybe you could talk about that. >>Yeah. Um, probably the, the biggest thing that we're seeing right now, other than OB the obvious enhancements in hardware, which, which we love, uh, you know, better performance, better scalability, better, and a better density. Um, but also the, some of the software functionality that Dells starting to roll out, you know, we've, we've, we've uh, implemented cloud IQ for all of our PowerMax systems and it's the same thing. We continue to, um, find features that we would like. And we've actually, you know, worked closely with the cloud IQ team. And within a matter of weeks or months, those features are popping up in cloud IQ that we can then continue to, to develop and, and use. >>Yeah. I think trust goes both ways in our partnership, right? So, you know, Salesforce can trust Dell to deliver the, you know, the products they need to deliver their business outcomes, but we also have a relationship to where we can trust that Salesforce is gonna really help us develop the next generation product that's gonna, you know, really deliver the most value. Yeah. >>Can you share some business outcomes that you've achieved so far leveraging power max and how it's really enabled, maybe it's your organization's productivity perspective, but what are some of those outcomes that you've achieved so far? >>Um, there there's so many to, to, to choose from, but I would say the, probably the biggest thing that we've seen is a as we roll out new infrastructure, we have various generations that we deploy. Um, when we went to the new PowerMax, um, initially we were concerned about whether our storage infrastructure could keep up with the new compute, uh, systems that we were rolling out. And when we went through and began testing it, we came to realize that the, the performance improvements alone, that we were seeing were able to keep up with the compute demand, making that transition from the older VMAX platforms to the PMAX practically seamless and able to just deploy the new SKUs as, as they came out. >>Talk about the portfolio that you apply to PowerMax. I mean, it's the highest of the highest end mission critical the toughest workloads in the planet. Salesforce has made a lot of acquisitions. Yeah. Um, do you throw everything at PowerMax? Are you, are you selective? What's your strategy there? So >>It's, it's selective. In other words that there's no square peg that meets every need, um, you know, acquisitions take some time to, to ingest, um, you know, some run into cloud, some run in first, in, in first party. Um, but so we, we try to take a very, very intentional approach to where we deploy that technology. >>So 10 years ago, someone in your position, or maybe someone who works for you was probably do spent a lot of time managing lawns and tuning performance. And how has that changed? >>We don't do that. <laugh> we? >>We can, right. So what do you do with right. Talk, talk more double click on that. So how talk about how that transition occurred from really non-productive activities, managing storage boxes. Yeah. And, and where you are today, what are you doing with those resources? >>It, it, it all comes outta automation. Like, you know, the, you know, hardware is hardware to a point, um, but you reach a point where the, the manageability scale just goes exponential and, and we're way, well past that. And the only way we've been able to meet that, meet that need is to, to automate and really develop our operations, to be able to not just manage at a lung level or even at the system level, but manage at the data center level at the geographical, you know, location level and then being able to, to manage from there. >>Okay. Really stupid question. But I'm gonna ask it cause I wanna hear your answer. True. Why can't you just take a software defined storage platform and just run everything on that? Why do you need all these different platforms and why do you gotta spend all this money on PowerMax? Why, why can't you just do >>That? That's the million dollar question. Uh, I, I ask that all the time. <laugh>, um, I think software defined is it's on its way. Um, it's come a long way just in the last decade. Yeah. Um, but in terms of supporting what I consider mission critical, large scale, uh, applications, it's, it's not, it's just simply not on par just yet with what we do with PowerMax, for example. >>And that's exactly how we position it in our portfolio. Right? So PowerMax runs on 95% of the fortune 100 companies, top 20 healthcare companies, top 10 financial services companies in the world. So it's really mission critical high end has all of the enterprise level features and capabilities to really have that availability. That's so important to a lot of companies like Salesforce and, and Pete's right, you know, software define is on its way and it provides a lot of agility there. But at the end of the day for mission critical storage, it's all about PowerMax. >>I wonder if we're ever gonna get to, I mean, you, you, you, it was interesting answer cuz you kind of, I inferred from your that you're hopeful and even optimistic that someday will get to parody. But I wonder because you can't be just close enough. It's almost, you have to be. >>I think, I think the key answer to that is it's it's the software flying gets you halfway there. The other side of the coin is the application ecosystem has to change to be able to solve that other, other side of it. Cuz if you simply simply take an application that runs on a PowerMax and try to run it, just forklift it over to a software defined. You're not gonna have very much luck. >>Recovery has to be moved up to stack >>Operations recovery, the whole, whole whole works. >>Jenny, can you comment on how customers like Salesforce? Like what's your process for involving them in testing in roadmap and in that direction, strategic direction that you guys are going? Great >>Question. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, customer feedback is huge. You've heard it. I'm sure this is not new right product development and engineering. We love to hear from our customers. And there's multiple ways you heard about beta testing, which we're really fortunate that Salesforce can help us provide that feedback for our new releases. But we have user groups, we have forums. We, we hear directly from our sales teams, our, you know, our customers, aren't shy, they're willing to give us their feedback. And at the end of the day, we take that feedback and make sure that we're prioritizing the right things in our product management and engineering teams so that we're delivering the things that matter. Most first, >>We've heard a lot of that this week. So I would agree guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Salesforce. What you doing with PowerMax? All the stuff that you announced yesterday, alone. Hopefully you get to go home and get a little bit of rest. >>Yes. >>I'm sure that there's, there's never a dull moment. Never. Can't wait guys. Great to have you. >>Thank you. You guys, >>For our guests on Dave Volante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the queue. We are live day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of the show.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm still minimum and this is the Cubes coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year doing the Cube. First year. We're doing it, of course, virtually globally. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Shannon Champion, and she is the director of product marketing with Dell Technologies. Shannon, Nice to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. >>Alright, So big thing, of course, at VM World, talking about building off of what was Project Pacific at last year's show? Talking about how kubernetes all the wonderful cloud native pieces go in. So let's let's talk about application modernization. Shannon, you know, with a theme I've talked about for a number of years, is you know, we need to modernize the platform, and then we can modernize the applications on top of those. So tell us what you're hearing from your customers and how Delon vm, where then, are bringing the solutions to help customers really along that journey. >>Yeah, I'd love Thio. It's fun stuff. So, um, enterprises are telling us that especially now more than ever, they're really looking for how they must digitally transform. And they need to do that so they can drive innovation and get a competitive advantage on one way. That they're able to do that is by finding ways to flexibly and rapidly move work loads to where they make sense, whether that's on premises or in the public cloud. And the new standard for doing this is becoming cloud native applications. There was a recent I. D. C. Future Escape that predicted that by 2025 2 3rd of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code being deployed on a daily basis, and over 90% of applications at that time will be delivered with cognitive approaches. So it's just kind of crazy to think, and what's really impressive to is that the sheer volume of applications that are anticipated to be produced with these cloud native approaches Ah, it's expected to be over 500 million new APS created with cognitive approaches by 2024 just kind of putting that into perspective 500 million. APS is the same number that's been created over the last 40 years. So it's a fun, fun trend to be part of. >>Yeah, it's really amazing. When I talked to customers, there's some It's like, Oh, let me show you how Maney APs I've done and created in the last 18 months. It was like, Great. How does that compare before? And they're like, we weren't creating APS. We were buying APS. We were buying software. We had outsourced some of those pieces. So you know that that that trend we've been talking about for a number of years is kind of everyone's a software company, Um, does not mean that, you know, we're getting rid of the old business models. But Shannon, there are challenges there either expanding and moving faster or, you know, making sure that I have the talent in house. So bring us inside. What if some of the big things that your customers are telling you, uh, maybe that's holding them back from unlocking that central? >>Yeah, totally. You hit on a couple of them, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in adoption of kubernetes and clearly VM Ware is leading the way with Changzhou. But we're also hearing that they're underestimating the challenges on how toe quote unquote get to kubernetes. Right? How do you stand up that full cloud native staff and particularly at scale Thio? How do you manage the ongoing operations and maintain that infrastructure? How do you support the various stakeholders? How do you bring I t operators and developers together? Eso There's really a wide range of challenges that, um businesses air facing. And the other thing is that you hit on, you know, they're going to be producing mawr and Mawr cloud native applications, but they still need to maintain legacy applications, many of which are driving business, critical applications and workloads. So they're going to need to look for solutions that help them manage both and allow them to re factor or retire those legacy ones at their own pace so they can maintain business continuity. >>Yeah, and of course, Shannon, we know as infrastructure people, our job was always toe, you know, give the environment to allow the applications to run in virtualization. For years, it was Well, I knew if I virtualized something, I could leave it there and it wasn't going to. It didn't have to worry about the underlying hardware changes. Help us understand How does kubernetes fit into this environment? Because, as I said that people don't want to even worry about it. And the infrastructure people now need to be able to change, expand and, you know, respond to the business so much faster than we might have in times past. >>Yeah, so from an infrastructure perspective, working with VM ware based on tons of really the essence of that is to bring I t operators and developers together. The infrastructure has a common set of management that, you know, each the developer and the I t operators can work in the language there most familiar with. And, you know, the communication of the translation all happens within Tan Xue so that they're more speaking the same, um, language when it comes Thio, you know, managing the infrastructure in particular with VM ware tansy on VX rail. We are delivering kind of a range of infrastructure options because we know people are still trying to figure out you know, where they are in their kubernetes readiness path. Some people have really developed mature capabilities in house for who were Netease for software defined networking. And for those customers, they still may want Thio. You know, use a reference architecture er and build on top of the ex rail for, you know, a custom cloud native specific application. What we're finding is more and more customers, though, don't have that level of kubernetes expertise, especially at scale. And so VM ware v sphere with Tan Xue on VX rail as well as via more cloud foundation on VX rail are ways Thio get a fast start on kubernetes with directly on these fair or kind of go with the full Monty of VM or Cloud Foundation on VX rail. >>Well, we're bringing up VX rail. Of course. The whole wave of h C I was How do we enable simplicity? We don't wanna have to think about these. We wanna, uh, just make it so that customers can just buy a solution. Of course. VX rail joint solution, you know, heavily partnership with VM ware. So, Shannon, there's a few options. VM has been moving very fast toe expand out that the into portfolio, uh, back at the beginning of the year when the sphere seven came out. You needed the BMR Cloud Foundation. Which, of course, what was an option for for for the VX rail. So help us understand you laid out a little bit some of those options there. But what should I know as Adele customer, Uh, you know what my options are? How the fault Kansas Wheat fits into it. >>Yeah, eso We like to call it kubernetes your way with the ex rail. So we have a range of options to fit your operational or kubernetes scale requirements or your level of expertise. So the three options, our first for customers that are looking for that tested, validated, multi configuration reference architectures er that will deliver platform as a service or containers is a service. We've got Tom to architecture for VX rail, which is a new name for what was known as pivot already architecture er and then for customers that may have minimum scaling requirements. They may have some of that expertise in house to manage at scale. The fastest path to get started with kubernetes is the new VM ware V sphere with Changzhou on VX rail. And then last I mentioned kind of that full highly automated turnkey on promises Cloud platform. That's the VM, or Cloud Foundation, on VX rail, which is also known as Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. And that option supports Tan Xue with software defined networking and security built in with that automated lifecycle management across the full stack. So there's really three paths to it from a reference architecture approach to a fast path on the actual clusters all the way to the full Deltek Cloud platform. And Dell Technologies is the first and only really offering this breath of tans. You infrastructure deployment options. Eso customers can really, uh, choose the best path for them. >>Yeah, So, Shannon, if if I If I think back to what we saw in the keynote, you know, VM Ware lays out there, they're hybrid and multi cloud solution. So of course they're they're public cloud the VM ware cloud on a W s. They have that solution. They have extended extended partnerships. Now, with azure uh, the the the offering with Oracle. Uh, that's coming, and I guess I could think to just think of the delta cloud on VX rail as just one of those other clouds in that hybrid and multi cloud solutions. Do I have that right? Same stack. Same management. If I'm if I'm living in that VM world world. >>Yeah. So the Deltek Cloud platform is an on premises hybrid cloud. So, you know, ah, lot of customers were looking to reduce complexity really quickly especially, you know, with some of the work from home initiatives that were sprung upon us and trying to pivot, um to respond to that. And, you know, the answer to solving some of that complexity is to jump into public cloud. What we found is a lot of customers actually are driving a hybrid cloud strategy and approach. And we know many customers sort of have that executive mandate. There's value in, um, driving that are on prem hybrid cloud approach. And that's what Dell Technologies Cloud platform is. So you get the consistent operations in the consistent infrastructure and more of the public cloud like consumption experience while having the infrastructure on Prem for security data locality. Other, um, you know, cost reasons like that. Eso That's really where VM or Cloud Foundation on VF Trail comes into play eso leveraging the VM ware technologies you have on Prem Hybrid cloud. It can connect all those public cloud providers that you talked about. So you have, you know, core to cloud on Dwan. Of the new capabilities that VM or Cloud Foundation, is announced support for is remote clusters. So that takes us kind of from cloud all the way toe edge because you now have the same VCF operational capabilities and operational efficiency with centralized management for remote locations. >>Wonderful. I'm glad you brought up the edge piece. Of course, you talk to the emerging space vm ware talking about ai talking about EJ, so help us understand. How much is it? The similar operational model? Is it even eyes that part of the VX rail family? What's the What's the state of the state in 2020 when it comes to how edge fits into that cloud core edge discussion that you just raised? >>Yeah, when you look at trends, especially for hyper converged edge and cloud native are kind of taking up a lot of the airwaves right now. Eso hyper converge is gonna play a big role in Theodore option of both cloud native Band Edge. And I think the intersection of those two comes into play with things like the remote cluster support for VM Ware Cloud Foundation on VX rail, where you can run cloud, you know, cloud native based modern applications with Tan Xue alongside traditional workloads at the edge, which traditionally have more stringent requirements. Less resource is maybe they need a more hardened environment, power and cooling, you know, um, constraints. So with VCF on VX rail, you have all the operational goodness that comes from the partnership in the levels of integration that we have with VM Ware. And customers can sort of realize that promise of full workload management mobility in a true hybrid cloud environment. >>Shannon I'm wondering what general feedback you're getting from your customers is as they look at a zoo, said these cloud native solutions. You know what's what's the big take away? Is this a continuation of the HD I wave that you've seen? Do they just pull this into their hybrid environments? Um, I'm wondering if you have any either any specific examples that you've been anonymized or just the general gestalt that you're getting from your customers. Is that how they're doing expanding, uh, into these, you know, new environments that kind of stretch them in different ways. >>Yeah, it's interesting because you know, there's there's customers that run the gamut when we look at those that are sort of the farther down their digital transformation journey. Those are the ones that were already planning for cloud native applications or had some in development. Uh, there's also some trends that we're seeing based on, you know, the the size of cluster deployments and the range of, you know, various configurations that are an indicator of those customers that are more modernized in terms of their approach to cloud native. And what we find from those customers, especially over the last six months, is that they're more prepared to respond to the unknown on bond. That was a big lesson for some of the other customers that you know, had new. The digital transformation was the way of the future, but hadn't yet sort of come up with a strategy on how to get there themselves were finding those customers are inhibiting their investments to areas that can help them be more ready for the unknown in the future. In Cloud native is top of that list. >>Absolutely. Shannon Day Volante showed a few times There's the people in the office, you know, with their white board doing everything. And there's the wrecking ball of covert 19. Kind of like Well, if you weren't ready and you weren't already down this path, you better move fast. Wonderful. All right, Shannon. So we know, uh, from past years, you know, VX rail. Usually it's all over the show. So in the digital world, what do you want to he takeaways. What are some of the key? You know, hands on demos, sessions that that people should check out. >>Thank you. Yeah. So hopefully your take away is that the X ray is a great infrastructure to support modern applications. First and foremost, we have, you know, a jointly engineered system built with VM ware, four VM ware environments to enhance fam. Where, and we do that with our the extra LHC I system software, which I didn't give a shout out to yet, which extends that native capabilities and really is the secret behind how we do seamless automated operational experience with the ex rail. And that's the case, whether it's traditional or modern applications. So that's my little commercial for VX rail at the show. Please tune into our VM World session on this topic. We also have hands on labs. We are launching a fun augmented reality game. Eso Please check that out on. We have a new Web page as well that you could get access to all the latest assets and guides that help you, you know, navigate your journey for cloud native. And that's at dell technologies dot com slash Hangzhou. >>Wonderful. Well, Shannon Champion, thanks so much. Great to see you again. And be short. Uh, we look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks to >>stay with us. Lots more coverage from VM World 2020. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the Cube.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm still minimum and this is the Cubes coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year doing the Cube. First year. We're doing it, of course, virtually globally. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Shannon Champion, and she is the director of product marketing with Dell Technologies. Cannon. Nice to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. >>Alright, So big thing, of course, at VM World, talking about building off of what was Project Pacific at last year's show? Talking about how kubernetes all the wonderful cloud native pieces go in. So let's let's talk about application modernization. Shannon, you know, with a theme I've talked about for a number of years, is you know, we need to modernize the platform, and then we can modernize the applications on top of those. So tell us what you're hearing from your customers and how Delon Vm Ware then are bringing the solutions to help customers really along that journey. >>Yeah, I'd love Thio. It's fun stuff. So, um, enterprises are telling us that especially now more than ever, they're really looking for how they must digitally transform. And they need to do that so they can drive innovation and get a competitive advantage on one way. That they're able to do that is by finding ways to flexibly and rapidly move work loads to where they make sense, whether that's on premises or in the public cloud. And the new standard for doing this is becoming cloud native applications. There was a recent I. D. C. Future Escape that predicted that by 2025 2 3rd of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code being deployed on a daily basis, and over 90% of applications at that time will be delivered with cognitive approaches. So it's just kind of crazy to think, and what's really impressive to is that the sheer volume of applications that are anticipated to be produced with these cloud native approaches Ah, it's expected to be over 500 million new APS created with club approaches by 2024 just kind of putting that into perspective 500 million. APS is the same number that's been created over the last 40 years. So it's a fun, fun trend to be part of. >>Yeah, it's really amazing. When I talked to customers, there's some It's like, Oh, let me show you how Maney APs I've done and created in the last 18 months. It was like, Great. How does that compare before? And they're like, we weren't creating APS. We were buying APS. We were buying software. We have outsourced some of those pieces. So you know that that that trend we've been talking about for a number of years is kind of everyone's a software company, Um, does not mean that, you know, we're getting rid of the old business models. But Shannon, there are challenges there either expanding and moving faster or, you know, making sure that I have the talent in house. So bring us inside. What if some of the big things that your customers were telling you, maybe that's holding them back from unlocking that potential? >>Yeah, totally. You hit on a couple of them, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in adoption of kubernetes and clearly vm Ware is leading the way with Changzhou. But we're also hearing that they're underestimating the challenges on how toe quote unquote get to kubernetes. Right? How do you stand up that full cloud native staff and particularly at scale Thio? How do you manage the ongoing operations and maintain that infrastructure? How do you support the various stakeholders? How do you bring I t operators and developers together? Eso There's really a wide range of challenges that, um businesses air facing. And the other thing is that you hit on, you know, they're gonna be producing Mawr and Mawr cloud native applications, but they still need to maintain legacy applications, many of which are driving business critical applications and workloads. So they're going to need to look for solutions that help them manage both and allow them to re factor or retire those legacy ones at their own pace so they can maintain business continuity. >>Yeah, and of course, Shannon, we know as infrastructure people, our job was always toe, you know, give the environment to allow the applications to run in virtualization. For years, it was Well, I knew if I virtualized something, I could leave it there, and it wasn't going to it didn't have to worry about the underlying hardware changes. Help us understand How does kubernetes fit into this environment? Because, as I said that people don't want to even worry about it. And the infrastructure people now need to be able to change, expand and, you know, respond to the business so much faster than we might have in times past. >>Yeah, So from an infrastructure perspective, working with VM ware based on tons of really the essence of that is to bring I t operators and developers together. The infrastructure has a common set of management that, you know, each the developer and the I t operators can work in the language there most familiar with. And, you know, the communication of the translation all happens within Tan Xue so that they're more speaking the same, um, language when it comes Thio, you know, managing the infrastructure in particular with VM ware tansy on VX rail. We are delivering kind of a range of infrastructure options because we know people are still trying to figure out you know, where they are in their kubernetes readiness. Have, um, some people have really developed mature capabilities in house for who were Netease for software defined networking. And for those customers, they still may want Thio. You know, use a reference architecture er and build on top of the ex rail for, you know, a custom cloud native specific application. What we're finding is more and more customers, though, don't have that level of kubernetes expertise, especially at scale. And so VM ware v sphere with Tan Xue on VX rail as well as via more cloud foundation on VX rail are ways Thio get a fast start on kubernetes with directly on these fair or kind of go with the full Monty of B M or Cloud Foundation on BX rail. >>Well, we're bringing up VX rail. Of course. The whole wave of h C I was How do we enable simplicity? We don't wanna have to think about these. We wanna, uh, just make it so that customers can just buy a solution. Of course. VX rail joint solution, you know, heavily partnership with VM ware. So, Shannon, there's a few options. VM has been moving very fast. Expand out that the into portfolio, uh, back at the beginning of the year when the Sphere seven came out. You needed the BMR Cloud Foundation. Which, of course, what was an option for for for the VX rail. So help us understand you laid out a little bit some of those options there. But what should I know as Adele customer, Uh, you know what my options are? How the fault hands a sweet fits into it. >>Yeah, eso we like to call it kubernetes your way with the ex rail. So we have a range of options to fit your operational or kubernetes scale requirements or your level of expertise. So the three options, our first for customers that are looking for that tested, validated multi configuration reference architectures er that will deliver platform as a service or containers is a service. We've got tons of architecture for VX rail, which is a new name for what was known as pivot already architecture er and then for customers that may have minimum scaling requirements, they may have some of that expertise in house to manage at scale. The fastest path to get started with kubernetes is the new VM ware V sphere with Changzhou on VX rail. And then last I mentioned kind of that full highly automated turnkey on promises. Cloud platform. That's the VM, or Cloud Foundation, on VX rail, which is also known as Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. And that option supports Tan Xue with software defined networking and security built in with that automated lifecycle management across the full stack. So there's really three paths to it, from a reference architecture approach to a fast path on the actual clusters all the way to the full Deltek Cloud platform. And Dell Technologies is the first and only really offering this breath of Tanya infrastructure deployment options. Eso customers can really choose the best path for them. >>Yeah, so, Shannon, if if I If I think back to what we saw in the keynote, you know, VM Ware lays out there, they're hybrid and multi cloud solution. So of course they're they're public cloud the VM ware cloud on a W s. They have that solution. They have extended extended partnerships. Now, with azure uh, the the the offering with Oracle that's coming. And I guess I could think to just think of the Delta cloud on VX rail as just one of those other clouds in that hybrid and multi cloud solutions do I have that right? Same stack. Same management. If I'm if I'm living in that VM world world. >>Yeah. So the Deltek Cloud platform is an on premises hybrid cloud. So, you know, ah, lot of customers were looking to reduce complexity really quickly especially, you know, with some of the work from home initiatives that were sprung upon us and trying to pivot to respond to that. And, um, you know the answer toe solving some of that complexity is to jump into public cloud. What we found is a lot of customers actually are driving a hybrid cloud strategy and approach. And we know many customers sort of have that executive mandate. There's value in, um, driving that, um on Prem hybrid cloud approach. And that's what Dell Technologies Cloud platform is. So you get the consistent operations in the consistent infrastructure and more of the public cloud like consumption experience while having the infrastructure on Prem for security data locality There, um, you know, cost reasons like that eso That's really where VM or Cloud Foundation on VF drill comes into play eso leveraging the VM ware technologies you have on Prem hybrid cloud. It can connect all those public cloud providers that you talked about. So you have, you know, core to cloud on day one of the new capabilities that VM or Cloud Foundation is announced support for is remote clusters. So that takes us kind of from cloud all the way toe edge because you now have the same VCF operational capabilities and operational efficiency with centralized management for remote locations. >>Wonderful. I'm glad you brought up the edge piece. Of course, you talk to the emerging space vm ware talking about ai talking about EJ. So help us understand. How much is it? The similar operational model is it even? Is that part of the VX rail family? What's the What's the state of the state in 2020 when it comes to how edge fits into that cloud core edge discussion that you just, uh, raised? >>Yeah. When you look at trends, especially for hyper converged edge and cloud native are kind of taking up a lot of the airwaves right now. Eso hyper converge is gonna play a big role in Theodore option of both cloud native Band Edge. And I think the intersection of those two comes into play with things like the remote cluster support for VM or Cloud Foundation on VX rail where you can run cloud, you know, cloud native based modern applications with thons Ooh, alongside traditional workloads at the edge, which traditionally have more stringent requirements. Less resource is maybe they need a more hardened environment, power and cooling, you know, um, constraints. So with VCF on Vieques, well, you have all the operational goodness that comes from the partnership in the levels of integration that we have with VM Ware. And customers can sort of realize that promise of full workload management mobility in a true hybrid cloud environment. >>Shannon, when I'm wondering what general feedback you're getting from your customers is as they look at a zoo, said these cloud native solutions and you know what's what's the big take away? Is this a continuation of the HD I wave that you've seen? Do they just pull this into their hybrid environments? Um, I'm wondering if you have any either any specific examples that you've been anonymized or just the general gestalt that you're getting from your customers. Is that how they're doing expanding, uh, into these, you know, new environments that kind of stretch them in different ways. >>Yeah, it's interesting because you know, there's there's customers that run the gamut when we look at those that are sort of the farther down their digital transformation journey. Those are the ones that were already planning for cloud native applications or had some in development. Uh, there's also some trends that we're seeing based on, you know, the the size of cluster deployments and the range of, you know, various configurations that are an indicator of those customers that are more modernized in terms of their approach to cloud native. And what we find from those customers, especially over the last six months, is that they're more prepared to respond to the unknown on bond. That was a big lesson for some of the other customers that you know, had new. The digital transformation was the way of the future, but hadn't yet sort of come up with a strategy on how to get there themselves were finding those customers are inhibiting their investments to areas that can help them be more ready for the unknown in the future. In Cloud Native is top of that list. >>Absolutely Shannon Day Volante shown a few times. There's the people in the office, you know, with their white board doing everything. And there's the wrecking ball of covert 19. Kind of like Well, if you weren't ready and you weren't already down this path, you better move fast. Wonderful. All right, Shannon. So we know, uh, from past years, you know, VX rail. Usually it's all over the show. So in the digital world, what do you want? He takeaways. What are some of the key? You know, hands on demos, sessions that that people should check out. >>Thank you. Yeah. So hopefully your take away is that the exhale is a great infrastructure to support modern applications. First and foremost, we have, you know, a jointly engineered system built with VM ware, four VM ware environments to enhance fam. Where, and we do that with our the extra LHC I system software, which I didn't give a shout out to yet, which extends that native capabilities and really is the secret behind how we do seamless automated operational experience with the ex rail. And that's the case, whether it's traditional or modern applications. So that's my little commercial for VX rail at the show please tune into our VM World session on this topic. We also have hands on labs. We are launching a fun augmented reality game. Eso Please check that out on. We have a new Web page as well that you get access to all the latest assets and guides that help you, you know, navigate your journey for cloud native. And that's at dell technologies dot com slash Hangzhou. >>Wonderful. Well, Shannon Champion, thanks so much. Great to see you again. And be short. Uh, we look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks to >>stay with us. Lots more coverage from VM World 2020. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas Nevada, it's the CUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to the CUBE from Coupa Inspire'19 at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. It's a pretty swanky place here. Very excited to welcome to the CUBE for the first time from Accenture, Jesse Hanger, Director of Capability Network Sourcing and Procurement. Jesse, welcome. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Oh, our pleasure to have you. So here we are day two of the main stuff going on here. All talking about Business Spend Management, BSM, this new category that Coupa is defining. We had the chance yesterday to speak with Rob Bernshteyn their CEO. Ravi Thakur was there. And it's one of the cool things that Coupa is doing is it's now, it's procurement, it's invoicing, it's expenses, it's payments, but it's also helping to redefine procurement and finance. >> And it is. I mean it's a huge shift when we think about, in industry, the same shift that Salesforce had years ago when it comes to CRM. When Coupa started talking about this, maybe two years ago, I had a little bit of a head-scratcher, I saw some of their slides and I thought to myself, that's a bit much to say you're going to change this, but the funny thing was, no one else had come up with a real definition of this. We finally had procurement technology that was at a level that you could capture this type of data and information, and it could go broader than just my MRP system and bills of materials, and to everything. Into your traveling expenses, into how you're sourcing things, into your basic inventory, and so it took me awhile to come around, but it was a slow journey for me, but clearly Business Spend Management is the future, what we look at with procurement. Because for a CPO, it can't just be about saving money or reducing costs, you have to start driving business and you can't drive business if all you do is save money. >> Exactly, and that's been something that I've learned a lot from in the last a week or so, alone, is how influential a CPO can be. This person can be, not just the money saver, it's shareholder value. >> Jesse: Right, bottom line growth of the business. >> Yes, and one of the things that I really appreciate is Coupa's done a great job the last two days of sharing the voice of the customer. Because I said to you, before we went live, I said, I don't as a marketer, I'm a little bias, but I don't think there's anything that's more brand validating than the voice of a successful customer that actually shows measurable business outcomes and they showed that this morning. That transcends any industry whether you're manufacturing or a retailer. >> Yep, and so when you do think about it from their customer's perspective, from our client's perspective at Accenture, this is not easy. Changing the way you do things and changing your overall procurement operating model it's not a easy stuff. There's a reason why there're so many big companies like Accenture that do this kind of work. Because it's hard and it's needed. We come in with a different perspective. Having a platform like Coupa to really initiate that transformation, to be the to be the lever that moves the company from where they were to where they want to be and where they need to be to be competitive in the market, it makes our job so much easier across the broader supply chain practice to really, not just make the change, but you know we use a big consulting word, to instantiate it, so that it stays. We don't make it better this year, we make it better moving forward. >> It's an evolution. >> Jesse: It is. >> But that requires the right mindsets to go from a tactical role, of managing budgets and things, to being strategic, being able to identify fraud detection, for example. >> Well and again, when they talk about their suite synergy and the fact that all of these components of the platform, they're not separate modules, they hate when we say modules, so it's the T&E module. All of these components because they are all natively integrated and the data structure is the same on the back end, things like the fraud detection become easy. for Coupa, not in other platforms. Again, the more things you are doing with Coupa, the more data you have and the more you can get the benefit from the broader ecosystem, from the over 1 trillion dollars in spend that's gone through, that's fully classified, coded, detailed, now all of that spend helps that fraud engine do a better job. >> The community that you mentioned they were saying, I think Rob Bernshteyn CEO Coupa said yesterday that since 2016, around the time they went public, it's been a 5X increase in the amount of spend being managed through the Coupa platform. Accenture has over 50 deployments of Coupa in 72 countries, you guys are also managing over 100 billion of that, but this community that they described yesterday, so eloquently, is very collaborative, allowing not just customers to leverage from peer's best practices, but suppliers, as well. Talk to us about some of the things, like the wave that they're riding now, in terms of this community intelligence, and how is it going to help Accenture really be able to help more companies get that visibility and that control of all their spend? >> So as an example, at Accenture when you look at the analyst reports, we do very well when it comes to our procurement practice and the spend that we're helping companies manage outside of a platform. So we've got I think the latest number I saw was like 1.8 trillion dollars that we have helped companies source in the last handful of years. >> Wow. So that is something that gives us a huge competitive advantage. The same thing is true of Coupa and you said, how they're riding this wave, honestly, I don't think they're riding the wave yet, I think the wave is still building and they're about to start riding it, I think that what we're going to see over the next one to four years is going to be a fairly significant shift in how that data is going to drive very discrete and concrete value to all the members of the community. >> Wow, that is exciting. One of the things that we talk about in terms of changes to the CPO's role and CFO are these ways of disruption. One of them is consumerization. And you know I think Raja talked about that this morning, it was talked about a number of times yesterday, we spoke about it on the program, we're consumers all the time. Whether we're getting up in the morning at a conference and going to buy a coffee at Starbucks, or something that we want to order from a vendor like an Amazon, we have this expectation that we can get it, or if you want to buy a car, we have all of this data that we've never had before, so empowered, but then we go to our work lives, and if we're in whatever role we're in, maybe I'm in marketing and I need to do a trip, so I've got to go and do it, travel expense, we want the same ease of consumerization. Your thoughts on Coupa Pay, the expansion of Coupa with open buying the AWS Marketplace, on bringing that consumerization in, do you think like, (hand clapping) yes, that's exactly what we need? >> The first place of bringing in the consumerization was really how Coupa was engineered, years ago. When we go back to before they had released numbers and it was fall of 2007, they had numbers like that, Coupa really did give you an experience that was like Amazon. It was, we used to say, we're going to bring your shopping experience from Sunday afternoon to your desk Monday morning. And as that happened, now you start to see a different piece and that is a greater uptake in terms of the usage of procurement platforms. So instead of people, it's easier to pick up the phone and call Bill over at my supplier and say I need a case of whatever, it's actually easier to do it in the platform, and I can still give Bill a call and go have a beer with him if I want to maintain the relationship, but I don't have to make every one of my transactions start with a phone call that necessitates three additional phone calls later on to check on the status. Instead, I can do it in the platform very quickly. When you expand that out to what now Coupa Pay is going to offer, especially when we look at our clients that have challenges with multiple financial systems, multiple banks that are processing their payments, as you shift it away from that multiple outlet situation and you can move it large, if not all of that, into Coupa Pay, you're streamlining things for dozens if not scores of people in your company and making it better for them. >> Some of the stats I saw on the press release about the amount of payment processes that are still manual, and still 40% of it by paper check? >> I've got one client that writes 40,000 paper checks a year. >> How receptive are they to digital transformation? >> They almost think it's too good to be true. When you when you talk to clients like that, Fortune 500 companies, and when we talk to clients like that and you tell them, what you heard from Coupa is true, they're not just selling you, or trying to sell you something, they're telling you how it really works for clients and we've seen it. I look at the last dozen or so clients I've worked with, last year and a half I was doing some analysis, 51 billion dollars, 50.8 billion dollars in revenues is the average for those clients. So big companies. >> Big, yes. Really big companies. And as we look at those, you'd be surprised at how many of them have challenges with a lot of manual processes, still. They're the top of their field but they still have those challenges. So bringing this to them as they are deploying Coupa and seeing what they can realize in terms of efficiencies, it actually makes my job really fun because everybody's going to be happy. >> That is a win-win. One of the things Rob said yesterday, I know a little bit about Rob, and some of his proudest moments are hearing clients articulate success and he goes, one of my favorite things that's going into, whether it's a 50 billion dollar a year company or not, where there's someone maybe in the C-suite that just is skeptical, and he goes, and that just takes one champion who sees this vision, to convert that person to, oh my gosh, we can have this crystal ball of visibility of everything, and really leverage that to drive digital transformation so that the business is faster to identify new products, new revenues, convert customers faster, increase customer lifetime value and, and, and, the impact there is exponential. >> Well and that's one of the reasons why I think our partnership with Coupa is so rich, is because Accenture is more a technology company. We're not just focused on accounting, we're not just focused on finance, we have a lot of technology resources. We usually have a lot of connection into the CIO and the IT suite of leadership. They're the ones that are typically the most skeptical. They've been through dozens of roll outs of different things and they've seen them go anywhere from 0% to 50% effective. So because we've got the relationships there and we can have these conversations with the CIO, and say, this is different. This is going to be a very different kind of program for you and we're coming in and telling you that we can work this together as your partner and be successful, and again, you get six months into it and the lights fully on at that point and they're on board. In fact next year we're looking forward to bringing one or two CIOs on stage with us at Inspire'20 to talk about it from an IT perspective. >> Awesome, well I look forward to hearing that. Jesse, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube this afternoon. Exciting stuff. Control, visibility, who doesn't want that? >> Exactly, it's good times. >> Excellent, thanks Jesse, appreciate it. >> Thank you, appreciate being here. >> For Jesse Hanger, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Coupa Inspire'19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Woman: From San Fransisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware's Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, John, we started really bright and early this morning with a very excited Pat Gelsinger. VMware, this is the fifteenth Radio, Radio is R&D innovation offsite. There's about 1800 VMware engineers from lots of B.U.s, very competitive event, very passion driven event, and really just is a... what a great manifestation of the VMware culture and the spirit of innovation. >> This is the best of the best event, and the story around Radio 2019 is really a cumulation of multiple years, as you pointed out, of cultural innovation, engineering. VMware has always been an engineering culture, coming out of Stanford, and from day one they've had that guiding principle. They've also been open and transparent, as we heard on theCUBE interviews today, that has created the culture of community. Open Source dives beautifully into it. And so radio is about that cumulation of the talent. It's the best of the best internally, they submit papers, it's a bottoms-up process, so it's truly a meritocracy from an engineering standpoint. But it's a culture of engineering, and their job is to come up with the future, and what's notable about this event is it's the second year now theCUBE's been here. Last year was the first year they've invited press, so three outlets from the media were allowed, were one of them. And we get exposed, we get to look under the hood, and look at the engine of innovation coming down the road for VMware and their partners. So, it's a super exciting event, Radio is a community within VMware that's now global, 50% outside of North America and the United States, all a bottoms-up, a hive mind, we heard that here. Really successful for VMware to continue this, bringing the press in, get the stories out there, take that transparency and open message from the content. We can share it, we get access to the data, it's a beautiful co-creation formula with theCUBE and VMware. It's a success, and their challenge is can they take it global and extend it. >> And this is day four of Radio19 and you can hear the amount of people that are still here, still passionate, these are projects that they're doing outside of their day jobs. So, the transparency that you talked about, I loved when we were talking with David Tennenhouse about the bottoms-up approach, that this is not a set agenda, we're going to talk about Blockchain, and IOT, and security, this is driven as you said, from thousand-plus submissions of people who want to have papers presented here. >> People don't want to leave, because this is like a kid in the candy store, it's like being intoxicated with technology and there's so much content here. Now that's also a bellwether and a barometer of the company. If R&D is weak, you don't have the innovation. There's companies that don't really invest in R&D, they wouldn't have this kind of mojo or this kind of excitement. But VMware prides themselves on doing 15% R&D, that's way outside the box. The rest is all done within the constraints of what they're doing in the market, so relevance is high, but still room to play and dream the future. And again, I've always believed that you can't dream it up, you can't build it. >> Now of course, VMware, all about, as every business should be, we needed to be developing products and solutions and services that the market needs to solve real-world problems. One of the cool things we learned about today, John, is, from the EMEA CTO John Bagley, is the CTO Ambassador program, the CTOA program, where there are folks, and this is also a competitive program, it's a couple, I think you said a four year tenure to get folks through the program, but being out in the field, in customer sights, learning about all these enterprise organizations, what they actually need, so in that spirit of openness that you talked about, they're bringing in customer information, building and fostering relationships, so that what they're investing in from an R&D standpoint, is going to be able to solve customer problems that they don't even know they have today. >> Yeah, that Champion program, that Ambassador CTO program, that Joe mentioned, what's interesting about VMware, and this is what I love, I admire about the company, as well as companies like AWS and Amazon web services, the people are smart and they think about scaling. So, that's kind of a cliché these days, how does it scale, makes you look smarter if you ask that question, but VMware actually thinks about how to scale, and so, the problem that they had was, they had these field CTOs that were out evangelizing with customers half the time, and doing internal real CTO work around architecture with the teams to build great stuff and move that to market, they couldn't scale. So they used their community of their own ecosystem to find people to come in and replicate. You heard Joe Bagley, "I had to be Steve Herrod," cause he can't be everywhere. That's the mindset of this culture, and I think they have real opportunity to crush it at Open Source, they have a real opportunity to take the Radio culture, and superimpose that in as a new way to do work, new way to create distributed, decentralized teams, and ultimately better software, and at the end of the day, they have to attract great engineers and keep them, work on hard problems, because, Pat's ambitious. And we know Pat. What he says, and what's real, they're all catching up to Pat. Pat has this great vision and he's nailing it, but the engineers got to build what Pat says they got to do. When he says "I'm abstracting away Kubernetes, as an abstraction layer," yeah that sounds simple, but it's really hard to do. >> Absolutely, and I want to get your perspective too, on this, not just the culture of innovation, that you talked about, that VMware has had for a very long time, but also in the spirit of VMware leveraging their innovation programs like Radio, to attract and retain this high quality talent, from your perspective, how does a conference like this, which is kind of academic in nature, it's kind of like a science fair for engineers, how does it differ from some of the other companies, like a Google that say "we have innovation programs." In your perspective, how is this different? >> Well, Google actually is fairly similar in the sense that they came out of Stanford, they have that kind of ethos of academic. Facebook is exactly the opposite, he wants to be Bill Gates, and be like Microsoft, as I was saying the other day. Google's internal stuff is pretty strong, they don't externalize it, and that's why Google Cloud's having such a hard time gaining market shares, that they're not good on the external game. Their thing is the SAS offering, it's all programmable. They're awesome at technology, but they're not good at externalizing it. So, I think Google's struggle is not a lot of internal to external translation. What Radio has done successfully, and we heard a little bit here, was they took it from the Palo Alto bubble, which Google lives in, and they've extended it beyond to the rest of the world, so 50% of the Radio attendees here are from outside the United States. So what they got right is, they've actually externalized it better, they're allowing press to come in, the storytelling that we're doing, that's going on, the collaboration here, is about people collaborating, that's why this successful. And it a world where everything's open, and information's freely available, there's a an audience for "high end," tech nerd activity. This is, this meets the high bar of the geeks of the best of the best, and so why isn't it being covered? Well, it is. We are here. >> You're right, we are here. And also, if you look at, it's one thing for companies to have innovative cultures, but it's another thing, some of the key elements that really can catalyze innovation are partnerships, diversity, that come to mind, both of which VMware does very, very well. Big foci on partnerships, which we've seen and heard about here as well, as well as, not just diversity and gender and things, but also thought diversity, and how groups from completely disparate business units can come together, either organically, before Radio, or even probably, can you imagine the hallway conversations that are going on here? Where suddenly, these different ideas are coming together. Partnerships and diversity are really catalysts for VMware's innovation- >> Well that's a great point, one of the first, on the partnership side, clearly a catalyst, because of multi-cloud and cloud native, seeing that. Diversity is a homerun for them, because they are a diverse culture, but look, how many women are here? Not many, I mean still, more than some, still a lot more work to do. But diversity of opinion, the inclusion that VMware has, they're a very inclusive company. So, it's not like, I just don't think there's enough population of women, in my opinion, that are in the community. But they're inclusive, there's different people with different backgrounds, different technical backgrounds, so from so from a quote "diversity" skill set, it's a melting pot. You've got people talking about carbon fiber, sustainability, to kubernetes, all kind of coming together. So I think diversity's a real strength for them. >> So we heard, I know you had a really, really intriguing Blockchain conversation today. We talked a lot about some of those emerging technologies, Vmworld 2019, which theCUBE will be at, for, I believe the tenth year, it's just around the corner. What excites you about some of the things you heard today that you think we might hear more about in August? >> What excited me about VMworld is what Pat Gelsinger said off camera, that it's going to be a ton of news, a ton of activity, and I think if you look at what VMware's doing, again, like I said, Pat Gelsinger's got an amazing vision, and I think he's cleared the runway, or sailed away from the icebergs. VMware's in a really good market position right now. They have great growth going on, and, look, the organic innovation here at Radio, amazing. Content's solid, people are still buzzing for it, they could probably stay here for a week, two weeks. Acquisitions, CloudHealth, Bitnami, again, two smart acquisitions, they're making smart deals, the ecosystem's evolving, it's a new VMware. So I think Vmworld is going to be, have a spring to its step this year, I think you'll see a lot of action, they'll be two CUBE sets again this year, it's going to be a different company next ten years, VMWare, than it was the past ten years. >> Well, I'm excited to be there with theCUBE, two sets as you mentioned, my interest is certainly heightened after some of the things we heard today. John, as always, I had a blast co-hosting with you. You got some awesome swag to go home with. Until next time, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching our exclusive coverage of VMware Radio2019 from San Fransisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019. (fizzing) (upbeat music) Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick at Imagine 2019, the Wynn, Las Vegas, with about 3500 customers, lots of partners, lots of developers, a lot of energy here. And speaking of energy, we have Jason Woosley, VP of commerce at Adobe. Jason, you came onto the stage this morning from the clouds suspended. Talk about energy. >> It was a lot of energy, and there was a message behind it, right? (clears throat) I mean we really are talking about our Cloud penetration and how that is the future. So, you know, I got to do something really cool and check something off the bucket list where I actually did descend from the sky onto the stage. It was the best Imagine entrance I've ever done (Lisa laughing) and really does talk about, you know, how important our Cloud Strategy is. Thanks for having me on, by the way. >> Absolutely. >> Our pleasure. >> So, a lot of energy here, again, community, community, community. We go to so many shows, so many people are desperate to engage developers. And you guys have that in your core. It's been there from day one. Continues to be such an important part of who you are as well as the road forward. >> It's the reason for why we are where we are today. I mean bar none, right? Our community, this eco system. And it's not something you can buy. It's not something you can even intentionally build. You have to nurture, you have to create a platform that speaks to a large audience, and then you've just got to make sure that you're treating those developers and your partners really, really well, empowering them to really differentiate that experience at the last mile. And, you know, it's a flywheel effect. You end up with this incredible community that's anxious to contribute back into our code base and they have made, what you see at this conference is a result of that community. It's not anything that Magento could do. It's not anything that Adobe could do. It is just something that has to organically happen, and then you have to nurture the heck out of it. And that, that's really what we've done. >> And this is a community that you say has grown organically to several hundred thousand people who I feel like to say that they're influential to Magento, the technologies is actually an understatement with how much, how, again, I think influential's the wrong word. They're stronger than that. >> They're absolutely core to it, right? I mean they're an extension of our development methodology. You know, I like to think about, you know, I run engineering as part of my organization, and everybody in my group is customer-facing. Just like everybody in out community is customer-facing. And so we've tried to tear down the walls that separate our community members from our internal core engineers, because it creates this incredible diversity of perspective that you can't find anywhere else. I mean, no matter how much I invest in broadly diverse engineering teams across the globe, 300,000 engineers, they call themselves Magento developers, don't take a paycheck from Adobe but contribute back to our code base, influence our road map and really show us the way. It's an incredible phenomenon. >> In the last year since the announcement of the Adobe acquisition and the actual completion of that six, seven months ago, how has that community reacted, strengthened? What have been some of your surprising observations about the community's strength? >> It is surprising, and I'll tell you why. I think we came into the acquisition with a lot of apprehension, right. There was a concern that, you know, Adobe's too big. They're too corporate. They don't really love Open Source. All untrue, right? Adobe has incredible Open Source initiatives already inside, but you don't here a lot about it. And so, our community, I think, is it's a little bit concerned about, you know, does the level of investment go down? Does all of our ability to promote that product, does that, do we start to back off of that? And of course, we have not done that at all, and in fact, what we've seen is that our community loves the Adobe acquisition. They see opportunity just as clearly as we do. We have more than triple-digit growth in the number of community contributions coming in to us since the acquisition last year. It is a clear sign that the ecosystem is fully on board with where we're going. >> Right. Well clearly the Adobe Suite provides so much gunpowder to power the commerce that's been at the core of Magento from the beginning. I mean it almost begs the question, why didn't this happen a long, long time ago? >> I think there's something to be said about that, and, but you know what, it took Adobe a while. They picked the right platform. We're very confident of that, and, you know, their investment in community is actually paying off on the Adobe side, right. When you think about digital experience products, they (Adobe) are now more active than ever in open source projects. We've got, you know, folks from Adobe Experience Manager that are writing code and contributing to Magento, which is, it's absolutely terrific. And they're now talking about how do we get the ability to kind of create that contribution mechanism and at least create a platform concept where, you know, everybody plays. It's an equal playing field. You can serve us small, you can serve us large. And it just brings everybody together to solve these common, complex problems that are joint merchant's face. >> I don't know how many times you've been on stage in the last few days but, a couple. But one of the things you really, you know, (pounding) you didn't pound on the table but you basically pounded on the table, is that we are still, totally, 100% behind SMB. >> Jason: Absolutely. >> It's our core. We're not giving that up. >> We built this market together, right. This was what made Magento what it is. It's where we play the best. We know it better than anybody else in the industry, and we're not retreating. We're doubling down. We've got ground to take in the mid-market, and I can't wait to do it. >> Right, but what's wild is you're enabling the mid-market, to compete with the tools of the big guys. So, announcements are on the integration with Amazon, announcements are on integration with Google. So it's kind of an interesting place for small retailers, small merchants. They've got to compete in this world, so you're really giving 'em an aid, an opportunity to both play in what might be a big competitor as well as leverage that ecosystem and assets as well as doing it within their own brick and mortar or their own site . >> And that's a terrific point. I think one of the reasons we do that is we've seen consumer expectations rising through the roof, right. I mean, everything from, you know, fast shipping is now one-day. And it wasn't very long ago that fast shipping, if you could get it within a week, that was pretty darn quick. >> Jeff: Right. >> But now fast shipping is one day, and that's across the board. Consumers are expecting frictionless payment. They're expecting, you know, buy online, pick up in-store, omni-channel capabilities. Really all of these capabilities. And a consumer, a shopper, really doesn't care whether you're big or small. What they care about is the experience that the consume when they interact with your brand. And so, bringing the tools of the enterprise to the mid-market allows them to compete on a more level playing field, and that's really where you generate all those great innovation. And that's where you see, you know, these smaller merchants that are really able to, you know, drive into something that, you know, may not have been a core target for some of the larger enterprises, but they find an niche and are able to deliver, but they have the same personalization needs. They have the same logistics needs. All of that has not changed just because they're a smaller organization. And so it's really on us to be able to provide them the tooling and the access to the capabilities that let them compete with the larger merchants. >> No, 'cause you're right. As consumers, which we are every day, we don't care if they're a big or small company, or what technologies that, well, no we do care, to a degree, that we can start something from a mobile phone, have a great seamless experience >> Jason: Yep. >> that's not gonna cause me to churn, because I'm not going to be able to find what I want. I want it to be personalized. I want them to know enough about me in a non-creepy way, as you say. >> That's right. If it's good, it's magic. (Lisa laughing) If it's bad, it's creepy! >> Right, regardless of-- >> That's fair. >> That's for recommendation engines. >> Yeah, no, that's fair. >> And expect that they have what I want. But also what you're doing now is giving these SMBs, these smaller organizations, the ability to harness this sort of symbiotic data power between Adobe and Magento for advertising, analytics, marketing, commerce, to be able to have that wealth of knowledge to make that experience exactly what that consumer expects. >> Exactly right. I mean it's about bringing behavioral data and the transactional data together to really get a 360 degree view of individual customers. And guess what? There's too much raw data there for Excel to ever be able to tell you anything. You've got to rely on things like artificial intelligence and machine learning so that things like Adobe Sensei to really derive insight out of that mass set of data. But that's the way you create those personalized experiences. You have to employ those techniques to get there. >> Right, I just wanted to unpack the Sensei down-spin a little bit, 'cause I think that's really interesting. You know, AI's been a great buzzword. We see it in a lot of places. You know, our Google email now automatically figures out what we want to reply to our email. But it's the integration of AI in applications is where we're really starting to see it come to market early, and this is a great example of, you know, using the Adobe AI inside of Sensei, on specific parts of the application to deliver a better application, a better consumer experience. >> And we've got a great roadmap for rolling out Artificial Intelligence capabilities to Magento commerce. It's one of the largest value adds that we'll do over the next 12 months, is really bringing those capabilities around recommendations, around experience personalization and experience targeting. Around A/B testing. And then you think a little bit into the future, and suddenly you're looking at an AI that can give you pricing recommendations and campaign recommendations, and, you know, that is a, that's a world we cannot wait to really explore fully in the commerce world, because I think that those are the tools, you know Amazon applies a lot of dynamic pricing techniques right now. It's a really expensive process. I don't know a lot of small merchants that have access to the tools to do that. We're bringing those tools to small merchants, and that's gonna change the game fundamentally, I believe. >> And a way that they can do it, almost themselves, rather than having to have a team of resources, which a small business doesn't have. >> And that is the name of the game for small business. You can't require them to have a data science team. You can't require them to have an IT staff or a Web development team. You gotta give them everything they need so that they can focus on retail, what they know best, merchandising to their customers and, you know, managing their inventory, driving up the correct margins and then making sure that they're able to grow the lifetime value of their customers, right? That's the Holy Grail for retail is when you can actually optimize against lifetime value. Because it's the number one thing that all merchants are chasing. >> Yeah, 'cause you had the guy on the keynote yesterday. I'm not in the demographic. I'm trying to remember the name of the-- >> Oh, Troy, Troy Brown from Zumiez! >> From Zumiez, yeah. >> Yeah. >> I thought it was just really interesting, you know, kind of re-thinking retail, right? Retail is not dead, but it's different, and you have to be different. And really to see how they have kind of taken their concept I thought it was pretty interesting, especially around the fact that he has no more fulfillment centers, he said. But basically, they're fulfilling from the store. They want to engage you in the store. It's a convenient thing. Especially now we see Amazon packages are all gettin' stolen off of doorsteps. But, you know, enabling them to be creative around their customer engagement, not necessarily worry about how to run a bunch of A/B tests. They let you do that complicated stuff. >> Let us take on all of the complexity, and then they can actually benefit from the insights derived from that. And what Zumiez have done, it's a phenomenal story, right. I mean, you're going away from this centralized warehouse concept, to really turning all of their stores into distribution centers, right? 704 or so, brick and mortar-strong where, you know, they now have merchandise close to their consumers. They have, you know, the ability to do showcasing, buy online, pick-up in store, all of the omni-channel techniques that are grabbing so much traction right now. And Zumiez has really capitalized. >> Jeff: Right. >> They've done a terrific job, and it's great seeing it come from these really innovative retailers, right? I mean, that show last night with Zumiez was absolutely, you know, fantastic. Their culture is super unique, highly energetic, but they're driving technology forward in a way that you might not expect from a skateboard apparel shop. >> Right, well, they're making Champion cool again. It came out of the Champion, and it was in the demo. I'm like, I didn't know Champion was a cool brand. >> Apparently, it is cool now. >> Jeff: It's cool now. >> You and I are both out of that demographic, (Jeff laughing) but it is a very good story. >> One of the things that we're hearing and seeing is that we talked about personalization and that this expectation, that as consumers, we bring to everything we buy, whatever it happens to be, but also, this sort of, looking at Amazon as an example, of going to brick and mortar from purely online, the acquisition of Whole Foods, people still wanting to have that human interaction. We talk about it all the time when we talk about AI, is that pretty much the common thread is yes, AI, and maybe yes, online to a degree, and then there's still that need and that demand for that personal face-to-face or maybe voice-to-voice interaction. >> Yeah, well, you know, its really for me, it's about taking that brand, you know, experience and making sure that it's resonating across all of your digital properties as well as all of the physical properties, right. It is about really leveraging. My brand experience is consistent across every place that I come encounter my customers, and I'm ready to transact anytime my customers are ready to transact. And when, you know, talking about Amazon. we've announced some really cool stuff this Ad Imagine on Amazon, a partnership. where Amazon sellers can now have a branded storefront on Magento. This is allowing folks that have done a terrific job selling in the market place, where you don't have a lot of opportunity for experience differentiation on the amazon.com site. >> Lisa: Right. >> And it's a terrific marketplace. More than 50% of product searches are starting on Amazon now. So it's a reality that retailers need to find a way to come to grips with. >> Jeff: Right. >> And what I'm really excited about is that those merchants that are doing really well on Amazon now have a new channel where they can create these branded experiences and really start differentiating themselves from their competitors. It's going to be a terrific story. It's Branded Storefronts for Amazon Sellers is the name of the offering. And its going to change the game for folks that have been exclusively Amazon, maybe thinking its too hard to go get an online presence that actually represents my brand. Now its a piece of cake. They've got a clean path to get there, and the capabilities go both ways, right? We also announced Amazon sales channel for Magento commerce that allows you as a branded merchant, to go and participate on the Amazon Marketplace and have full control over your inventory, your orders and all of your catalog. >> It's so funny, you know, we talk about experience but so much of retail execution is actually inventory execution, right? >> [Jason} That's Right. >> It's inventory management. That's where all your money sits. You can get it real upside down really quickly if you're not managing your inventory. And if you don't have the right amount of inventory, especially as you say with same-day delivery now being an expected behavior. And so to add the sophisticated tools on the back and to manage that inventory across that broad, kind of distribution plane, if you will, with all these different points of engagement is so critical to these guys to have any type of chance of success. >> Yeah, it is. It's absolutely critical, and we've also got a Magento order management product that specializes in sort of global inventory control. We've made terrific investments there to bring new capabilities to make sure that those omni-channel aspirations are not something that a merchant has to go invest a whole lot of money and change in their systems. I think it is interesting to think about when you talk about how B2C is really bleeding into B2B, right. As supply chain management, you know, 70% of our B2C merchants, self-described, actually engaged in B2B workflows, and almost all of our B2B-only merchants are really looking at how do I go B2B to C? >> Jess: Right. >> So there's this really great platform play happening, and the fact that Magento commerce and Adobe commerce Cloud can serve us B2B and B2C and all the hybrids in-between really puts us in a differentiated position and helps merchants not have to go invest in multiple platform, multiple maintainability and then find some way to reconcile the inventory between the two. >> Right, and we had a quote earlier today. I can't remember who said it, but I thought it was great where, you know, no longer is the actual transaction the destination. Right, but now you're bringing the transaction to, you know, kind of the journey. It's a very different way to think about a traditional funnel. It isn't the traditional funnel that you work your way down to the end. Now you're inserting commerce opportunities, >> Jason: Yep. >> engagement opportunities all along kind of this content flow. >> We kind of teased ourselves, right, We kinda lied to ourselves and said that, you know, this is a linear journey. And we've all bought into it, right. You know all the steps, right. It's a discovery, awareness, I mean all the way to post-purchase. Its not linear. People move in and out of each of those sections, and so being able to transact where the customer is ready to transact is critically important >> Jeff: Right. >> and then understanding that the post-sale service is the key to lifetime value. That's the other major learning that we're trying to take away from this. And it's why it's important to be at every point your customer is. >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause especially with these things, because you don't sit down to work on your phone like we sat down to work at these things. >> Jason: That's right. >> And so your attention, >> Jason: works coming to you. >> it's coming to you, and its coming in little bits. Oh, and by the way, there's a whole bunch of notifications coming on that can pull you away. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So they're very different challenges in terms of actual engagement when this is the primary vehicle. >> And increasingly, it is the primary vehicle, right? >> Jess: Absolutely. >> More than 50% of traffic to retail, e-commerce site is generated from a mobile phone, and there are emerging markets where that is the only internet-connected device, and so it's the standard. You absolutely have to take mobile very seriously. There's a great set of technologies coming online to help us get there. It's called Progressive Web Application. It's going to change the game on how mobile is treated as a device, and in fact, it gets rid of the need for discrete native applications. So instead of having an IOS app, an Android app, a desktop storefront, a mobile storefront and maybe a tablet storefront, plus your online brick and mortar, now you can actually say, my digital properties are serviced by one set of technology. And that way, when I make a change to one, it shows up in everything. I don't have all these difference code bases to maintain. It's a total cost of ownership, and really, a time-to-market play >> Lisa: I was gonna say, >> across the board. >> faster time-to market for sure. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> With far less resources. >> Well, and bringing it so that you really have to invest in allowing your merchandisers to merchandise on your digital properties, right? If there is an engineer sitting between your merchandiser and the customer, that time lag and even just trying to get it done, there's so much frustration there. So creating these self-service tools that really allow non-technical merchandisers to go in, make adjustments to how they're selling products across all those channels very, very easily and in one place, that's gonna return a ton of value to our merchants. So its another thing that we're super excited about. >> No, you deliver that consistent experience that the consumer is expecting, and then, we were talking to PayPal earlier, start to help companies close that revenue gap of getting them from mobile to, you know, wanting to transact and making that whole process seamless. >> There's a nine billion dollar opportunity in closing the mobile gap. When you think about abandoned cards and folks that begin the checkout process for whatever reason, likely they get frustrated and don't want to type in their credit card number or don't want to type in their address, and then they move to another device or another store that's doing checkout in a more frictionless way, the nine billion dollar opportunity if you close that. >> Wow, that's huge! >> So its incredibly important. >> It is incredibly important. Well Jason, we wish we had more time, but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Jeff and Me. Such an exciting time. Sounds like developers are feeling embraced. The community is happy. Customers are reacting well. So we can't wait to hear whats next, next year. >> This is the best place to be in the world in commerce. Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure, and I've enjoyed it a lot. >> Oh, our pleasure as well, Jason. >> Alright, thank you, guys. Thanks, Jason. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin at Imagine 2019 at the Wynn, Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier coming to you live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is our third day of coverage from two CUBE sets. What do you call that John? >> CUBE Cannon. >> CUBE Cannon of content. And guess who's back? One of our alumni Shannon Champion. >> Hello. >> Director of Product Marketing Dell EMC, Shannon thank you so much for joining us. >> A pleasure as always. >> Day three you still have a big smile on your face. >> I do do, it has been exhilarating, I'm completely exhausted but I'm thrilled to be here talking with you. >> You don't look exhausted but we're thrilled to have you. >> Thank you. >> So everything started, talking about cannons, Michael came out on Monday morning with all the gang, lots of news, lots of information that we've heard throughout the last three days, people are very excited about this. Excited about the deeper collaboration within the Dell Technologies companies. But something that you guys announced that we want to kind of really break through is Dell Technologies Cloud, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, can you help me as a non-technologist understand those two differences, consumption model. >> Absolutely yeah, so it's all in a name really, Dell Technologies Cloud is the unification of the strategies between Dell EMC Cloud and VMware Cloud, one unified cloud strategy called Dell Technologies Cloud. Under that there are offers. So there's two categories of offers, one is the Data Center-as-a-Service, the fully managed, on-prem infrastructure where VxRail is the foundation. People know this as Project Dimension announced last year, it now has a formal, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. So it's an offer underneath the category of Dell Technologies Cloud. >> And the VxRail components, explain VxRail for a minute, I think that's super important, it seems to be everywhere a key part of the architecture. >> It is yeah, so if you are here at the show, you've seen that VxRail is everywhere, it's on stage in lots of demos and it is the core foundation of our Dell Technologies Cloud offers. The collaboration between Dell EMC and VMware to bring VxRail to market kind of showcases the power of what this partnership can do. So it makes sense that this tightly integrated enterprise grade hyper-converged platform is the foundation of these Dell Tech Cloud offers. >> What's some of the use cases that was really driving the project, obviously multiple clouds was a key message here, but what was some of specific use cases you guys were really attacking? >> Sure, so when you look at the Data Center-as-a-Service offer, it's the fully managed capabilities. So customers are going to public cloud for the simplicity, agility, that cloud-like operations. But we started to see customers slowing down the adoption of that to some extent because they needed the security and the control of having infrastructure on premises and that's what we do with Data Center-as-a-Service, basically deliver the benefits of both, in a monthly subscription type model where they have all the infrastructure on premise but they get the benefit of a public cloud-like experience. >> And that's in beta, the announcement in the news was that Project Dimension, now Data Center-as-a-Service, which I love that name by the way, I think it's going to be great. But it's in beta, what does that mean beta? Select customers, preview, what's specific? >> Yeah, it's in beta phase, we have a couple customers that are running it today, so we're looking for customers to help shape the future, help us prioritize, you know, what are the key use cases that they're seeing a need for this technology. So we're looking for a few good companies still, so if anyone's out there interested, hit up our reps. Yeah, it'll be available in the market in the second half of this year, but currently in beta. >> It seems to be great for the edge, shipping a data center is almost like, okay with all this new technology, the bundling's literally nice, you guys did a good job on that. Shipping a data center, it almost was a dream years ago, We'll just ship a data center to the edge. That seems to be the the big use case that people are talking about, the edge of the network's going to have more capabilities, moving data around is not the answer, 'cause of latencies and as Pat Gelsinger would say laws of physics. This is identified as a big sweet spot. Michael Dell commented the edge in the next 10 years is going to be explosive, is that pretty much the core kind of direction? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you know it's called Data Center-as-a-Service and edge is a key use case for Data Center-as-a-Service, but also the core data centers when we are polling our customers they're actually telling us, they have a need for this in both locations, so both are key use cases, the edge obviously for the reasons you pointed out too. >> So talk to us about the customers involvement in the manifestation of Project Dimension. We've been hearing a lot the last three days, you really even felt it on stage from day one. Collaboration, not just within the Dell Technologies companies, we saw Microsoft. But where are the customers in terms of influencing Project Dimension now becoming a reality? >> Sure yeah, I mean this has been a collaboration with customers, but also between Dell EMC and VMware jointly with our joint customers going out to talk to them about the possibility and the promise and the capabilities that are being delivered. So certainly a joint effort from both companies along with our customers to give us feedback in terms of you know, where they see this as a key use case for them. >> Customers just looking for tighter integration, tighter collaboration, what are some of the business imperatives, where your customers are saying, hey guys, this is really the way to go here and here's why. >> Yeah I mean I touched on it a little bit in terms of like, the transparency, the security, the control, the data latency, improvements of having infrastructure on premises whilst still wanting sort of that agility and simplicity of a public cloud-like operating model, and that's essentially what's driving this new category of infrastructure consumption, Data Center-as-a-Service. And we have a whole nother side of Dell Tech Cloud, which is the Dell Technologies Cloud platform and we deliver that through VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, so I mentioned VxRail's kind of everywhere, that offer is available today for customers on premises. And with VxRail it's really the only VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure offering that has full stack integration, we're calling it full stack integration because there is a set of software capabilities for VxRail that tie together what VMware does with the SDDC Manager automation together with the infrastructure management VxRail through RESTful APIs, through software that integrates the two. So for customers, they have a complete seamless all in one management experience with cloud foundation on VxRail. So, we're really excited about that and it's only been shipping for two weeks and already customers are willing to be reference customers for us, talking about the potential, the promise, wanting to work with us on what this could mean for their organizations. >> Was going to ask you about their reactions. >> Give us some feedback on the customer, I'd love to hear what they're saying, obviously demand, what's the main euphoria around it? >> Yeah so, hybrid cloud is part of every customer's strategy and really understanding how they can best get there, what's the simplest and the fastest way for them, has been what they're considering. And if you look at what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, we have a fast and simple way and they back by the promise of both Dell EMC and VMware working together to bring these two technologies in a unified way that's a seamless experience. So, you know the power of hyper-converged is to let businesses get out of the, maintaining the infrastructure so they can focus on business outcomes. The same is true for other use cases like hybrid cloud. So that's what customers are excited about there. >> Yeah Pat Gelsinger says "don't look down, look up." Meaning if you can take advantage of the modernizations of hyper-converged which you guys have been doing for a while, the packaging's more consumable and you bolt on the VMware piece. So then you got consistent cloud operations, but then can focus in on the software. This is the dream of software defined data center, this is what people had hoped for, I think two years ago, but it's kind of, come in now this is reality. >> This is reality, for sure. >> So it sounds like, you've got nearly what 5,000 VxRail customers, it's over a billion dollar run rate, are customers looking at VxRail as a foundational component of really accelerating their modernization of their IT and their data center. >> Yeah, that's been the core of what VxRail's delivered since the start, so it's three years old, as you mentioned nearly 5,000 customers to date. It's the fastest growing HCI system, thanks to that strong customer adoption. But really it's been a catalyst for data center modernization to date. And what we're talking about this week is how it's really going beyond an HCI appliance. So it's the foundation for hybrid cloud for the Dell Tech Cloud offers. And we're also offering up additional deployment options, so people think of VxRail as an appliance, but now they can get it as fully integrated rack with or without networking and if they choose Dell EMC Networking, they get the power of SmartFabric Services integration, for hyper-converged networking can be a pain point now it's fully automated, deployment, life cycle management as part of the full stack, so lots of options. >> Talk about the software innovation, 'cause we've been hearing and this has been happening, they've done a software transition, there's more software engineers than hardware engineers these days, you guys have the system software and some analytical software, how does that play in on the HCI side and where's that sit on the VxRail side, is it on the stacks, so where is your software piece? >> Yeah, thanks so there's really great software innovation from the PowerEdge side from the VMWare vSAN side, but we also have additional software innovation, specifically for VxRail that kind of ties those things together and that now includes VMware Cloud Foundations. So there's things like the RESTful APIs that I talked about that enable VMware Cloud Foundation full stack integration, that also have downstream connectors that allow networking automation. But now we're introducing another piece of software innovation that we're calling VxRail ACE. Analytical Consulting Engine, so you know, it's a marketing term, but what does this do, it's intelligent analytics to further simplify operations. We like to call it infrastructure machine learning for VxRail. So we're excited, we have a data lake, it has an analytics engine and historical data of how customers have been using VxRail to date. Now we're able to have enough data to apply machine learning to that and offer up customers insights into how to best optimize their configurations, forecast consumptions, I was just talking with some customers in a session before about how a few years back they would try and project their resource consumption over a five year period and now they can't even look six months ahead. So a tool like this can help them forecast it. At what point in time am I going to need to add more drives or add more nodes based on my current usage rates and that's pretty powerful technology. >> And with the consumption model changing too to the subscription, this gives them more agility on both sides, proactive planning and also understanding kind of what's going on. Not look back six months to a year like, well we should have bought or over-provisioning, the old days right? >> Yeah exactly yeah, that's good a point. >> So what's the future hold, tell us about where this is going to go next. Obviously selling like hot cakes, congratulations. >> Thanks. >> What's next, where's the next innovation coming, what's going on? >> Yeah I mean, like I said, we're seeing VxRail as more than just a catalyst for data center modernization, a lot of customers are going to keep choosing it for that turnkey simplicity. But we're now enabling fast and simple hybrid cloud and as edge use cases start to emerge, VxRail as a hyper-converged infrastructure has a lot of promise there too, so we really see it as a opportunity and a foundation for a wide range of use cases with our customers. >> So a lot of customers as we mentioned. Any favorite stories that really showcase how VxRail as a foundation for hybrid cloud, customer's cloud strategies, how it's really enabling them to unlock the data capital as it's been talking about here as obviously data has so much potential, but if you can't find it and you can't harness the insights. Any customer stories that really in your opinion speak to, this is really unlocking customer's data so that they can make better decisions, identify new revenue streams and ultimately deliver an awesome customer experience. >> Yeah definitely, I mean we have over 25 VxRail customers here at the show telling their stories throughout. It's hard for me to pick a single one. You know what's interesting is when we just had a session, we had two customers there and we asked them what are the business drivers that VxRail is enabling for you? They both, completely different industries, one is an insurance industry and one was a financial services industry, and they both came back to the same premise of I need to deliver IT services faster to my customer base and I can't spend time being in the business of maintaining the infrastructure, I just need automation that enables me to let my teams accelerate the pace of innovation and stay competitive. So, that's the role that it's playing. >> And in any industry, because as we know, every company these days, if they're not technology companies already, they need to be. >> Yeah that's true, yeah we were just talking about IT as a business, how IT leaders really need to work hand in hand with the CEOs, understand the business strategy and then create their own IT strategy. And really drive a culture around a business plan specifically for IT and technology. Which is a really interesting way to think about it. >> I was going to ask you about cultural change, as we all know that's very challenging to do. These two customers that you mentioned did they talk about that at all, like how it's actually enabling cultural change that drives the business forward. >> Yeah they did actually and you know, the core there is that people is harder to change than technology and tools and processes. Some of the tips that they had were really insightful, one of which is, a lot of people fear change. But if you can inspire them to fear obsolescence more than fearing change, then you can motivate them around that, but also creating a vision for them around what their role will be when they're not maintaining infrastructure will also help kind of inspire them to do things differently. So that was pretty cool to hear directly from customers around how their innovating, inspiring their people. >> Competition real quick, obviously HCI's been very competitive, new other vendors are out there, we know who they are, how do you guys fit in versus the competition, obviously the differentiators, the multiple piece parts of Dell Technologies. But where's the real innovation and competitive advantage that you guys are putting out there? >> Yeah, from a VxRail perspective it's easy. There's no deeper integration with VMware. All customers pretty much are VMware customers, a majority of them right? And being jointly engineered with VMware gives us inherent advantages and an experience that customers come to us and tell us, is superior to others that they're able to find, so we always go back to that and we get validation from our customers on that too. >> Okay Shannon as we wrap up here in the last few seconds. What are some the things you're personally going to be taking away as you hop on that red-eye tonight? >> Personally, I think Dell Technologies World is like the culmination of so much hard work of a ton of people, so I'm going to send a ton of thank you notes to all the people that made this happen, but really reflect on how exciting a time it is in technology, in what we're doing in hyper-converged that plays a role in everything that we've heard this week. And just be proud of what we're doing. >> Awesome, you should be proud, well Shannon thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE again this afternoon we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Go get some rest. >> I will. (laughs) >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)