>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Cube Live, AWS Reinvent 2022. This is our first day of three and a half days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, it's getting louder and louder behind us. People are back. They're excited. >>You know what somebody told me today? Hm? They said that less than 15% of the audience is developers. I'm like, no way. I don't believe it. But now maybe there's a redefinition of developers because it's all about the data and it's all about the developers in my mind. And that'll never change. >>It is. And one of the things we're gonna be talking about is app modernization. As customers really navigate the journey to do that so that they can be competitive and, and meet the demands of customers. We've got an alumni back with us to talk about that. AJ Patel joins us, the SVP and GM Modern Apps and Management business group at VMware. Aj, welcome back. Thank >>You. It's always great to be here, so thank you David. Good to see >>You. Isn't great. It's great to be back in person. So the VMware Tansu team here back at Reinvent on the Flow Shore Flow show floor. There we go. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing together, innovating with aws. >>Yeah, so it's, it's great to be back after in person after multiple years and the energy level continues to amaze me. The partnership with AWS started on the infrastructure side with VMware cloud on aws. And when with tanza, we're extending it to the application space. And the work here is really about how do you make developers productive To your earlier point, it's all about developers. It's all about getting applications in production securely, safely, continuously. And tanza is all about making that bridge between great applications being built, getting them deployed and running, running and operating at scale. And EKS is a dominant Kubernetes platform. And so the better together story of tanu and EKS is a great one for us, and we're excited to announce some sort of innovations in that area. >>Well, Tanu was so front and center at VMware Explorer. I wasn't at in, in VMware Explorer, Europe. Right. But I'm sure it was a similar kind of focus. When are customers choosing Tanu? Why are they choosing Tanu? What's, what's, what's the update since last August when >>We, you know, the market settled into three main use cases. One is all about developer productivity. You know, consistently we're all dealing with skill set gap issues. How do we make every developer productive, modern developer? And so 10 is all about enabling that develop productivity. And we can talk quite a bit about it. Second one is security's front and center and security's being shifted left right into how you build great software. How do you secure that through the entire supply chain process? And how do you run and operationalize secure at runtime? So we're hearing consistently about making secure software supply chain heart of what our solution is. And third one is, how do I run and operate the modern application at scale across any Kubernetes, across any cloud? These are the three teams that are continuing to get resonance and empowering. All of this is exciting. David is this formation of platform teams. I just finished a study with Bain Consulting doing some research for me. 40% of our organization now have some form of a central team that's responsive for, for we call platform engineering and building platforms to make developers productive. That is a big change since about two years ago even. So this is becoming mainstream and customers are really focusing on delivering in value to making developers productive. >>Now. And, and, and the other nuance that I see, and you kinda see it here in the ecosystem, but when you talk about your customers with platform engineering, they're actually building their, they're pointing their business. They gonna page outta aws, pointing their businesses to their customers, right? Becoming software companies, becoming cloud companies and really generating new forms of revenue. >>You know, the interesting thing is, some of my customers I would never have thought as leading edge are retailers. Yeah. And not your typical Starbucks that you get a great example. I have an auto parts company that's completely modernizing how they deliver point of sale all the way to the supply chain. All built on ES at scale. You're typically think of that a financial services or a telco leading the pack. But I'm seeing innovation in India. I'm seeing the innovation in AMEA coming out of there, across the board. Every industry is becoming a product company. A digital twin as we would call it. Yeah. And means they become software houses. Yeah. They behave more like you and I in this event versus a, a traditional enterprise. >>And they're building their own ecosystems and that ecosystem's generating data that's generating more value. And it's just this cycle. It's, >>It's a amazing, it's a flywheel. So innovation continues to grow. Talk about really unlocking the developer experience and delivering to them what they need to modernize apps to move as fast and quickly as they want to. >>So, you know, I think AWS coin this word undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you think of a typical developer today, how much effort does he have to put in before he can get a single line of code out in production? If you can take away all the complexity, typically security compliance is a big headache for them, right? Developer doesn't wanna worry about that. Infrastructure provisioning, getting all the configurations right, is a headache for them. Being able to understand what size of infrastructure or resource to use cost effectively. How do you run it operationally? Cuz the application team is responsible for the operational cost of the product or service. So these are the un you know, heavy lifting that developers want to get away from. So they wanna write great code, build great experiences. And we've always talked about frameworks a way to abstract with the complexity. And so for us, there's a massive opportunity to say, how do I simplify and take away all the heavy lifting to get an idea into production seamlessly, continuously, securely. >>Is that part of your partnership? Because you think about a aws, they're really not about frameworks, they're about primitives. I mean, Warner Vos even talks about that in his, in his speech, you know, but, but that makes it more challenging for developers. >>No, actually, if you look at some of their initial investments around proton and et cetera work, they're starting to do, they're recognized, you know, PS is a bad, bad word, but the outcomes a platform as a service offers is what everybody wants. Just talking to the AWS leaders, responsible area, he actually has a separate build team. He didn't know what to call the third team. He has a Kubernetes team, he has a serverless team and has a build team. And that build team is everything above Kubernetes to make the developer productive. Right. And the ecosystem to bring together to make that happen. So I think AWS is recognizing that primitives are great for the elite developers, but if they want to get the mass scale and adoption in the business, it, if you will, they're gonna have to provide richer set of building blocks and reduce the complex and partnership like ours. Make that a reality. And what I'm excited about is there's a clear gap here, and t's the best platform to kind of fill that gap. Well, >>And I, I think that, you know, they're gonna double down triple, I just wrote about this double down, triple down on the primitives. Yes. They have to have the best, you know, servers and storage and database. And I think the way they, they, I call it taping the seams is with the ecosystem. Correct. You know, and they, nobody has a, a better ecosystem. I mean, you guys are, you know, the, the postage child for the ecosystem and now this even exceeds that. But partnering up, that's how they >>Continue to, and they're looking for someone who's open, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the first question is, you know, are you proprie or open? Because one of the things they're fighting against is the lock in. So they can find a friendly partner who is open source, led, you know, upstream committing to the code, delivering that innovation, and bring the ecosystem into orchestrated choreography. It's like singing a music, right? They're running a, running an application delivery team is like running a, a musical orchestra. There's so many moving parts here, right? How do you make them sing together? And so if Tan Zoo and our platform can help them sing and drive more of their services, it's only more valuable for them. And >>I think the partners would generally say, you know, AWS always talking about customer obsession. It's like becomes this bromine, you go, yeah, yeah. But I actually think in the field, the the sellers would say, yeah, we're gonna do what the customer, if that means we're gonna partner up. Yeah. And I think AWS's comp structure makes it sort >>Of, I learned today how, how incentives with marketplaces work. Yeah. And it is powerful. It's very powerful. Yeah. Right. So you line up the sales incentive, you line up the customer and the benefits, you line up bringing the ecosystem to drive business results and everybody, and so everybody wins. And which is what you're seeing here, the excitement and the crowd is really the whole, all boats are rising. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. And it's driven by the fact that customers are getting true value out of it. >>Oh, absolutely. Tremendous value. Speaking of customers, give us an example of a customer story that you think really articulates the value of what Tanzi was delivering, especially making that developer experience far simpler. What are some of those big business outcomes that that delivers? >>You know, at Explorer we had the CIO of cvs and with their acquisition of Aetna and CVS Health, they're transforming the, the health industry. And they talked about the whole covid and then how they had to deliver the number of, you know, vaccines to u i and how quickly they had to deliver on that. It talked about Tanu and how they leverage, leverage a Tanza platform to get those new applications out and start to build that. And Ro was basically talking about his number one prior is how does he get his developers more productive? Number to priority? How does he make sure the apps are secure? Number three, priority, how does he do it cost effectively in the world? Particularly where we're heading towards where, you know, the budgets are gonna get tighter. So how do I move more dollars to innovation while I continue to drive more efficiency in my platform? And so cloud is the future. How does he make the best use of the cloud both for his developers and his operations team? Right? >>What's happening in serverless, I, in 2017, Andy Chassy was in the cube. He said if AWS or if Amazon had to build all over again, they would build in, in was using serverless. And that was a big quote. We've mined that for years. And as you were talking about developer productivity, I started writing down all the things developers have to do. Yep. With it, they gotta, they gotta build a container image. They said they gotta deploy an EC two instance. They gotta allocate memory, they gotta fence off the apps in a virtual machine. They gotta run the, you know, compute against the app goes, they gotta pay for all that. So, okay, what's your story on, what's the market asking for in terms of serverless? Because there's still some people who want control over the run time. Help us sift through that. >>And it really comes back to the application pattern or the type you're running. If it's a stateless application that you need to spin up and spin down. Serverless is awesome. Why would I wanna worry about scaling it up in, I wanna set up some SLAs, SLIs service level objectives or, or, or indicators and then let the systems bring the resources I need as I need them. That's a perfect example for serverless, right? On the other hand, if you have a, a more of a workflow type application, there's a sequence, there's state, try building an application using serverless where you had to maintain state between two, two steps in the process. Not so much fun, right? So I don't think serverless is the answer for everything, but many use cases, the scale to zero is a tremendous benefit. Events happen. You wanna process something, work is done, you quietly go away. I don't wanna shut down the server started up, I want that to happen magically. So I think there's a role of serverless. So I believe Kubernetes and servers are the new runtime platform. It's not one or the other. It's about marrying that around the application patterns. I DevOps shouldn't care about it. That's an infrastructure concern. Let me just run application, let the infrastructure manage the operations of it, whether it's serverless, whether it's Kubernetes clusters, whether it's orchestration, that's details right. I I I shouldn't worry about it. Right. >>So we shouldn't think of those as separate architectures. We should think of it as an architecture, >>The continuum in some ways Yeah. Of different application workload types. And, and that's a toolkit that the operator has at his disposal to configure and saying, where does, should that application run? Should I want control? You can run it on a, a conveyance cluster. Can I just run it on a serverless infrastructure and and leave it to the cloud provider? Do it all for me. Sure. What, what was PAs? PAs was exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. Write the code once you do the rest. Yeah. Okay. Those are just elements of that. >>And then K native is kinda in the middle, >>Right? K native is just a technology that's starting to build that capability out in a standards way to make serverless available consistently across all clouds. So I'm not building to a, a lambda or a particular, you know, technology type. I'm building it in a standard way, in a standard programming model. And infrastructure just >>Works for me on any cloud. >>The whole idea portability. Consistency. >>Right. Powerful. Yep. >>What are some of the things that, that folks can expect to learn from VMware Tan to AWS this week at the >>Show? Yeah, so there's some really great announcements. First of all, we're excited to extend our, our partnership with AWS in the area of eks. What I mean by that is we traditionally, we would manage an EKS cluster, you visibility of what's running in there, but we weren't able to manage the lifecycle With this announcement. We can give you a full management of lifecycle of S workloads. Our customers have 400 plus EKS clusters, multiple teams sharing those in a multi-tenanted way with common policy. And they wanna manage a full life cycle, including all the upstream open source component that make up Kubernetes people. That ES is the one thing, it's a collection of a lot of open, open source packages. We're making it simple to manage it consistently from a single place on the security front. We're now making tons of service mesh available in the marketplace. >>And if you look at what service MeSHs, it's an overlay. It's an abstraction. I can create an idea of a global name space that cuts across multiple VPCs. I'm, I'm hearing at Amazon's gonna make some announcements around VPC and how they stitch VPCs together. It's all moving towards this idea of abstractions. I can set policy at logical level. I don't have to worry about data security and the communication between services. These are the things we're now enabling, which are really an, and to make EKS even more productive, making enterprise grade enterprise ready. And so a lot of excitement from the EKS development teams as well to partner closely with us to make this an end to end solution for our >>Customers. Yeah. So I mean it's under chasy, it was really driving those primitives and helping developers under continuing that path, but also recognizing the need for solutions. And that's where the ecosystem comes in, >>Right? And the question is, what is that box? As you said last time, right? For the super cloud, there is a cloud infrastructure, which is becoming the new palette, but how do you make sense of the 300 plus primitives? How do you bring them together? What are the best practices, patterns? How do I manage that when something goes wrong? These are real problems that we're looking to solve. >>And if you're gonna have deeper business integration with the cloud and technology in general, you have to have that >>Abstraction. You know, one of the simple question I ask is, how do you know you're getting value from your cloud investment? That's a very hard question. What's your trade off between performance and cost? Do you know where your security, when a lock 4G happens, do you know all the open source packages you need to patch? These are very simple questions, but imagine today having to do that when everybody's doing in a bespoke manner using the set of primitives. You need a platform. The industry is shown at scale. You have to start standardizing and building a consistent way of delivering and abstracting stuff. And that's where the next stage of the cloud journey >>And, and with the economic environment, I think people are also saying, okay, how do we get more? Exactly. We're in the cloud now. How do we get more? How do we >>Value out of the cloud? >>Exactly. Totally. >>How do we transform the business? Last question, AJ for you, is, if you had a bumper sticker and you're gonna put it on your fancy car, what would it say about VMware tan zone aws? >>I would say tan accelerates apps. >>Love >>It. Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Appreciate it. Always great to be here. >>Pleasure. Likewise. For our guest, I'm Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

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

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

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

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

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

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of the cube coverage here at VMware VMware Explorer, not world 12 years. The Cube's been covering VMware is end user conference this year. It's called explore previously world. We got two great guests, friends of the cube friend, cube, alumni and cloud rod, Keith Townson, principal CTO advisor, air streaming his way into world this year in a big way. Congratulations. And course James Erhard principal technology, a at tan zoo cloud ARA. He's been in cloud game for a long time. We've known each other for a long, long time, even before cloud was cloud. So great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Ah, it's a pleasure, always happy to >>Be here. So day threes are kind of like riff. I'll throw out super cloud. You guys will, will trash it. We'll debate. It'll be controversial and say this damage done by the over rotation of developer experience. We'll defend Tansu, but really the end of the game is, is that guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time. We're we're totally into it. And we've been saying infrastructure is code as the end state. We want to get there. Right? DevOps and infrastructure is code has always been the, the, the underlying fire burning in, in all the innovation, but it's now getting legitimately enterprised it's adopted in, in, in large scale, Amazon web services. We saw that rise. It feels we're in another level right now. And I think we're looking at this new wave coming. And I gotta say, you know, the Broadcom thing has put like an electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem cuz they don't know what's gonna happen next. So as a result, everyone's kind of gotta spring in their step a little, whether it's nervous, energy or excitement around something happening, it's all cloud native. So, you know, as VMware's got such a great investment in cloud native, but yet multi cloud's the story. Right? So, so messaging's okay. So what's happening here? Like guys let's, let's break it down. You're on the show floor of the Airstream you're on the inside, but with the seeing the industry, James will start with you what's happening this year with cloud next level and VMware's future. >>Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is that we are beginning to see the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption in computing. And what I mean by that is the, the abstractions that sort of bled between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have sort of become separated much better. And I think Kubernetes is, is the strong evidence of that. But also all of the public cloud APIs are strong evidence of that. And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that we're strong evidence of that. So I think what's, what's starting to happen now then is, is developers have really kind of pulled very far away from, from anything other than saying, I need compute, I need network. I need storage. And so now you're seeing the technologies that say, well, we've figured out how to do that at a team level, like one team can automate an application to an environment, but another team will, you know, other teams, if I have hundreds of teams or, or thousands of applications, how do I handle that? And that's what the excitement I think is right >>Now. I mean the, the developer we talking, we're going on camera before you came on camera Keith around, you know, your contr statement around the developer experience. Now we, I mean, I believe that the cloud native development environment is doing extremely well right now. You talk to, you know, look around the industry. It's, it's at an all time high and relative to euphoria, you know, sit on the beach with sunglasses. You couldn't be better if you were a developer open source, booming, everything's driving to their doorstep, self service. They're at the center of the security conversation, which shift left. Yeah. There's some things there, but it's, it's a good time. If you're a developer now is VMware gonna be changing that and, and you know, are they gonna meet the developers where they are? Are they gonna try to bring something new? So these are conversations that are super important. Now VMware has a great install base and there's developers there too. So I think I see their point, but, but you have a take on this, Keith, what's your, what's your position on this? How do the developer experience core and tangential played? >>Yeah, we're I think we're doing a disservice to the industry and I think it's hurting and, or D I think I'm gonna stand by my statement. It's damaging the in industry to, to an extent VMware >>What's damaging to the >>Industry. The focusing over focusing on developer experience developer experience is super important, but we're focusing on developer experience the, the detriment of infrastructure, the infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry isn't there. So we're asking VMware, who's a infrastructure company at core to meet the developer where the developer, the developer is at today with an infrastructure that's not ready to deliver on the promise. So when we're, when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations, like adding block storage to VMC on AWS, we collectively yawn. It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well, what does that mean for the developer down the road? >>It should mean nothing because if it's infrastructure's code, it should just work, right. >>It should just work, but it doesn't. Okay. >>I see the damage there. The, >>The, when you're thinking, oh, well I should be able to just simply provide Dr. Service for my on-prem service to this new block level stores, because I can do that in a enterprise today. Non-cloud, we're not there. We're not at a point where we can just write code infrastructure code and that happens. VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap and we're, you know, and then I think we, we, when buyers look at what we say, and we, we say VMware, isn't meeting developers where they're at, but they're doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds. I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John, the, the, the, the unicorn we all talk about. And at the end I tried to wrap up and he said, no, no, no way. I gotta talk about vRealize. Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about vRealize and, and the importance of normalizing that underlay. And we just don't give these companies in this space, the right >>Latitude. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to rock a little bit what you're saying. So from my standpoint, generically speaking, okay. If I'm a, if the developers are key to the, to the cloud native role, which I, I would say they are, then if I'm a developer and I want, and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood, I'm not getting the weeds in which some lot people love to do. I wanna just make things work. So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service, I don't care about locking someone else should figure that problem out, but I'm gonna just accelerate my velocity, making sure it's secure. And I'm moving on being creative and doing my thing, building apps. Okay. That's the kind of the generic, generic statement. So what has to happen in your mind to >>Get there? Yeah. Someone, someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move as 400, still propagate the data center. They're still H P X running SAP, E there's still, you know, 75% of the world's transactions happen through SAP. And most of that happens on bare metal. Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that infrastructure's cold world. Yeah. Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do Dr. Between my on premises edge solution and the public cloud, someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes, the, the Kubernetes consuming that, that work isn't done. Yeah. It >>Is. It's an >>Opportunity. It's on paper. >>It's an opportunity though. It's not, I mean, we're not in a bad spot. So I mean, I think what you're getting at is that there's a lot of fix a lot of gaps. All right. I want Jay, I wanna bring you in, because we had a panel at super cloud event. Chris Hoff, you know, beaker was on here. Yeah. He's always snarky, but he's building, he's been building clouds lately. So he's been getting his, his hands dirty, rolling up his sleeves. The title of panel was originally called the innovators dilemma with a question, mark, you know, haha you know, innovators, dilemma, little goof on that. Cuz you know, there's challenges and trade offs like, like he's talking about, he says we should call it the integrator's dilemma because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay, it's not as seamless as it can be or should be in the Nirvana state. >>But there's a lot of integration going on. A lot of APIs are, are key to this API security. One of the most talked about things. I mean I interviewed six companies on API security in the past couple months. So yeah. I mean I never talked to anybody about API security before this year. Yeah. APIs are critical. So these key things of cloud are being attacked. And so there's more complexity as we're getting more successful. And so, so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations, what's your read on this to make the complexity go away. You guys have the, the chaos rain here, which I actually like that Dave does too, but you know, Andy Grove once said let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. So we're in that reign in the chaos mode. Now what's your take on what Keith was saying around. Yeah. >>So I think that the one piece of the puzzle that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative that I think is important is it's really not just infrastructure and developers. Right? It's it's there's in fact, and, and I, I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, right? There's there's really sort of three layers of operations that come out of the cloud model in long term and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and in the middle is platform and services. And so I think one of the, this is where VMware is making its play right now is in terms of providing the platform and service capability that does that integration at a lower level works with VMs works with bare metal, works with the public cloud services that are available, makes it easy to access things like database services and messaging services and things along those lines. >>It makes it easy to turn code that you write into a service that can be consumed by other applications, but ultimately creates an in environment that begins to pull away from having to know, to write code about infrastructure. Right. And so infrastructure's, code's great. But if you have a right platform, you don't have to write code about infrastructure. You can actually D declare what basic needs of the application are. And then that platform will say, okay, well I will interpret that. And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is. Yeah. And that's what VMware's taking advantage of with what we're doing >>With. Yeah. I remember when we first Lou Tucker and I, and I think you might have been in the room during those OpenStack days and when Kubernetes was just starting and literally just happened, the paper was written, gonna go out and a couple companies formed around it. We said that could be the interoperability layer between clouds and our, our dream at that time was Hey. And, and we, we mentioned and Stratus in our, our super cloud, but the days of spanning clouds, a dream, we thought that now look at Kubernetes. Now it's kind of become that defacto rallying moment for, I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've been talking about allows for right once run anywhere. I think to me, that's not nowhere in the market today. Nobody has that. Nobody has anything that could write once, read one, write once and then run on multiple clouds. >>It's more true than ever. We had one customer that just was, was using AKs for a while and then decided to try the application on EKS. And they said it took them a couple of hours to, to get through the few issues they ran into. >>Yeah. I talked to a customer who who's going from, who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle cloud on Oracle cloud's VMware solution. And he raved about now he has a inherent backup Dr. For his O CVS solution because there's a shim between the two. And >>How did he do >>That? The, there there's a solution. And this is where the white space is. James talked about in the past exists. When, when I go to a conference like Cuban, the cube will be there in, in Detroit, in, in, in about 45 days or so. I talk to platform group at the platform group. That's doing the work that VMware red had hash Corp all should be doing. I shouldn't have to build that shim while we rave and, and talk about the power Kubernetes. That's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60 to 65% of their, for the platform right now there's groups of developers within that sit in between infrastructure and sit in between application development that all they do is build platforms. There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform. VMware announced tap one, 1.3. And the thing that I'm surprised, the one on Twitter is talking about is this API discovery piece. If you've ever had to use an API and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever, and now it, it just magically happens. The marketing at the end of developing the application. Think if you're in you're, you're in a shop that develops hundreds of applications, there's thousands or tens of thousands of APIs that have to be documented. That's beating the developer where it's at and it's also infrastructure. >>Well guys, thanks for coming on the cube. I really appreciate we're on a time deadline, which we're gonna do more. We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explorer. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. No problem. See you pleasure. Yeah. Okay. We'll be back with more live coverage. You, after this short break, stay with us.

>>Hey guys. Good morning. And welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with John furrier. This is the Cube's third day of Wal Dal coverage of VMware Explorer. We're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. Chris Wolf joins us chief research and innovation officer at VMware. Chris, welcome back to the >>Cube. Yeah. Thanks Lisa. It's always a pleasure. >>This has been a great event. We, we, the key note was standing room only on Tuesday morning. We've had great conversations with VMware's ecosystem and VMware of course, what are some of the, the hot things going on from an R and D perspective? >>Yeah, there's, there's a lot. I mean, we're, we have about four or five different priorities. And these look at this is looking at sovereign clouds and multi-cloud edge computing, modern applications and data services. We're doing quite a bit of work in machine learning as well as insecurity. So we're, we're relatively large organization, but at the same time, we really look to pick our bets. So when we're doing something in ML or security, then we wanna make sure that it's high quality and it's differentiated and adds value for VMware, our partners and our customers. >>Where are our customers in the mix in terms of being influential in the roadmap? >>Very, very much in the mix. What we, what we like to do is in early stage R and D, we want to have five to 10 customers as design partners. And that really helps. And in addition to that, as we get closer to go to market, we look to a lineup between one and three of our SI partners as well, to really help us, you know, in a large company, sometimes your organic innovations can get lost in the shuffle. Yeah. And when we have passionate SI that are like, yes, we want to take this forward with you together. That's just awesome. And it also helps us to understand at a very early stage, what are the integration requirements? So we're not just thinking about the, the core product itself, but how would it play in the ecosystem equally important? >>We had hit Culbert on CTO, great work. He's dealing with the white paper and cross cloud, obviously vSphere, big release, lot of this stuff. Dave ante had mentioned that in the analyst session, you had a lot of good stuff you were talking about. That's coming around the corner. That's shipping coming outta the oven and a big theme this year is multi-cloud cloud native. The relationship what's one's ahead. Bleed dog. No one, you kinda get a feel for multi-cloud. It's kind of out front right now, but now cloud native's got the most history what's coming out of the oven right now in terms of hitting the market. That's not yet in this, in the, in the, in the numbers, in terms of sales, like there's, there's some key cloud native stuff coming out. Where's the action. Can you share what you've shared at the analyst meeting? >>Yeah. So at the analyst meeting, what I was going through was a number of our new innovation projects or projects. And, and these are things that are typically close to being product or service at VMware, you know, somewhere in the year out timeframe. Some, some of these are just a few months out. So let me just go through some of them, I'll start with project keek. So keek is super exciting because when you think about edge, what we're hearing from customers is the, the notion of a single platform, a single piece of hardware that can run their cloud services, their containers, their VMs, their network, and security functions. Doing all of this on one platform, gives them the flexibility that as changes happen, it's a software update. They don't have to buy another piece of hardware, but if we step back, what's the management experience you want, right? >>Simple get ops oriented, simple life cycle and configuration management, very low touch. I don't need technical skills to deploy these types of devices. So this is where keek comes in. So what keek is doing is exposing a Kubernetes API above the ESXi hypervisor and taking a complete, get op style of management. So imagine now, when you need to do an update for infrastructure, you're logging into GitHub, you're editing a YAML file and pushing the update. We're doing the same thing for the applications that reside. I can do all of this through GitHub. So this is very, I would say, even internally disruptive to VMware, but super exciting for our customers and partners that we've shared this with. >>What else is happening? What else on the cloud native side Tansu Monterey those lot areas. >>Oh, there's so much. So if we look at project Monterey, I had a presentation within Invidia yesterday. We're really talking through this. And what I'm seeing now is there's a couple of really interesting inflection points with DPU. The first thing is the performance that you're getting and the number of cores that you can save on an X 86 host is actually providing a very strong business case now to bring DPU into the servers, into the data center. So that's one. So now you have a positive ROI. Number two, you start to decouple core services now from the X 86 host itself. So think about a distributed firewall that I can run on a PCI adapter. Now that's DEC coupled, physically from the server, and it really allows me to scale out east west security in a way that I could not do before. So again, I think that's really exciting and that's where we're seeing a lot of buzz from customers. >>So that DPU, which got a lot of buzz, by the way, Lisa, I never, you had trouble interviews on this. I had to the Dell folks too, V X RS taking the advantage of it, the performances, I see the performance angle on that and deep user hot. Can you talk about that security east west thing? Cuz Tom Gillis was on yesterday talking about that's a killer advantage for the security side. Can you touch on that real >>Quick? Yeah. A hundred percent. So what I can now do is take a, a firewall and run it isolated from the X 86 host that it's trying to protect. So it's right next to the host. I can get line rate speeds in terms of analytics and processing of my network and security traffic. So that's also huge. So I'm running line rate on the host and I'm able to run one of these firewall instances on every host in my data center, you cannot do that. You can never afford it with physical appliances. So to me, this is an inflection point because this is the start of network and security functions moving off of hardware appliances and onto DPU. And if you're the ecosystem vendors, this is how they're going to be able to scale some of their services and offerings into the public >>Cloud. So a lot of good stuff happening within the VMware kind of the hardware, low level atoms and the bits as well as the software. The other thing I wanna get your thoughts on relative to the next question is that takes to the next level is the super cloud world we're living in is about cloud native developers, which is DevOps dev security ops and data ops are now big parts of the, the challenges that the people are reigning in the chaos that that's being reigned in. How does VMware look at the relationship to the cloud providers? Cause we heard cloud universal. We had the cloud. If you believe in multi-cloud, which you guys are saying, people are agreeing with, then you gotta have good tight couple coupled relationships with the cloud services, >>A hundred percent. >>We can be decoupled, but highly cohesive, but you gotta connect in via APIs. What's the vision for the VMware customers who want to connect say AWS, for instance, is that seamless? What makes that happen? What's that roadmap look like for taking that VMware on premises hybrid and making it like turbo charging it to be like public cloud hybrid together? >>Yeah, I think there's some lessons that can be learned here. You know, an analogy I've been using lately is look at the early days of virtualization when VMware had vCenter, right? What was happening was you saw the enterprise management vendors try to do this overlay above virtualization management and say, we can manage all hypervisors. And at the end of the day, these multi hypervisor managers, no one bought 'em because they can do 20% of the functionality of a tool from VMware or Microsoft. And that's the lesson that we have to take to multi-cloud. We don't have to overlay every functionality. There's really good capabilities that the cloud providers are offering through their own tooling and APIs. Right? But you, you, if you step back, you say, well, what do I wanna centralize? I wanna have a centralized, secure software supply chain and I can get that through VMware tan zoo and, and where we're going with Kubernetes. When you're going with native cloud services, you might say, you know what, I wanna have a central view of, of visibility for compliance. So that's what we're doing with secure state or a central view of cost management. And we're doing that with cloud health. So you can have some brokering and governance, but then you also have to look from a surgical perspective as to what are the things that I really need to centralize versus what do I not need to centralize? >>One of the themes that we heard on the keynote on Tuesday was the, the different phases and that a lot of customers are still in the cloud chaos phase. We talked a lot about that in the last couple days with VMware, with its partner ecosystem. And, but the goal of getting to cloud smart, how does the R and D organization, how do, how are you helping customers really navigate that journey from the chaos that they're in, maybe they've inherited multi-cloud environment to getting to cloud smart. And what does cloud smart mean from your perspective >>Cloud? Smartt from my perspective means pragmatism. It means really thinking about what should I do here first, right? I don't want to just go somewhere because I can, right. I want to be really mindful of the steps I'm going to take. So one ex one example of this is I've met with a customer this morning and we were talking about using our vRealize network insight tool, because what that allows 'em to do is get a map of all of their application dependencies in their data center. And they can learn like, well, I can move this to the cloud or maybe I can't move this cuz it has all these other dependencies and it would be really difficult. So that's that's one example. It also means really thinking through issues around data sovereignty, you know, what do I wanna hold onto a customer? I just met with yesterday. They were talking about how valuable their data is and their services that they want to use via SA in the cloud. But then there's also services, which is their core research. They wanna make sure that they can maintain that in their data centers and maintain full control because they see researchers will leave. And now all of a sudden, so that intellectual property has actually gone with the person and they need to, they need to have, you know, better accountability there. >>Yeah. One of the things about that we discovered at our super cloud event was is that, you know, we kind didn't really kind of put too much structure on other than our, our vision. It's, it's not just SaaS on cloud and it's not just, multi-cloud, it's a new kind of application end state or reality that if you believe in digital transformation, then technology is everywhere. And like it in the old days, it powered the back office and then terminals and PCs and whatnot, wasn't powering the boardroom obviously or other business. But if, if it happens like that digital transformation, the company is the app, the app is the company. So you're all digital. So that means the operating expenses has to drive an income statement and the CapEx handled by the cloud provides a lot of goodness. So I think everyone's gonna realize that AWS and the hyperscalers are providing great CapEx gifts. They do all the work and you only pay when you've made your success. So that's a great business model. >>Absolutely >>That's and then combine that with open source, which is now growing so fast, going next level, the software industry's open source. That's not even a debate Mo in some circles, maybe like telco, cloud's got the CapEx. The new operating model is this cloud layer. That's going to transform the companies finally in a hundred percent. Okay. That's super cloud. If that's the case, does it really matter who provides the electricity or the power? It's the coders that are in charge. It's the developers that have to make the calls because if the application is the core, the developers are, are not only the front lines, they are the company. This is really kind of where the sea change is. So if, if we believe that, I'm sure you, you agree with that generally? >>Yeah, of >>Course. Okay. So then what's the VMware customer roadmap here. So to me, that's the big story here at the show is that we're at this point in time where the VMware customers are, have to go there >>A hundred percent, >>What's that path. What is the path for the VMware customer to go from here to there? And what's this order of operations or is there a roadmap? Can, can you share your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, I think part of it is, is with these disruptive technologies, you have to start small, you know, whether it's in your data center, into cloud, you have to build the own institutional knowledge of your team members in the organization. It's much easier than trying to attract outside talent, for least for many of our customers. So I think that's important. The other part of this when with the developer and control, like in my organization, I want my innovators to innovate any other noise around them. I don't want them to have to worry about it. And it's the same thing with our customers. So if your developers are building the technologies that is really differentiating your company, then things like security and cryptography shouldn't have to be things they worry about. So we've been doing a lot of work. Like one of the projects we announced this week was around being able to decouple cryptography from the applications themselves. And we can expose that through a proxy through service mesh. And that's really exciting because now it ops can make these changes. Our SecOps teams can make these changes without having to impact the application. So that's really key is focusing the developers on innovation and then really being mindful about how you can build the right automation around everything else. And certainly open source is key to all >>That. So that's so, so then if you, if that's happening, which I'm, I'm not gonna debate that then in essence, what's really going on here is that the companies are decomposing their entire businesses down to levels that are manageable completely different than the way they did them 20, 30 years ago. >>Absolutely. You, you, you could take a modular approach to how you're solving business problems. And we do the same thing with technology, where there might be a ML algorithms that we've developed that we're exposing as SA service, but then all of the interconnects around that service are open source and very flexible so that the businesses and the customers and the VMware partners can decide what's the right way to build a puzzle for a given problem. >>We were talking on day one, I was riffing with an executives. It was Ragu and Victoria. And the concept around cross cloud was if you get to this Nirvana state, which is we, people want to get to this or composability mode, you're not coding, you're composing cuz coding's kinda happening open source and not the old classic, write some code and write that app. It's more orchestrate, compose and orchestrate. Do you, what's your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. And it's it's I would add one more part to it too, which is scope. You know, I think sometimes we see projects fail because the, the initial scope is just too big. You know, what is the problem that you need to solve, scope it properly and then continuously calibrate. So even like our customers have to listen to their customers and we have to be thinking about our customers' customers, right? Because that's really how we innovate because then we can really be mindful of a holistic solution for them. >>You know, Lisa, when we had a super cloud event, you know, one of the panels was called the innovators dilemma with a question mark. And of course everyone kinds of quotes that book innovators dilemma, but one of the panelists, Chris ho beaker on Twitter said, let's change the name from the innovator's dilemma to the integrator's dilemma. And we all kind of got chuckled. We all kind of paused and said, Hey, that's actually a good point. Yeah. If you're now in a cloud and you're seeing some of the ecosystem floor vendors out there talking in this game too, they're all kind of fitting in snapping in almost like modular, like you said, so this is a Lego game. Now it feels like, it feels like, you know, let's compose, let's orchestrate, let's integrate. Now I integrations API driven. Now you're seeing a lot more about API security in the news and we've been covering at least I've probably interviewed six companies in the past, you know, six months that are doing API security, who would've thought API, that's the link, frankly, with the web. Now that's now a target area for hackers. >>Oh. And that's such an innovation area for VMware, John. Okay. >>There it is. So, I mean, this is, again, this means the connected tissue is being attacked yet. We need it to grow. No one's debating that is wrong, but it's under siege. >>Yes. Yes. So something else we introduced this week was a project. We called project Trinidad. And the way, the way you can think about it is a lot of the anomaly detection software today is looking at point based anomalies. Like this API header looks funny where we, where we've gone further is we can look at full sequence based anomalies so we can learn the sequences of transactions at an application takes and really understand what is expected behavior within those API calls within the headers, within the payloads. And we can model legitimate application behavior based on what those expectations are. So like a, like a common sequence might be doing an e-commerce checkout, right? There's lots of operations that happen logging into the site, searching, finding a product, going through the cart. Right. All of those things. Right. So if something's out of sequence, like all of a sudden somebody's just trying to do a checkout, but they haven't actually added to the cart. Right. This just seems odd. Right. So we can start to, and that's a simplistic example, but we're able now to use our algorithms to model legitimate application behavior through the entire sequence of how applications behave and then we can start to trap on anomalies. That's very differentiating IP and, and we think it's gonna be really important for the industry. Yeah. >>Because a lot of the hacks, sometimes on the API side, even as a example, are not necessarily on the API, it's the business logic in them. That's what you're getting at here. Yes. The APIs are hard. Oh our APIs are secure. Right. Well, yeah, but you're not actually securing the business logic internally. That's what you're getting at. If I read >>That right. Or exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it's the thing it's right. It's great that you can, you can look at a header, but what's the payload, right? What is what's, what's the actual data flow, right. That's associated with the call and that's what we want to really hone in on. And that's just a, it's, it's a, it's a far different level of sophistication in being able to understand east west vulnerabilities, you know, log for JX voice and these kind of things. So we have some real, it's interesting technology >>There. Security conversations now are not about security there about defense ability because security's a state of time, your secure here, you're not secure or someone might be in the network or in the app, but can you defend yourself from, and in >>That's it, you know, our, our, our malware software, right. That we're building to prevent and respond has to be more dynamic than the threats we face. Right. And this is why machine learning is so essential in, in these types of applications. >>Let me ask you a question. So just now zooming out riffing here since day, three's our conversational day where we debate and just riff more like a podcast style. If you had to do a super cloud or build a NextGen cloud multi-cloud with abstraction layer, that's, you know, all singing and dancing and open everyone's happy hardware below it's working ISAs and then apps are killed. Can ass what's in that. What does it look like to you if you had to architect the, the ultimate super cloud enabler, that something that would disrupt the next 10 years, what would it look like and how does, and assuming, and trying to do where everybody wins go, you have 10 seconds. No, >>Yeah, yeah. So the, you know, first of all, there has to be open source at all of the intersections. I think that's really important. And, and this is, this goes from networking constructs to our database, as a service layers, you know, everything in between, you know, the, the, the participants should be able to win on merit there. The other part of super cloud though, that hasn't happened that I probably is the most important area of innovation is going to be decoupled control planes. We have a number of organizations building sovereign cloud initiatives. They wanna have flexibility in where their services physically run. And you're not going to have that with a limited number of control planes that live in very specific public cloud data centers. So that's an area, give >>An example of what a, a, a, a narrowly defined control plane is. >>Yeah, sure. So my database as a service layer, so the, the, the actual portal that the customer is going into to provision databases, right. Rep managed replication, et cetera. Right. I should be able to run that in a colo. I should be able to run that somewhere in region that is guaranteed, that I'm going to have data stay physically in region. You know, we still have some of these challenges in networking in terms of being able to constrain traffic flows and be able to predict and audit them within a particular region as well. >>It's interesting. You bring up region again, more complexity. You know, you got catalogs here, catalogs different. I mean, this is where the chaos really comes down. I mean, it's, it's advancing, but it's advancing the state of functionality, but making it hella complex, I mean, come on. Don't you think it's like pretty amazingly hard to reign in that? Well, or is it maybe you guys making it easier? I just think I just, my mind just went, oh my God, I gotta, I gotta provision to that region, but then it's gotta be the same over there. And >>When you go back to modular architecture constructs, it gets far easier. This has been really key for how VMware is even building our own clouds internally is so that we have a, a shared services platform for the different apps and services that we're building, so that you do have that modularized approach. Like I said, the, the examples of innovation projects I've shared have been really driven by the fact that, you know, what, I don't know how customers are gonna consume it, and I don't have to know. And if you have the right modular architecture, the right APIs around it, you don't have to limit a particular project or technology's future at the time you build >>It. Okay. So your super would have multiple control planes that you can move, manage with that within one place. I get that. What about the data control plane? That seems to be something that used to be the land grab in, in conversations from vendors. But that seems to be much more of a customer side, cuz if I'm a customer, I want my control plane data plane to be, you know, mine. Like I don't want to have anyone cuz data's gotta move around, gotta be secure. >>Oh exactly. >>And that's gonna be complicated. How does, how do you see the data planes emerging? >>Yeah. Yeah. We, we see an opportunity really around having a, a centralized view that can give me consistent indexing and consistent awareness of data, no matter where it resides. And then being able to have that level of integration now between my data services and my applications, because you're right, you know, right now we have data in different places, but we could have a future where data's more perpetually in motion. You know, we're already looking at time sensitive fabrics where we're expecting microservices to sometimes run in different cell towers depending on the SLA that they need to achieve. So then you have data parts that's going to follow, right? That may not always be in the same cloud data center. So there's, this is enormously complicated, not just in terms of meeting application SLAs, but auditing and security. Right. That makes it even further. So having these types of data layers that can give me a consistent purview of data, regardless of where it is, allow me to manage and life cycle data globally, that's going to be super important, I believe going forward. >>Yeah. Awesome. Well, my one last question, Lisa, gonna get a question in here. It's hard. Went for her. I'm getting all the, all the questions in, sorry, Lisa that's okay. What's your favorite, most exciting thing that you think's going on right now that people should pay attention to of all the things you're looking at, the most important thing that that's happening and maybe something that's super important that people aren't talking about or it could be the same thing. So the, the most important thing that you think that's happening in the industry for cloud next today and, and maybe something that you think people should look at and pay more attention to. >>Okay. Yeah, those are good questions. And that's hard to answer because there's, there's probably so much happening. I I've been on here before I've talked about edge. I still think that's really important. I think the value of edge soft of edge velocity being defined by software updates, I think is quite powerful. And that's, that's what we're building towards. And I would say the industry is as well. If you look at AWS and Azure, when they're packaging a service to go out to the edge it's package as a container. So it's already quite flexible and being able to think about how can I have a single platform that can give me all of this flexibility, I think is really, really essential. We're building these capabilities into cars. We have a version of our Velo cloud edge device. That's able to run on a ruggedized hardware in a police car today. We're piloting that with a customer. So there is a shift happening where you can have a core platform that can now allow you to layer on applications that you're not thinking about in the future. So I think that's probably obvious. A lot of people are like, yeah. Okay. Yes. Let's talk about edge, big deal. >>Oh it's, it's, it's big. Yes. It's >>Exploding, but >>It's complicated too. It's not easy. It's not obvious. Right. And it's merging >>There's new things coming every day. Yeah. Yeah. And related to that though, there is this kind of tension that's existing between machine learning and privacy and that's really important. So an area of investment that I don't think enough people are paying attention to today is federated machine learning. There's really good projects in open source that are having tangible impact on, in a lot of industries in VMware. We are, we're investing in a, in a couple of those projects, namely fate in the Linux foundation and open FFL. And in these use cases like the security product I mentioned to you that is looking at analyzing API sequence API call sequences. We architected that originally so that it can run in public cloud, but we're also leveraging now federated machine learning so that we can ensure that those API calls and metadata associated with that is staying on premises for the customers to ensure privacy. So I think those intersections are really important. Federated learning, I think is a, an area not getting enough attention. All right. All >>Right, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. Unfortunately we are out of time. I know you guys could keep going. Yeah. Good stuff. But thank you for sharing. What's going on in R and D the customer impact the outcomes that you're enabling customers to achieve. We appreciate your >>Insights. We're just getting started >>In, in early innings, right? Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff for guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily. >>Okay.

>>Okay, welcome back to everyone. Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John fur, host of the cube. Two sets three days of live coverage. Dave Ante's here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all host of the cube 12 interviews today, just we're with Rocklin and rolling, getting down to the end of the show. As we wind down and look back and look at the future. We've got Steven Jones. Here's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS. He's with Amazon web service. Steven Jones. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. >>Welcome back cube alumni. I've been on many times going back to 2015. Yeah. >>Pleasure to be here. Great >>To see you again. Thanks for coming on. Obviously 10 years at AWS, what a ride is that's been, come on. That's fantastic. Tell me it's been crazy. >>Wow. Learned a lot of stuff along the way, right? I mean, we, we, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity, right? Customers wanting the agility and flexibility of, of the cloud and, and we, we still think it's early days, right? I mean, you'll hear Andy say that animals say that, but it really is. Right. If you look at even just the amount of spend that's being spent on, on clouds, it's in the billions, right. And the amount of, of spend in it is still in the trillion. So there's, there's a long way to go and customers are pushing us hard. Obviously >>It's been interesting a lot going on with VM. We're obviously around with them, obviously changing the strategy with their, their third generation and their narrative. Obviously the Broadcom thing is going on around them. And 10 years at abs, we've been, we've been, this'll be our ninth year, no 10th year at reinvent coming up for us. So, but it's 10 years of everything at Amazon, 10 years of S three, 10 years of C two. So if you look at the, the marks of time, now, the history books are starting to be written about Amazon web services. You know, it's about 10 years of full throttle cube hyperscaler in action. I mean, I'm talking about real growth, like >>Hardcore, for sure. I'll give you just one anecdote. So when I first joined, I think we had maybe two EC two instances back in the day and the maximum amount of memory you could conversion into one of these machines was I think 128 gig of Ram fast forward to today. You literally can get a machine with 24 terabytes of Ram just in insane amounts. Right? My, my son who's a gamer tells me he's got 16 gig in his, in his PC. You need to, he thinks that's a lot. >>Yeah. >>That's >>Excited about that. That's not even on his graphics card. I mean, he's, I know it's coming next. The GPU, I mean, just all >>The it's like, right? >>I mean, all the hardware innovation that you guys have done, I mean, look at every it's changed. Everyone's changed their strategy to copy AWS nitro, Dave ante. And I talk about this all the time, especially with James Hamilton and the team over there, Peter DeSantos, these guys have, are constantly going at the atoms and innovating at the, at the level. I mean that, that's how hardcore it is over there right now. I mean, and the advances on the Silicon graviton performance wise is crazy. I mean, so what does that enabling? So given that's continuing, you guys are continuing to do great work there on the CapEx side, we think that's enabling another set of new net new applications because we're starting to see new things emerge. We saw snowflake come on, customer of AWS refactor, the data warehouse, they call it a data cloud. You're starting to see Goldman Sachs. You see capital one, you see enterprise customers building on top of AWS and building a cloud business without spending the CapEx >>Is exactly right. And Ziggy mentioned graviton. So graviton is one of our fastest growing compute families now. And you know, you mentioned a couple of ISVs and partners of ours who are leaning in heavily on porting their own software. Every event Adam announced that we're working with SAP to, to help them port their HANA cloud, which is a, a database of service offering HANA flagship to graviton as well. So it's, it's definitely changing. >>And I think, you know, one of the, and we're gonna circle back to VMware is kind of a point to this. This conversation is that, is that if you look at the trends, right, okay. VMware really tried hard to do cloud and they had a good shot at it V cloud air, but it just, they didn't have the momentum that you guys had at AWS. We saw a lot, lot of other stragglers try to do cloud. They fell off the road, OpenStack, HP, and the list goes on and on. I don't wanna get into that, but the point is, as you guys become more powerful and you're open, right? So you have open ecosystem, you have people now coming back, taking advantage and refactoring and picking up where they left off. VMware was the one of the first companies that actually said, you know what pat Gelsinger said? And I was there, let's clear up the positioning. Let's go all in with AWS. That's >>Right >>At that time, 2016. >>Yeah. This was new for us, for >>Sure. And then now that's set the standard. Now everybody else is kind of doing it. Where is the VMware cloud relationship right now? How is that going out? State's worked. >>It's working well very well. It's I mean, we're celebrating, I think we made the announcement what, five years ago at this conference. Yeah. 2016. So, I mean, it's, it's been a tremendous ride. The best part are the customers who were coming and adopting and proving to us that our vision back then was the right vision. And, and, and what's been different. I think about this relationship. And it was new for us was that we, we purposely went after a jointly engineered solution. This wasn't a, we've got a, a customer or a partner that's just going to run and build something on us. This is something where we both bring muscle and we actually build a, a joint offering together. Talk about, about the main difference. >>Yeah. And that, and that's been working, but now here at this show, if you look at, if you squint through the multi-cloud thing, which is like just, I think positioning for, you know, what could happen in, in a post broad Broadcom world, the cloud native has traction they're Tansu where, where customers were leaning in. So their enterprise customer is what I call the classic. It, you know, mainstream enterprise, which you guys have been doing a lot of business with. They're now thinking, okay, I'm gonna go on continu, accelerate on, in the public cloud, but I'm gonna have hybrid on premise as well. You guys have that solution. Now they're gonna need cloud native. And we were speculating that VMware is probably not gonna be able to get 'em all of it. And, and that there's a lot more cloud native options as customers want more cloud native. How do you see that piece on Amazon side? Because there's a lot of benefits between the VMware cloud on AWS and the services that you guys have natively in your cloud. So we see customers really taking advantage of the AWS goodness, as well as expanding the cloud side at VMware cloud on AWS. >>Yeah. There's probably two ways I would look at this. Right? So, so one is the combination of VMware cloud on AWS. And then both native services just generally brings more options to customers. And so typically what we're seeing now is customers are just able to move much faster, especially as it comes to data center, evacuations, migrating all their assets, right? So it used to be that, and still some customers they're like, I I've gotta think through my entire portfolio of applications and decide what to refactor. And the only way I can move it to cloud is to actually refactor it into some net new application, more and more. We're actually seeing customers. They've got their assets. A lot of them are still on premises in a VMware state, right. They can move those super quick and then modernize those. And so I think where you'll see VMware and AWS very aligned is on this, this idea of migrate. Now you need to get the benefits of TCO and, and the agility that comes with being in the cloud and then modernize. We took a step further, which is, and I think VMware would agree here too, but all of the, the myriad of services, I think it's 200 plus now AWS native services are for use right alongside any that a customer wants to run in VMware. And so we have examples of customers that are doing just, >>And that's, that's how you guys see the native and, and VMware cloud integrating in. Yeah, that's, that's important because this, I mean, if I always joke about, you know, we've been here 12 years listening in the hallways and stuff, you know, on the bus to the event last night, walking the parties and whatnot, listening in the streets, there's kind of two conversations that rise right to the top. And I wanna get your reaction to this Steven, because this seems to be representative of this demographic here at VMware conference, there's conversations around ransomware and storage and D dub and recovery. It's all, a lot of those happen. Yeah. Clearly a big crowd here that care about, you know, Veeam and NetApp and storage and like making sure stuff's secure and air gapped. And a lot of that kind of, I call nerdy conversations and then the other one is, okay, I gotta get the cloud story. >>Right. So there's kind of the operational security. And then there's like, okay, what's my path to true cloud. I need to get this moving. I need to have better applications. My company is the application now not it serves some sort of back office function. Yeah. It's like, my company is completely using technology as its business. So the app is the business. So that means everything's technology driven, not departmental siloed. So there's a, that's what I call the true cloud conversation. How do you, how do you see that evolving because VMware customers are now going there. And I won't say, I won't say they're behind, but they're certainly going there faster than ever before. >>I think, I think, I mean, it's an interesting con it's an interesting way to put it and I, I would completely agree. I think it's, it's very clear that I think a lot of customer companies are actually being disrupted. Right. And they have to move fast and reinvent themselves. You said the app is now becoming the company. Right. I mean, if, if you look at where not too many years back, there were, you know, big companies like Netflix that were born in the cloud. Right. Airbnb they're disruptors. >>There's, that's the >>App, right? That's the app. Yeah. So I, I would exactly agree. And, and that's who other companies are competing with. And so they have to move quickly. You talked about some, some technology that allows them to do that, right? So this week we announced the general availability of a NetApp on tap solution. It's been available on AWS for some time as a fully managed FSX storage solution. But now customers can actually leverage it with, with VMC. Now, why is that important? Well, there's tens of thousands of customers running VMware. On-premises still, there's thousands of them that are actually using NetApp filers, right? NetApp, NetApp filers, and the same enterprise features like replication. D do you were talking about and Snapp and clone. Those types of things can be done. Now within the V VMware state on AWS, what's even better is they can actually move faster. So consider replicating all this, you know, petabytes and petabytes of data that are in these S from on-premises into AWS, this, this NetApp service, and then connected connecting that up to the BMC option. So it just allows customers much, much. >>You guys, you guys have always been customer focus. Every time I sat down with the Andy jazzy and then last year with Adam, same thing we worked back from, I know it's kind of a canned answer on some of the questions from media, but, but they do really care. I've had those conversations. You guys do work backwards from the customer, actually have documents called working backwards. But one of the things that I observed, we talked about here yesterday on the cube was the observations of reinvent versus say, VM world. Now explore is VM world's ecosystem was very partner-centric in the sense of the partners needed to rely on VMware. And the customers came here for both more of the partners, not so much VMware in the sense there wasn't as much, many, many announcements can compare that to the past, say eight years of reinvent, where there's so much Amazon action going on the partners, I won't say take as a second, has a backseat to Amazon, but the, the attendees go there generally for what's going on with AWS, because there's always new stuff coming out. >>And it's, it's amazing. But this year it starts to see that there's an overlap or, or change between like the VMware ecosystem. And now Amazon there's, a lot of our interviews are like, they're on both ecosystems. They're at Amazon's show they're here. So you start to see what I call the naturalization of partners. You guys are continuing to grow, and you'll probably still have thousands of announcements at the event this year, as you always do, but the partners are much more part of the AWS equation, not just we're leasing all these new services and, and oh, for sure. Look at us, look at Amazon. We're growing. Cause you guys were building out and look, the growth has been great. But now as you guys get to this next level, the partners are integral to the ecosystem. How do you look at that? How has Amazon thinking about that? I know there's been some, some, a lot of active reorgs around AWS around solving this problem or no solve the problem, addressing the need and this next level of growth. What's your reaction to >>That? Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a good point. So I have to be honest with you, John. I, I, I spent eight of my 10 years so far at AWS within the partner organization. So partners are very near and dear to my heart. We've got tens of thousands of partners and you are you're right. You're starting to see some overlap now between the VMware partner ecosystem and what we've built now in AWS and partners are big >>By the way, you sell out every reinvent. So it's, you have a lot of partners. I'm not suggesting that you, that there's no partner network there, but >>Partners are critical. I mean, absolutely naturally we want a relationship with a customer, but in order to scale the way we need to do to meet the, the needs of customers, we need partners. Right. We, we can't, we can't interact with every single customer as much as we would like to. Right. And so partners have long built teams and expertise that, that caters to even niche workloads or opportunity areas. And, and we love partners >>For that. Yeah. I know you guys do. And also we'll point out just to kind of give props to you guys on the partner side, you don't, you keep that top of the stack open on Amazon. You've done some stuff for end to end where customers want all Amazon, but for the most part, you let competition come in, even on, so you guys are definitely partner friendly. I'm just observing more the maturization of partners within the reinvent ecosystem, cuz we're there every year. I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, they're all buzzing. I mean, it's not like there's no action. There's a lot of customers there it's sold out as big numbers, but it just seems that the partners are much more integrated into the value proposition of at a AWS because of the, the rising tide and, and now their enablement, cuz now they're part of the, of the value proposition. Even more than ever before >>They, they really are. And they, and they're building a lot of capabilities and services on us. And so their customers are our customers. And like you say, it's rising tide, right. We, we all do better together. >>Okay. So let's talk about the VMware cloud here. What's the update here in terms of the show, what's your, what's your main focus cuz a lot of people here are doing, doing sessions. What's been some of the con content that you guys are producing here. >>Yeah. So the best part obviously is a always the customer conversations to partner conversations. So a, a lot of, a lot of sessions there, we did keynote yesterday in Ryan and I, where we talked about a number of announcements that are, I think pretty material now to the offering a joint announcement with NetApp yesterday as well around the storage solution I was talking about. And then some, some really good technical deep dives on how the offering works. Customers are still interested in like how, how do I take what I've got on premises and easily move into AWS and technology like HSX H CX solution with VMware makes it really easy without having to re IP applications. I mean, you know, it is super difficult sometimes to, to move an application. If you've got figure out where all the firewall rules are and re iPing those, those things source. But yeah, it's, it's been fantastic. >>A lot of migrations to the cloud too. A lot of cloud action, new cloud action. You guys have probably seen an uptake on services right on the native side. >>Yes. Yes. For sure. So maybe I just outlined some of the, some of the assets we made this week. So absolutely >>Go ahead. >>We, we announced a new instance family as a, a major workhorse underneath the VMware cloud offering called I, I, you mentioned nitro earlier, this is on, based on our latest generation of nitro, which allows us to offer as you know, bare metal instances, which is, which is what VMware actually VMware was our first partnership and customer that I would say actually drove us to really get Nira done and out the door. And we've continued to iterate on that. And so this I four, I instance, it's based on the, the latest Intel isolate processor with more than double the Ram double the compute, a whopping 75 gigabytes per second network. So it's a real powerhouse. The cool thing is that with the, with the NetApp storage solution that we, we discussed, we're now disaggregating the need to provision, compute and storage at the same time. It used to be, if you wanted to add more storage to your VSAN array, that was on a V VMware cloud. Yeah. You'd add another note. You might not need more compute for memory. You'd have to add another note. And so now customers can simply start adding chunks of storage. And so this opens up customers. I had a customer come to me yesterday and said, there's no reason for us not to move. Now. We were waiting for something that like this, that allowed us to move our data heavy workloads yeah. Into VMware cloud. It's >>Like, it's like the, the alignment. You mentioned alignment earlier. You know, I would say that VMware customers are lined up now almost perfectly with the hybrid story that's that's seamless or somewhat seems it's never truly seamless. But if you look at like what Deepak's doing with Kubernetes and open source, you, you guys have that there talking that big here, you got vs a eight vSphere, eight out it's all cloud native. So that's lined up with what you guys are doing on your services and the horsepower. They have their stuff, you have yours that works better together. So it seems like it's more lined up than ever before. What's your take on that? Do you agree? And, and if so, what folks watching here that are VMware customers, what's, what's the motivation now to go faster? >>Look, it is, it is absolutely lined up. We are, as, as I mentioned earlier, we are jointly engineering and developing this thing together. And so that includes not just the nuts and bolts underneath, but kind of the vision of where it's going. And so we're, we're collectively bringing in customer feedback. >>What is that vision real quick? >>So that vision has to actually help an under help meet even the most demanding customer workloads. Okay. So you've got customer workloads that are still locked in on premises. And why is that? Well, it used to be, there was big for data and migration, right? And the speed. And so we continue to iterate this and that again is a joint thing. Instead of say, VMware, just building on AWS, it really is a, a tight partnership. >>Yeah. The lift and shift is a, an easy thing to do. And, and, and by the way, that could be a hassle too. But I hear most people say the reason holding us back on the workloads is it's just a lot of work, a hassle making it easier is what they want. And you guys are doing that. >>We are doing that. Absolutely. And by the way, we've got not just engineering teams, but we've got customer support teams on both sides working together. We also have flexible commercial options, right? If a customer wants to buy from AWS because they've negotiated some kind of deal with us, they can do that. They wanna buy from VMware for a similar reason. They could buy from VMware. So are >>They in the marketplace? >>They are in the market. There, there are some things in the marketplace. So you talked about Tansu, there's a Tansu offering in the marketplace. So yes. Customers can >>Contract. Yeah. Marketplaces. I'm telling you that's very disruptive. I'm Billy bullish on the market AIOS marketplace. I think that's gonna be a transformative way. People have what they procure and fully agree, deploy and how, and channel relationships are gonna shift. I think that's gonna be a disruptive enabler to the partner equation and, and we haven't even seen it yet. We're gonna be up there in September for their inaugural event. I think it's a small group, but we're gonna be documenting that. So even final question for you, what's next for you? What's on the agenda. You got reinvent right around the corner. Your P ones are done. Right? I know. Assuming all that, I turn that general joke. That's an internal Amazon joke. FYI. You've got your plan. What's next for the world. Obviously they're gonna go this, take this, explore global. No matter what happens with Broadcom, this is gonna be a growth wave with hybrid. What's next for you and your team with AWS and VMware's relationship? >>Yeah. So both of us are hyper focused on adding additional options, both from a, an instance compute perspective. You know, VMware announced some, some, some additional offerings that we've got. We've got a fully complete, like, so they're, they announce things like VMware flex compute V VMware flex storage. You mentioned earlier, there was a conversation around ransomware. There's a new ransomware based offering. So we're hyper focused on rounding out, continuing to round out the offering and giving customers even more choice >>Real quick. Jonathan made me think about the ransomware we were at reinforce Steven Schmidtz now the CSO. Now you got a CSO. AJ's the CSO. You got a whole focus, huge emphasis on security right now. I know you always have, but now it's much more public. It's PO more positive, I think, than some of the other events I've been to. It's been more Lum and doom. What's the security tie in here with VMware. Can you share a little bit real quick on the security piece update around this relationship? >>Yeah, you bet. So as you know, security for us is job zero. Like you don't have anything of security. And so what are the things that, that we're excited about specifically with VMware is, is the latest offering that, that we put together and it's called this, this ransomware offering. And it's, it's a little bit different than other ransomware. I mean, a lot of people have ransomware offerings today, just >>Air gap. >>Right, right, right. Exactly. No, that's easy. No, this one is different. So on the back end, so within VMC, there's this, this option where CU we can be to be taking iterative snapshots of a customer environment. Now, if an event were to occur, right. And a customer is like, I have to know if I'm compromised, we can actually spin up super easy. This is cloud. Remember? Yeah. We can spin up a, a copy of this environment, throw a switch, pick a snapshot with NSX. So VMware NSX firewall it off and then use some custom tooling from VMware to actually see if it's been compromised or not. And then iterate through that until you actually know you're clean. And that's different than just tools that do maybe a >>Little bit of scam. We had Tom gills on yesterday and, and one of the things Dave ante had to leave is taking the sun to college is last one in the house and B nester now, but Tom Gill was on. We were talking about how good their security story is ware. And they really weren't showboating it as much as they could have here. I thought they could have done a better job, but this is an example of kind of them really leaning in with you guys. That's the key part of the relationship. >>Yeah, it really is. And I think this is something is materially different than what you can get elsewhere. And it's exciting for, >>Okay. Now the, the real question I want to know is what's your plans for AWS reinvent the blockbuster end of the year, Amazon surf show that gets bigger and bigger. I know it's still hybrid now, but it's looking be hybrid, but people are back in person last year. You guys were the first event really come back and still had massive numbers. AWS summit, New York at 19,000. I heard last week in Chicago, big numbers. So we're expecting reinvent to be pretty large this year. What are you, what are you gonna do there? What's your role there? >>We are expecting, well, I'll be there. I cover multiple businesses. Obviously. We're, we're planning on some additional announcements, obviously in the VMware space as well. And one of the other businesses I run is around SAP. And you should look for some things there as well. Yeah. Really looking forward to reinvent, except for the fact that it's right after Thanksgiving. But I think it >>Always ruins my, I always get an article out. I like, why are you we're having, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. I gotta write this article. It's gotta get Adam, Adam. Leski exclusive. We, every year we do a, a CEO sit down with Andy was the CEO and then now Adam. But yeah, it's a great event to me. I think it sets the tone. And it's gonna be very interesting to see the big clouds are coming to the big cloud. You guys, and you guys are now called hyperscalers. Now, multiple words. It's interesting. You guys are providing the CapEx goodness for everybody else now. And that relationship seems to be the new, the new industry standard of you guys provide the enablement and then everyone you get paid, cuz it's a service. A whole nother level of cloud is emerging in the partner network, GSI other companies. Yeah. >>Yeah. I mean we're really scaling. I mean we continue to iterate and release regions at a fast clip. We just announced support for VMware in Hong Kong. Yeah. So now we're up to 21 regions for this service, >>The sovereign clouds right around the corner. Let's we'll talk about that soon. Steven. Thanks for coming. I know you gotta go. Thank you for your valuable time. Coming in. Put Steven Jones. Who's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS business. Four AWS here inside the cube day. Three of cube coverage. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of VM wear Explorer, 2022 formerly VM world. The Cube's 12th year covering the annual conference. I'm Jennifer Daveon. We got Jason Bloomberg here. Who's a Silicon angle contributor guest author, president of inte analyst firm. Great to see you, Jason. Thanks for coming on the queue. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks a lot. >>And thanks for contributing to Silicon angle. We really appreciate your articles and, and so does the audience, so thanks for that. >>Very good. We're happy >>To help. All right. So I gotta ask you, okay. We've been here on the desk. We haven't had a chance to really scour the landscape here at Moscone. What's going, what's your take on what's going on with VMware Explorer, not world. Yeah. Gotta see the name change. You got the overhang of the, the cloud Broadcom, which from us, it seems like it's energized people like, like shocked to the system something's gonna happen. What's your take. >>Yeah, something's definitely going to happen. Well, I've been struggling with VMware's messaging, you know, how they're messaging to the market. They seem to be downplaying cloud native computing in favor of multi-cloud, which is really quite different from the Tansu centric messaging from a year or two ago. So Tansu is still obviously part of the story, but it's really, they're relegating the cloud native story to an architectural pattern, which it is, but I believe it's much more than that. It's really more of a paradigm shift in how organizations implement it. Broadly speaking, where virtualization is part of the cloud native story, but VMware is making cloud native part of the virtualization story. Do so >>Do you think that's the, the mischaracterization of cloud native or a bad strategy or both? >>Well, I think they're missing an opportunity, right? I think they're missing an opportunity to be a cloud native leader. They're well positioned to do that with Tansu and where the technology was going and the technology is still there. Right? It's not that that >>They're just downplaying it. >>They're just downplaying it. Right. So >>As, as they were security too, they didn't really pump up security at >>All. Yeah. And you know, vSphere is still gonna be based on Kubernetes. So it's, they're going to be cloud native in terms of Kubernetes support across their product line. Anyway. So, but they're, they're really focusing on multi-cloud and betting the farm on multi-cloud and that ties to the change of the name of the conference. Although it's hard to see really how they're connecting the dots. Right. >>It's a bridge you can't cross, you can't see that bridge crossing what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was a clever way of saying, oh, we're exploring new frontiers, which is kinda like, we don't really know what it is >>Yet. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the term Explorer was probably concocted by a committee where, you know, they eliminated all the more interesting names and that was the one that was left. But, you know, Raghu explained that that Explorer is supposed to expand the audience for the conference beyond the VMware customer to this broader multi-cloud audience. But it's hard to say whether you >>Think it worked. Was there people that you recognize here or identified as a new audience? >>I don't think so. Not, not at this show, but over time, they're hoping to have this broader audience now where it's a multi-cloud audience where it's more than just VMware. It's more than just individual clouds, you know, we'll see if that works. >>You heard the cl the cloud chaos. Right. Do you, do you think they're, multi-cloud cross cloud services is a solution looking for a problem or is the problem real? Is there a market there? >>Oh, oh, the cloud chaos. That's a real problem. Right? Multi-cloud is, is a reality. Many organizations are leveraging different clouds for different reasons. And as a result, you have management security, other issues, which lead to this chaos challenge. So the, the problem is real aria. If they can get it up and running and, you know, straightened out, it's gonna be a great solution, but there are other products on the market that are more mature and more well integrated than aria. So they're going to, you know, have to compete, but VMware is very good at that. So, you know, I don't, I don't count the outing. Who >>Do you see as the competition lay out the horses on the track from your perspective? >>Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of different companies. I, I don't wanna mention any particular ones cuz, cuz I don't want to, you know, favor certain ones over others cuz then I get into trouble. But there's a, a lot of companies that >>Okay, I will. So you got a red hat with, you got obvious ones, Cisco, Cisco, I guess is Ashi Corp plays a role? Well, >>Cisco's been talking about this, >>Anybody we missed. >>Well, there's a number of smaller players, including some of the exhibitors at the, at the show that are putting together this, you know, I guess cloud native control plane that covers more than just a single cloud or cover on premises of virtualization as well as multiple clouds. And that's sort of the big challenge, right? This control plane. How do we come up with a way of managing all of this, heterogeneous it in a unified way that meets the business need and allows the technology organization, both it and the application development folks to move quickly and to do what they need to do to meet business needs. Right? So difficult for large organizations to get out of their own way and achieve that, you know, level of speed and scalability that, that, that technology promises. But they're organizationally challenged to, >>To accomplish. I think I've always looked at multi-cloud as a reality. I do see that as a situational analysis on the landscape. Yeah, I got Azure because I got Microsoft in my enterprise and they converted everything to the cloud. And so I didn't really change that. I got Amazon cause that's from almost my action is, and I gotta use Google cloud for some AI stuff. Right. All good. Right. I mean that's not really spanning anything. There's no ring. It's not really, it's like point solutions within the ecosystem, but it's interesting to see how people are globbing onto multi-cloud because to me it feels like a broken strategy trying to get straightened out. Right. Like, you know, multi-cloud groping from multi-cloud it feels that way. And, and that makes a lot of sense cuz if you're not on the right side of this historic shift right now, you're gonna be dead. >>So which side of the street do you wanna be on? I think it's becoming clear. I think the good news is this year. It's like, if you're on this side of the street, you're gonna be, be alive. Yeah. And this side of the street, not so much. So, you know, that's cloud native obviously hybrid steady state mul how multi-cloud shakes out. I don't think the market's ready personally in terms of true multi-cloud I think it's, it's an opportunity to have the conversation. That's why we're having the super cloud narrative. Cause it's a lit more attention getting, but it focuses on, it has to do something specific. Right? It can't be vaporware. The market won't tolerate vaporware and the new cloud architecture, at least that's my opinion. What's your reaction? Yeah. >>Well the, well you're quite right that a lot of the multiple cloud scenarios involve, you know, picking and choosing the various capabilities each of the cloud provider pro offers. Right? So you want TensorFlow, you have a little bit of Google and you want Amazon for something, but then Amazon's too expensive for something else. So you go with a Azure for that or you have Microsoft 365 as well as Amazon. Right? So you're, that's sort of a multi-cloud right there. But I think the more strategic question is organizations who are combining clouds for more architectural reasons. So for example, you know, back backup or failover or data sovereignty issues, right, where you, you can go into a single cloud and say, well, I want, you know, different data and different regions, but they may a, a particular cloud might not have all the answers for you. So you may say, okay, well I want, I may one of the big clouds or there's specialty cloud providers that focus on data sovereignty solutions for particular markets. And, and that might be part of the mix, right? Isn't necessarily all the big clouds. >>I think that's an interesting observation. Cause when you look at, you know, hybrid, right. When you really dig into a lot of the hybrid was Dr. Right? Yeah. Well, we got, we're gonna use the cloud for backup. And that, and that, what you're saying is multi-cloud could be sort of a similar dynamic, >>The low-head fruit, >>Which is fine, which is not that interesting. >>It's the low hanging fruit though. It's the easy, it's that risk free? I won't say risk free, but it's the easiest way not to get killed, >>But there's a translate into just sort of more interesting and lucrative and monetizable opportunities. You know, it's kind of a big leap to go from Dr. To actually building new applications that cross clouds and delivering new monetization value on top of data and you know, this nerve. >>Yeah. Whether that would be the best way to build such applications, the jury's still out. Why would you actually want to do well? >>I was gonna ask you, is there an advantage? We talked to Mariana, Tess, who's, you know, she's CTO of into it now of course, into it's a, you know, different kind of application, but she's like, yeah, we kinda looked hard at that multiple cloud thing. We found it too complex. And so we just picked one cloud, you know, in, for kind of the same thing. So, you know, is there an advantage now, the one advantage John, you pointed this out is if I run on Microsoft, I'll make more money. If I run on Amazon and you know, they'll, they'll help me sell. So, so that's a business justification, but is there a technical reason to do it? You know, global presence, there >>Could be technical reason not to do it either too. So >>There's more because of complexity. >>You mean? Well, and or technical debt on some services might not be there at this point. I mean the puzzle pieces gotta be there, assume that all clouds have have the pieces. Right. Then it's a matter of composability. I think E AJ who came on AJ Patel who runs modern applications development would agree with your assessment of cloud native being probably the driving front car on this messaging, because that's the issue like once you have the, everything there, then you're composing, it's the orchestra model, Dave. It's like, okay, we got everything here. How do I stitch it together? Not so much coding, writing code, cuz you got everything in building blocks and patterns and, and recipes. >>Yeah. And that's really what VMware has in mind when they talk about multi-cloud right? From VMware's perspective, you can put their virtual machine technology in any cloud. So if you, if you do that and you put it in multiple clouds, then you have, you know, this common, familiar environment, right. It's VMware everywhere. Doesn't really matter which cloud it's in because you get all the goodness that VMware has and you have the expertise on staff. And so now you have, you know, the workload portability across clouds, which can give you added benefits. But one of the straw men of this argument is that price arbitrage, right. I'm gonna, you know, put workloads in Amazon if it's cheaper. But if then if Amazon, you know, Azure has a different pricing structure for something I'm doing, then maybe I'll, I'll move a workload over there to get better pricing. That's difficult to implement in practice. Right. That's so that's that while people like to talk about that, yeah. I'm gonna optimize my cost by moving workloads across clouds, the practicalities at this point, make it difficult. Yeah. But with, if you have VMware, any your clouds, it may be more straightforward, but you still might not do it in order to save money on a particular cloud bill. >>It still, people don't want data. They really, really don't want to move >>Data. This audience does not want do it. I mean, if you look at the evolution, this customer base, even their, their affinity towards cloud native that's years in the making just to good put it perspective. Yeah. So I like how VMware's reality is on crawl, walk, run their clients, no matter what they want 'em to do, you can't make 'em run. And when they're still in diapers right. Or instill in the crib. Right. So you gotta get the customers in a mode of saying, I can see how VMware could operate that. I know and know how to run in an environment because the people who come through this show, they're like teams, it's like an offsite meeting, meets a conference and it's institutionalized for 15 plus years of main enterprise workload management. So I like, that's just not going away. So okay. Given that, how do you connect to the next thing? >>Well, I think the, the missing piece of the puzzle is, is the edge, right? Because it's not just about connecting one hyperscaler to another hyperscaler or even to on-premises or a private cloud, it's also the edge, the edge computing and the edge computing data center requirements. Right. Because you have, you could have an edge data center in a, a phone tower or a point of presence, a telco point of presence, which are those nondescript buildings, every town has. Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know, we have that >>Little colo that no one knows about, >>Right, exactly. That, you know, used to be your DSL end point. And now it's just a mini data center for the cloud, or it could be the, you know, the factory computer room or computer room in a retailer. You know, every retailer has that computer room in the modern retails target home Depot. They will have thousands of these little mini cloud data centers they're handling their, their point of sale systems, their, you know, local wifi and all these other local systems. That's, that's where the interesting part of this cloud story is going because that is inherently heterogeneous inherently mixed in terms of the hardware requirements, the software requirements and how you're going to build applications to support that, including AI based applications, which are sort of the, one of the areas of major innovation today is how are we going to do AI on the edge and why would we do it? And there's huge, huge opportunity to >>Well, real time referencing at the edge. Exactly. Absolutely. With all the data. My, my question is, is, is, is the cloud gonna be part of that? Or is the edge gonna actually bring new architectures and new economics that completely disrupt the, the economics that we've known in the cloud and in the data center? >>Well, this for hardware matters. If form factor matters, you can put a data center, the size of four, you know, four U boxes and then you're done >>Nice. I, >>I think it's a semantic question. It's something for the marketers to come up with the right jargon for is yeah. Is the edge part of the cloud, is the cloud part of the edge? Are we gonna come up with a new term, super cloud HyperCloud? >>Yeah. >>Wonder woman cloud, who knows? Yeah. But what, what >>Covers everything, but what might not be semantic is the, I, I come back to the Silicon that inside the, you know, apple max, the M one M two M two ultras, the, what Tesla's doing with NPUs, what you're seeing, you know, in, in, in arm based innovations could completely change the economics of computing, the security model. >>As we say, with the AJ >>Power consumption, >>Cloud's the hardware middleware. And then you got the application is the business everything's completely technology. The business is the app. I >>Mean we're 15 years into the cloud. You know, it's like every 15 years something gets blown up. >>We have two minutes left Jason. So I want to get into what you're working on for when your firm, you had a great, great traction, great practice over there. But before that, what's the, what's your scorecard on the event? How would you, what, what would be your constructive analysis? Positive, good, bad, ugly for VMwares team around this event. What'd they get right? What'd they need to work on >>Well as a smaller event, right? So about one third, the size of previous worlds. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a reasonably well run event for a smaller event. I, you know, in terms of the logistics and everything everything's handled well, I think their market messaging, they need to sort of revisit, but in terms of the ecosystem, you know, I think the ecosystem is, is, is, is doing well. You know, met with a number of the exhibitors over the last few days. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of positive things going on there. >>They see a wave coming and that's cloud native in your mind. >>Well, some of them are talking about cloud native. Some of them aren't, it's a variety of different >>Potentially you're talking where they are in this dag are on the hardware. Okay, cool. What's going on with your research? Tell us what you're focused on right now. What are you digging into? What's going on? Well, >>Cloud native, obviously a big part of what we do, but cybersecurity as well, mainframe modernization, believe it or not. It's a hot topic. DevOps continues to be a hot topic. So a variety of different things. And I'll be writing an article for Silicon angle on this conference. So highlights from the show. Great. Focusing on not just the VMware story, but some of the hot spots among the exhibitors. >>And what's your take on the whole crypto defi world. That's emerging. >>It's all a scam hundred >>Percent. All right. We're now back to enterprise. >>Wait a minute. Hold on. >>We're out of time. >>Gotta go. >>We'll make that a virtual, there are >>A lot of scams. >>I'll admit that you gotta, it's a lot of cool stuff. You gotta get through the underbelly that grows the old bolt. >>You hear kit earlier. He's like, yeah. Well, forget about crypto. Let's talk blockchain, but I'm like, no, let's talk crypto. >>Yeah. All good stuff, Jason. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for spending time. I know you've been busy in meetings and thanks for coming back. Yeah. Happy to help. All right. We're wrapping up day two. I'm Jeff David ante cube coverage. Two sets three days live coverage, 12th year covering VMware's user conference called explore now was formerly VM world onto the next level. That's what it's all about. Just the cube signing off for day two. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage, VMware Explorer, 2022 formerly world. I've been saying now I gotta get that out. Dave, I've been sayingm world. It just kind of comes off the tongue when I'm tired, but you know, wall to wall coverage, again, back to back interviews all day two sets. This is a wrap up here with the analyst discussion. Got one more interview after this really getting the analyst's perspective around what we've been hearing and seeing, observing, and reporting on the cube. Again, two sets blue and green. We call them here on the show floor on Moscone west with the sessions upstairs, two floors of, of amazing content sessions, keynote across ed Moscone, north and south SBI here, cloud strategists with the cube. And of course, what event wouldn't be complete without SBE weighing in on the analysis. And, and, and I'm, you know, all kidding aside. I mean that because we've had great interactions around, you know, digging in you, you're like a roving analyst out there. And what's great about what you do is you're social. You're communicating, you're touching everybody out there, but you're also picking up the puzzle pieces. And we, you know, of course we recognize that cuz that's what we do, but you're out, we're on the set you're out on the floor and you know your stuff and, and you know, clouds. So how you, this is your wheelhouse. Great to see you. Good to >>See you. I'm good guys. Thank you. Thank you for having >>Me. So I mean, Dave and I were riffing going back earlier in this event and even before, during our super cloud event, we're reminded of the old OpenStack days. If you remember, Dave OpenStack was supposed to be the open source version of cloud. And that was a great ambition. And the cloud AATI at that time was very into it because it made a lot of sense. And the vision, all the infrastructure was code. Everything was lined up. Everything was religiously was on the table. Beautiful cloud future. Okay. 20 2009, 2010, where was Amazon? Then they just went off like a rocket ship. So cloud ended up becoming AWS in my opinion. Yeah. OpenStax then settled in, did some great things, but also spawns Kubernetes. Okay. So, you know, we've lived through thiss we've seen this movie. We were actually in the trenches on the front lines present at creation for cloud computing. >>Yeah. I was at Rackspace when the open stack was open sourced. I was there in, in the rooms and discussions and all that. I think OpenStack was given to the open source like prematurely. I usually like we left a toddler on the freeway. No, the toddler >>Got behind the wheel. Can't see over the dashboard. >>So we have learned over the years in last two decades, like we have seen the open source rise of open source and we have learned quite a few lessons. And one lesson we learned from there was like, don't let a project go out in the open, tell it mature enough with one vendor. So we did that prematurely with NASA, NASA and Rackspace gave the, the code from two companies to the open source community and then likes of IBM and HPE. No. Now HPE, they kind of hijacked the whole thing and then put a lot of developers on that. And then lot of us sort of second tier startup. >>But, but, but I remember not to interject, but at that time there wasn't a lot of pushback for letting them it wasn't like they infiltrated like a, the vendors always tried to worry about vendors coming in open source, but at that time was pretty people accepted them. And then it got off the rails. Then you remember the great API debate. You >>Called it a hail Mary to against AWS, which is, is what it was, what it was. >>It's true. Yeah. Ended up being right. But the, the battle started happening when you started seeing the network perimeters being discussed, you starting to see some of the, in the trenches really important conversations around how to make essentially cross cloud or super cloud work. And, and again, totally premature it continue. And, and what does that mean today? So, okay. Is VMware too early on their cross cloud? Are they, is multi-cloud ready? >>No >>For, and is it just vaporware? >>No, they're not too early, actually on, on, on, on that side they were premature to put that out there, but this is like very mature company, like in the ops area, you know, we have been using, we VMware stuff since 2000 early 2000. I, I was at commerce one when we started using it and yeah, it was for lab manager, you know, like, you know, put the labs >>Out desktop competition. >>Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. So it, it matured pretty fast, but now it it's like for all these years they focused on the op site more. Right. And then the challenge now in the DevOps sort of driven culture, which is very hyped, to be honest with you, they have try and find a place for developers to plug in on the left side of the sort of whole systems, life cycle management sort of line, if you will. So I think that's a, that's a struggle for, for VMware. They have to figure that out. And they are like a tap Tansu application platform services. They, they have released a new version of that now. So they're trying to do that, but still they are from the sort of get ups to the, to the right, from that point to the right on the left side. They're lot more tooling to helpers use as we know, but they are very scattered kind of spend and scattered technology on the left side. VMware doesn't know how to tackle that. But I think, I think VMware should focus on the right side from the get ups to the right and then focus there. And then how in the multi-cloud cross cloud. >>Cause my sense is, they're saying, Hey, look, we're not gonna own the developers. I think they know that. And they think they're saying do develop in whatever world you want to develop in will embrace it. And then the ops guys, we, we got you covered, we got the standards, we have the consistency and you're our peeps. You tend then take it, you know, to, to the market. Is that not? I mean, it seems like a viable strategy. I >>Mean, look at if you're VMware Dave and start, you know, this where they are right now, the way they missed the cloud. And they had to reboot that with jazzy and, and, and Raghu to do the databases deal. It's essentially VMware hosted on AWS and clients love it cuz it's clarity. Okay. It's not vCloud air. So, so if you're them right now, you seeing yourself, wow. We could be the connective tissue between all clouds. We said this from day one, when Kubernetes was hitting in the scene, whoever can make this, the interoperability concept of inter clouding and connect clouds so that there could be spanning of applications and data. We didn't say data, but we said, you know, creating that nice environment of multiple clouds. Okay. And again, in concept, that sounds simple, but if you're VMware, you could own that abstraction layer. So do you own it or do you seed the base and let it become a defacto organization? Like a super layer, super pass layer and then participate in it? Or are you the middleware yourself? We heard AJ Patel say that. So, so they could be the middleware for at all. >>Aren't they? The infrastructure super cloud. I mean, that's what they're trying to be. >>Yeah. I think they're trying, trying to do that. It's it's I, I, I have said that many times VMware is bridged to the cloud, right? >>The sorry. Say bridge to >>The cloud. Yeah. Right. For, for enterprises, they have virtualized environments, mostly on VMware stacks. And another thing is I wanna mention touch on that is the number of certified professionals on VMware stack. There it's a huge number it's in tens of thousands. Right? So people who have got these certifications, they want to continue that sort of journey. They wanna leverage that. It's like, it's a Sunco if they don't use that going forward. And that was my question to, to during the press release yesterday, like are there new certifications coming into the, into the limelight? I, I think the VMware, if they're listening to me here somewhere, they will listen. I guess they should introduce a, a cross cloud certification for their stack because they want to be cross cloud or multi-cloud sort of vendor with one sort of single pane. So does actually Cisco and so do many others. But I think VMware is in a good spot. It's their market to lose. I, I, I call it when it comes to the multi-cloud for enterprise, especially for the legacy applications. >>Well, they're not, they have the enterprise they're super cloud enabler, Dave for the, for the enterprise, cuz they're not hyperscaler. Okay. They have all the enterprise customers who come here, we see them, we speak to them. We know them will mingle, but >>They have really good relationships with all the >>Hyperscale. And so those, those guys need a way to the cloud in a way that's cloud operation though. So, so if you say enterprises need their own super cloud, I would say VMware might wanna raise their hands saying we're the vendor to provide that. Yes, totally. And then that's the middleware role. So middleware isn't your classic stack middleware it's middle tissue. So you got, it's not a stack model anymore. It's completely different. >>Maybe, maybe my, my it's >>Not a stack >>Industry. Maybe my industry super cloud is too aspirational, but so let's assume for a second. You're not gonna have everybody doing their own clouds, like Goldman Sachs and, and capital one, even though we're seeing some evidence of that, even in that case, connecting my on-prem to the cloud and modernizing my application stack and, and having some kind of consistency between your on-prem and it's just call it hybrid, like real hybrid, true hybrid. They should dominate that. I mean, who is who, if it's not it's VMware and it's what red hat who else? >>I think red hat wants it too. >>Yeah. Well, red hat and red, hat's doing it with IBM consulting and they gotta be, they have great advantage there for all the banks. Awesome. But what, what about the other 500,000 customers that are >>Out there? If VMware could do what they did with the hypervisor, with virtualization and create the new thing for super cloud, AKA connecting clouds together. That's a, that's a holy grail move right >>There. But what about this PA layer? This Tansu and area which somebody on Twitter, there was a little SNAR come that's V realized just renamed, which is not. I mean, it's, it's from talking to Raghu unless he's just totally BSing us, which I don't think he is. That's not who he is. It's this new federated architecture and it's this, their super PAs layer and, and, and it's purpose built for what they're trying to do across clouds. This is your wheelhouse. What, what do you make of that? >>I think Tansu is a great effort. They have put in lot of other older products under that one umbrella Tansu is not a product actually confuses the heck out of the market. That it's not a product. It's a set of other products put under one umbrella. Now they have created another umbrella term with the newer sort of, >>So really is some yeah. >>Two >>Umbrella on there. So it's what it's pivotal. It's vRealize it's >>Yeah. We realize pivotal and, and, and older stack, actually they have some open source components in there. So, >>So they claim that this ragus claim, it's this new architecture, this new federated architecture graph database, low latency, real time ingestion. Well, >>AJ, AJ that's AJ's department, >>It sounded good. I mean, this is that >>Actually I think the newer, newer stuff, what they announced, that's very promising because it seems like they're building something from scratch. So, >>And it won't be, it won't be hardened for, but, but >>It won't be hardened for, but, >>But those, but they have a track record delivering. I mean, they gotta say that about yeah. >>They're engineering focus company. They have engineering culture. They're their software engineers are top. Not top not, >>Yes. >>What? >>Yeah. It's all relatives. If they, if the VMware stays the way they are. Well, >>Yeah, >>We'll get to that a second. What >>Do you mean? What are you talking >>About? They don't get gutted >>The elephant in the room if they don't get gutted and then, then we'll see it happens there. But right now I love, we love VMware. We've been covering them for 12 years and we've seen the trials, not without their own issues to work on. I mean, everyone needs to work on stuff, but you know, world class, they're very proud of their innovation, but I wanna ask you, what was your observations walking around the floor, talking to people? What was the sense of the messaging? Is it real in their minds? Are they leaning in, are they like enthused? Are they nervous, apprehensive? How would you categorize the attitude of the folks here that you've talked to or observed? >>Yeah. It at the individual product level, like the people are very confident what they're building, what they're delivering, but when it comes to the telling a cohesive story, if you go to all the VMware booth there, like it's hard to find anybody who can tell what, what are all the services under tens and how they are interconnected and what facilities they provide or they can't. They, I mean, most of the people who are there, they can are walking through the economic side of things, like how it will help you save money or, or how the TCR ROI will improve. They are very focused on because of the nature of the company, right. They're very focused on the technology only. So I think that that's the, that's what I learned. And another sort of gripe or negative I have about VMware is that they have their product portfolio is so vast and they are even spreading more thinly. And they're forced to go to the left towards developers because of the sheer force of hyperscalers. On one side on the, on the right side, they are forced to work with hyperscalers to do more like ops related improvements. They didn't mention AI or, or data. >>Yeah. Data storage management. >>That that was weak. That's true. During the, the keynote as well. >>And they didn't mention security and their security story, strong >>Security. I think they mentioned it briefly very briefly, very briefly. But I think their SCO story is good actually, but no is they didn't mention it properly, I guess. >>Yeah. There wasn't prominent in the keynote. It was, you know, and again, I understand why data wasn't P I, they wanted to say about data, >>Didn't make room for the developer story. I think this was very much a theatrical maneuver for Hawk and the employee morale and the ecosystem morale, Dave, then it had to do with the nuts bolt of security. They can come back to get that security. In my opinion, you know, I, I don't think that was as bad of a call as bearing the vSphere, giving more demos, which they did do later. But the keynote I thought was, was well done as targeted for all the negative sentiment around Broadcom and Broadcom had this, the acquisition agreement that they're, they are doing, they agree >>Was well done. I mean, >>You know, if I VMware, I would've done the same thing, look at this is a bright future. We're given that we're look at what we got. If you got this, it's on you. >>And I agree with you, but the, the, again, I don't, I don't see how you can't make security front and center. When it is the number one issue for CIOs, CSOs, CSOs boards or directors, they just, it was a miss. They missed it. Yeah. Okay. And they said, oh, well, there's only so much time, but, and they had to put the application development focus on there. I get that. But >>Another thing is, I think just keynote is just one sort of thing. One moment in this whole sort of continuous period, right. They, I think they need to have that narrative, like messaging done periodically, just like Amazon does, you know, like frequent events tapping into the practitioners on regional basis. They have to do that. Maybe it's a funding issue. Maybe it is some weakness on the, no, >>I think they planning, I talked to, we talked to the CMO and she said, Explorer is gonna be a road show. They're gonna go international with, it's gonna take a global, they're gonna have a lot of wood behind the arrow. They're gonna spend a lot of money on Explorer is what, they're, what we're seeing. And that's a good thing. You got a new brand, you gotta build it. >>You know, I would've done, I would've had, I would've had a shorter keynote on day one and doing, and then I would've done like a security day, day two. I would've dedicated the whole morning, day two keynote to security cuz their stories I think is that strong? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And I don't know the developers side of things. I think it's hard for VMware to go too much to the left. The spend on the left is very scattered. You know, if you notice the tools, developers change their tools on freaking monthly basis, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard to sustain that they on the very left side and the, the, the >>It's hard for companies like VMware to your point. And then this came up in super cloud and ins Rayme mentioned that developers drive everything, the patterns, what they like and you know, the old cliche meet them where they are. You know, honestly, this is kind of what AJ says is the right they're doing. And it's the right strategy meeting that develops where they are means give them something that they like. They like self-service they like to try stuff. They like to, they don't like it. They'll throw it away. Look at the success that comes like data, dog companies like that have that kind of offering with freemium and self-service to, to continue the wins versus jamming the tooling down their throat and selling >>Totally self-serve infrastructure for the, in a way, you know, you said they missed cloud, which they did V cloud air. And then they thought of got it. Right. It kind of did the same thing with pivotal. Right. It was almost like they forced to take pivotal, you know, by pivotal, right. For 2 billion or whatever it was. All right. Do something with it. Okay. We're gonna try to do something with it and they try to go out and compete. And now they're saying, Hey, let's just open it up. Whatever they want to use, let 'em use it. So unlike and I said this yesterday, unlike snowflake has to attract developers to build on their unique platform. Okay. I think VMware's taken a different approach saying use whatever you want to use. We're gonna help the ops guys. And that, to me, a new op >>Very sensitive, >>The new ops, the new ops guys. Yes. Yes. >>I think another challenge on the right right. Is on, on the op site is like, if, if you are cloud native, you are a new company. You just, when you're a startup, you are cloud native, right. Then it's hard for VMware to convince them to, Hey, you know, come to us and use this. Right. It's very hard. It is. They're a good play for a while. At least they, they can prolong their life by innovating along the way because of the, the skills gravity, I call it of the developers and operators actually that's their, they, they have a loyal community they have and all that stuff. And by the way, the name change for the show. I think they're trying to get out of that sort of culty kind of nature of the, their communities that they force. The communities actually can force the companies, not to do certain things certain way. And I've seen that happening. And >>Well, I think, I think they're gonna learn and they already walked back their messaging. Not that they said anything overtly, but you know, the Lori, the CMO clarified this significantly, which was, they never said that they wanted to replace VM world. Although the name change implies that. And what they re amplified after the fact is that this is gonna be a continuation of the community. And so, you know, it's nuanced, they're splitting hairs, but that's, to me walking back the, you know, the, the loyalty and, and look at let's face it. Anytime you have a loyal community, you do anything of change. People are gonna be bitching and moaning. Yeah. >>But I mean, knew, worked, explore, >>Work. It wasn't bad at all. It was not a bad look. It wasn't disastrous call. Okay. Not at all. I'm critical of the name change at first, but the graphics are amazing. They did an exceptional job on the branding. They did, did an exceptional job on how they handled the new logo, the new name, the position they, and a lot of people >>Showed >>Up. Yeah. It worked >>A busy busier than all time >>It worked. And I think they, they threaded the needle, given everything they had going on. I thought the event team did an exceptional job here. I mean, just really impressive. So hats up to the event team at, at VMware pulling off now, did they make profit? I don't know. It doesn't matter, you know, again, so much going on with Broadcom, but here being in Moscone west, we see people coming down the stairs here, Dave's sessions, you know, lot of people, a lot of buzz on the content sold out sessions. So again, that's the ecosystem. The people giving the talks, you know, the people in the V brown bag, you know, got the, the V tug. They had their meeting, you know, this week here, >>Actually the, the, the red hat, the, the integration with the red hat is another highlight of, of, they announced that, that you can run that style >>OpenShift >>And red hats, not here, >>Red hat now here, but yeah, but, but, but >>It was more developers, more, you know, >>About time. I would say, why, why did it take so long? That should >>Have happened. All right. Final question. So what's the bottom line. Give us the summary. What's your take, what's your analysis of VMware explore the event, what they did, what it means, what it's gonna mean when the event's over, what's gonna happen. >>I think VMware with the VMware Explorer have bought the time with the messaging. You know, they have promised certain things with newer announcements and now it, it, it is up to them to deliver that in a very sort of fast manner and build more hooks into other sort of platforms. Right? So that is very important. You cannot just be closed system people. Don't like those systems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. And especially when you are sitting on top of the actually four or four or more public clouds, Alibaba cloud was, they were saying that they're the only VMware is only VMware based offering in mainland China on top of the Alibaba. And they, they can go to other ones as well. So I think, especially when they're sitting on top of other cloud providers, they have to build hooks into other platforms. And if they can build a marketplace of their own, that'll be even better. I think they, >>And they've got the ecosystem for it. I mean, you saw it last night. I mean, all the, all the parties were hopping. I mean, there was, there's >>A lot of buzz. I mean, I pressed, I pressed them Dave hard. I had my little, my zingers. I wanted to push the buttons on one question that was targeted towards the answer of, are they gonna try to do much more highly competitive maneuvering, you know, get that position in the middleware. Are they gonna be more aggressive with frontal competitiveness or are they gonna take the, the strategy of open collaborative and every single data point points to collaborative totally hit Culbert. I wanna do out in the open. We're not just not, we're not one company. So I think that's the right play. If they came out and said, we're gonna be this, you know? >>Yeah. The one, the last thing, actually, the, the one last little idea I'm putting out out there since I went to the Dell world, was that there's a economics of creation of software. There's economics of operations of software. And they are very good on the operation economics of operations side of things that when I say economics, it doesn't mean money only. It also means a productivity practitioner, growth. Everything is in there. So I think these vendors who are not hyperscalers, they have to distinguish these two things and realize that they're very good on the right side economics of operations. And, and that will go a long way. Actually. I think they muddy the waters by when DevOps, DevOps, and then it's >>Just, well, I think Dave, we always we've had moments in time over the past 12 years covering VMware's annual conference, formally world now floor, where there were moments of that's pat Gelsinger, spinal speech. Yeah. And I remember he was under a siege of being fired. Yeah. There was a point in time where it was touch and go, and then everything kind of came together. That was a moment. I think we're at a moment in time here with VMware Dave, where we're gonna see what Broadcom does, because I think what hop 10 and Broadcom saw this week was an EBI, a number on the table that they know they can probably get or squeeze. And then they saw a future value and net present value of future state that you could, you gotta roll back and do the analysis saying, okay, how much is it worth all this new stuff worth? Is that gonna contribute to the EBITDA number that they want on the number? So this is gonna be a very interesting test because VMware did it, an exceptional job of laying out that they got some jewels in the oven. You >>Think about how resilient this company has been. I mean, em, you know, EMC picked them up for a song. It was 640 million or whatever it was, you know, about the public. And then you, another epic moment you'll recall. This was when Joe Tuchi was like the mafia Don up on stage. And Michael Dell was there, John Chambers with all the ecosystem CEOs and there was Tucci. And then of course, Michael Dell ends up owning this whole thing, right? I mean, when John Chambers should have owned the whole thing, I mean, it's just, it's been incredible. And then Dell uses VMware as a piggy bank to restructure its balance sheet, to pay off the EMC debt and then sells the thing for $60 billion. And now it's like, okay, we're finally free of all this stuff. Okay. Now Broadcom's gonna buy you. And, >>And if Michael Dell keeps all in stock, he'll be the largest shareholder of Broadcom and own it off. >>Well, and that's probably, you know, that's a good question is, is it's gonna, it probably a very tax efficient transaction. If he takes all stock and then he can, you know, own against it. I mean, that's, that's, >>That's what a history we're gonna leave it there. Start be great to have you Dave great analysis. Okay. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day two, winding down after the short break.

>>Good afternoon. Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone west for VMware Explorer, 2022. We're excited to welcome a new cube guest to the program. Steve Bravo joins us the SVP of edge technology at Luman. Great to have you on the program. Thank >>You very much for having me. Appreciate it. Welcome. >>Talk to us a little bit about, we've had several conversations with Luman folks over the last day and a half, but talk to us a little bit about it from your perspective, the VMware relationship with Luman. Okay. >>So it's actually, you know, we have been partners for the last 20 years. Okay. When, when VMware was really cutting its teeth in the, the virtualized space Luman, and one of its, you know, companies that acquired through time was really a, a cutting edge user of VMware technologies. And as, as time has evolved and VMware's technologies have evolved, we have grown with VMware. So much of the software they write is embedded not only within our network, but on our edge platforms and extended out to the, the, the hyperscalers as well as in the client pre. So it's an ever growing partnership and, and one that we're continually innovating and creating better outcomes for, for really the, the enterprise space. >>Talk about those enterprise customers and some of the outcomes that you are helping to deliver. What's the joint value prop that Luman and BM bring to the enterprise. >>So really stronger together, right? If you think about the strengths that Luman has, it's really our, our, our network. We call that our central nervous system, our, our, our platform. Okay. So all of our edge technologies and compute capabilities that we're able to deploy in our edge centers, data centers globally, as well as out to prem, we lay the software technologies that VMware creates not only from a hyper virtualized sense, but also through sassy through security and also out to workspace one. So it's their entire suite, we're able to support it. So with those, we create amazing technology solutions to serve the enterprise, whether it's healthcare, whether it's manufacturing, retail space, the customers are plenty in the use cases are endless. >>You talked about your history and, and at the foundation of what you do this sort of idea of a central nervous system. Yeah. The network, if we wanted to completely geek out, we could just talk about that. Yeah. For an hour. Sure. We could, but we're not going to, we were talking just, you know, before we came live, came on, live about lumens philosophy and how you're taking that foundation, that network, that central nervous system, and you have a philosophy about what you want to achieve with it. And the other things you layer on top of it. Yeah. Tell, tell us about that. Cause I thought was >>Interesting it's so it it's really all about furthering human progress with technology. Okay. We're very lucky that we have the global network that we do, but the workloads, right? The applications that make really life kind of, you know, go round in today's world lives in, in forms and factors of compute that hang off of the network. We're very lucky that we can bring that all together. So over the years, you know, every enterprise has a different need, right? They're trying to solve a problem. We want to help them solve that problem. Right. We bring our technology, our capabilities, our experience, and, and experts to really cater to and, and be that partner that can, that can build the entire stack for them to allow them to be very, very efficient in their place of competition. So >>I wanna hear, I wanna hear a concrete example of that in action. Sure. But, but I think it's interesting, not just from a, what is happening on the outside perspective, but it's also very interesting culturally yes. From a, an organizational perspective when you wake up in the morning and you have that mindset, that that's what your mission is. Sure. That's a lot different than waking up in the morning, thinking I'm going to deploy 50 terabytes of storage. Absolutely. I'm going to install nine ports and yellow cables and blue cables in my switch. That's right. Thinking you're toiling and obscurity. So everybody, everybody illumined then is waking up with this mission in mind. Yes. Which makes the day a lot easier to get through when you're, when you're having to work hard. But give me, give a, gimme a concrete example of that in, in motion. >>Sure. So it's actually, it's, it's about those outcomes and those use cases, right. I, I explain to my kids, sometimes they're like, dad tell me, you know, like tell me what you do. And if you start talking about the cables and the compute, they, their eyes gloss over. But if I say to him, you know, remember when you were sick and it was during COVID and you couldn't go to the doctor. Right. And we were able to pop open the computer and we were able to see a doctor on the screen and they had to stick your tongue out and do all the things you got care. And we were able to deliver that based on our platform, based on our network, we helped healthcare providers, you know, go remote to see patients as COVID was happening and people were going to the hospital. So that's just a real world scenario that we did for a very large network when people were dealing with it, they needed to really expand horizontally horizontally to allow care providers, to operate in different areas. And we were able to hit it outta the park. >>That's a great explanation. Did, did your kids go, wow, dad, that's >>Awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then they're like, anything else, like, is there anything else cool. And talk about sporting stadiums, lighting up, you know, a different venue where they go and they're able to from their, you know, phone order, a soda or a pretzel and, and with the different sensors from an I two, >>Now you're talking >>Yeah. Perspective like dad, you guys did this. Yes. You know, it it's, so it resonates. And those, those use cases, if you think about the building blocks, right. Whether it's the medical scenario or, or a, a smart stadium, the building blocks are very similar. Right. And we're lucky enough that you put those building blocks together in a, in a, in a prescriptive way for a specific outcome. You're able to play with strikes and you're able to get better scale and you're able to move fast because the technology industry we're in is it's. I mean, it's, it's moving at light speeds >>As the edge become grows and grows and expands and becomes more and more amorphous, how have your customer conversations changed as there's more demand for every company to become a data company, to be a security company. Right. How have they kind of elevated up the stack to the C-suite >>We've really had to just pivot to talking about that, that outcome, that, that entity, that, that enterprise is really trying to achieve. You know, if you think about, you know, the, the two examples, another one, it could be very, you know, cost driven. It could be that we need to get to market in a much more rapid fashion at a global level. How can we stamp things out quickly? So you take those outcomes, show them how the technology's going to enable it, and then you can really open the door for the return. Right. Did you get the cost savings? Yes. Did you, did you achieve that time to market for, it could be seasonality, right. Right. People don't have to pay for the full boat anymore. If, if let's say there are an online marketplace and it it's huge around the seasons, right. Around the holiday season, there's gonna be big peaks that they have there. Right. We like to be able to have them burst and, and ebb and flow. So it's all about that outcome. And getting to that, the technology pieces, you just put 'em together to accommodate. >>What, what does your go-to market strategy look like? How do you engage with customers? You know, there are, there are finite number of seats, strategic seats at a customer table. Yeah. Are you typically going in arm and arm with partners and alliances? What does that ecosystem look like? Or do you, do you have a direct sales force that engages customers? Yep. Tell, tell me about the, how the whole thing >>Works. So we have a direct sales force. Okay. And we like to play to our strengths. So we have a great Alliance partners as well. So that arm and arm absolutely happens where we are heavily connected already at C-suites. They're able to walk in and make those types of relationships and outcomes a reality. But we find that we are, we're better with partners playing to their strengths with us. Right. If we come in and show up and we have that complete stack, the software experts as well, our assets, our platform, our network, it's really a one, two punch wrap with our service capabilities at a global level that it's unbeatable. So we show up to the very best of our abilities with our alliances. And then with those more steep relationships where we've been there, where we have the relationships, there's more of a trust factor, but it's all about building trust. And we gotta, we gotta show up appropriately to do that. >>So if it's unbeatable, why do customers choose? Luin what, what's the value prop that you talk to customers about? >>So if you think about a, a COO or CIO or CTO and all of the different things, you need to purchase to make outcomes a reality, whether it's network, whether it's compute, whether it's storage, whether it's software, right? Whether it's people, it becomes very easy. If you have a partner that can do all of that for you and it's their assets, right? So we have those assets. We have those, you know, you know, our, our employees are absolutely our greatest asset. My, in my opinion, at a global level. And then we partner with the biggest software manufacturers, like, like an AWS or a, like a VMware. And we, we loaded into our, our fabric. And now we have literally the entire stack right there. It's a single hand to shake rather than I needed to go to a network provider to go to compute provider storage, security. Like you get that holistic solution approach makes it far easier. And that's a, it's a huge differentiator. And >>You, you, you said AWS. Yeah. You work with all you work with all, all the >>Har hyperscalers. Like if you think about the cloud, the, I'll say the, the big three, right? AWS, Google, and Microsoft, everything is using the cloud and the fact that we can connect to it in dynamic ways and extend that experience all the way out to our edge and on-prem and deliver the same experience again, massive differentiator. >>So from your customer's point of view, you can be agnostic. Yes. So you, you can say, well, Azure for this AWS, for that maybe run VMware in both >>100, >>Both context. Interesting stat that was brought up to Lisa and I yesterday through the VCP P program. Yep. The, the VMware cloud provider program, if you aggregate all of that cloud stuff, that's going on, that becomes the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. Yeah. So a lot of the messaging, a lot of the stuff they're talking about now has to do with that. So you, so for example, you could be involved in deploying that software defined data center stack in a variety of hyperscale class. Yes. Where appropriate for people? >>Yeah. 100%. And whether it's in the hyperscalers or in their own data center, in one of our platforms, the, the, the, the biggest differentiators, it's gonna be the same. Right? You have that partner that can do it for you no matter where the venue is. So that's really the, the coming of hybrid cloud, very agnostic. But I always say, it's the best venue. Right? You have different applications are gonna need different things, build it to suit. And when you do that, okay. And it's, and you're not pushing one way, you're taking the, the requirements you build trust. And when you build trust, you build long lasting relationships with your clients, and that's, that's what it's about. And you then make more great outcomes, a reality, >>Right. That trust is absolutely critical. It's currency really is. Yes. Talk about, you have a, a joint innovation lab with VMware. Talk a little bit about that. What is it all about? How long have you guys been doing it? What exciting things are coming from it? So >>We, we, we launched at about 18 months ago. Some, some, some amazing thinkers, you know, on our team and their team came together and it's really to, to keep pace with the market. Okay. So platforms and software evolve at a, at a, at a certain pace, right. And it's always speeding up, but creating use cases within that lab to solve a common core set of problems for maybe a specific vertical is really what it's intended to do. So when the software's ready to kind of an incubation engine that we're testing these use cases, so we can then go deploy and begin solving immediately when market ready. So it, it, it puts us ahead of the game. It gives us those at bats. So we're very comfortable deploying. And, and I would say, you know, created that muscle memory before you're going live in a, in a client environment. >>And then you can show, see, you know, and seen is believing. So there are multiple just, I'll say different, you know, IOT use cases that we're doing right now, 5g wireless, you know, untethered headsets, things of that nature. You think about some of the VI and, and AI capabilities that are emerging, whether it's digital twin, whether it's literally T sensors with packages, tracking those types of things, the use cases are endless. But the, the cool thing about it is you're testing those building blocks that I kind of keep referring to. And you're expanding the portfolio of use cases that you can solve with them. And when you start to see patterns, you now have use cases that can solve many similar needs and outcomes. So it's a, it's a huge differentiator. We're lucky to have the, the teams, the, the collective teams together, making those outcomes a reality, some of the best technologies I've ever seen. >>So the joint innovation lab formed about 18 months ago during the pandemic. What was the compelling event or was, was that part of it, or was it customer demand that, that caused you guys to go, you know what, let's come together and actually build a joint lab. >>We saw how fast things were moving. We wanted to say, okay, as something's getting ready to roll out, let's start touching it before, before it's market ready. So when it does, we can hit market and begin generating those outcomes immediately. And it, it, it took a little doing, but it came to place very quickly, like mines, right. Thinking the right way, you get a good outcome. >>So if you think about the way that a lot of consolidation has happened, yeah. Over, over recent years, you have large cloud vendors, including VMware. If you, if you accept that definition of their partner program, spanning their software to find data center stack across clouds. And then on the other side of the chasm, you have the organizations that help people take the technology and move it into the realm of outcomes. Yes. Doing actual things with the shiny toys, right. It's one thing to develop the shiny toys. It's another thing to get value out of them. Right. You guys are in that middle space, that critical space. So are the largest global systems integrators in the world. Sure. So how do you, how do you work with, or are you strictly competitive with yeah. The, you know, the, the alphabet soup of, of, yeah. Of global systems integrators, where do you fit into that space? >>So, so again, go back to those, the assets and the capabilities that we have, right? The power users of software, we have a manage and professional services organization, and it's all about, I'll say day zero day one, think of that consultative professional services approach to literally discover, define design, analyze what that outcome is, and then build and deploy. Okay. So migration, you know, transition of workloads, all tee it up for the day, two type capabilities where we are different, those assets that we're building on are hours. Okay. You know, the Accentures, the Deloittes, they're amazing, right. They're also sourcing network, they're sourcing compute, they're sourcing edge. They're sourcing things from other third providers. We are the power users of our capabilities that makes us the best at it. So that integration, we have the, the, the ways to put the, the instructions to put those Legos together better than anybody else. >>Well, so does that mean that you are best targeting at a certain market segment? Where possibly, would you seed some market to the largest of, of global systems integrators at some point? Sure. >>So, so there are certain things that they are amazing at, right. Think about some of the, the, the biggest M applications and things like that. We're power users and power deployers of SAP. That's really, the niche is high up that will go into the app stack, right? Doing the dynamics, doing different types of Oracle suites and things of that nature, let them go there. Right. But enabling applications to live on our platforms and across our networks, we play to our strengths there, leveraging software technologies like VMware, right. And the hyperscalers that's really where I don't wanna say it's their hard boundaries, but again, it's boundaries where we have strength. We will always wanna play to our strengths and be honest, right. If you're honest about your capabilities, you will win the business that you were, that you were great at. And that's what we did. >>Yeah. I, I think there's huge opportunity in that space, frankly. I think not too long ago when asked, I think a lot of people would say, Hmm, it's all gonna be consolidation. There's gonna be five standing over here, five standing over there and they're gonna work together and everyone else is gonna have to go work for those people. What we've seen is organizations like lumen yeah. Taking their historical capabilities and finding that space. Sure. It's really, really interesting to see that >>There's one thing that I'll add too. And the, you know, the, the, the way of the world is automation and orchestration. Okay. When you own the platforms, when you own the technologies that you're able to work with, you're able to evolve those capabilities and it, it, it stays your intellectual property, right. That intellectual property gives you amazing scale too. So that's one of the things that we've been lucky enough to do is we're continually working and involving that suite of orchestration and automation, that layers on top of our platform, right. Our platform for amazing things is it's that automation, orchestration is very key to making it go round. >>Speaking of amazing things, what are some of the things on the horizon for Lumin and VMware? What can customers look forward to in the coming months? >>So yesterday we actually just launched our sassy offering. So that's amazing and great job to the product teams for >>That. I, I, I, I gave one of your colleagues grief yesterday. He didn't appreciate it. I'm sure, but it's considered a party foul to let's, let's remind people what sassy stands for. >>So, so secure a access service edge, basically, all right. Software to find networking. Plus security it's really becomes a dynamic network, right. One that can live, breathe and grow and, and VMware has amazing technology yeah. That we are leveraging that's really the under or the, the overlay network for, for our network. And then we're also even scaling that out too, to, to, to include carbon black security offerings. Okay. As well as workspace one. So those are additional evolutions, some of the, the, the further enhancements with Tansu and Kubernetes. Right, right. In the portfolio as well. So as that capability expands. So, so does, so does the efforts that we have with it. >>Fantastic. Awesome. >>Steve, thank you so much for joining David. Me, I program appreciate talking about lumen. What's going on there, how you're working better together with VMware and the, and the outcomes that you're delivering for customers. We appreciate your time. Thank >>You very much greatly. Appreciate >>It. Our pleasure. Thank you for our guest and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022, Dave. And I will be right back with our next guest. So don't change the channel.

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explorer. I'm John farer, Dave LAN two days of Wal three days of Wal Walker. Two sets live events got PERA, had Metabo, senior vice president and general manager of cloud management at VMware. I got it. Right. Thanks for coming on the queue. >>You got it right. Good to >>Be here. We're all smiles. Cause we were talking about your history. You once worked at loud cloud and we were reminiscent about how cloud was before cloud was even cloud. Exactly. And how, how hard it was. >>And >>It's still hard. Complexity is a big deal. And one of the segments we want to talk to you about is the announcement around aria and you see cloud manage a big part of this direction to multi-cloud yes. To tame the complexity. And you know, we were quoting Andy Grove on the cube, let chaos rain, and then rain in the chaos. Exactly. Okay. A very famous quote in tech and the theme here is cloud chaos. Yes. And so we're starting to see signs of raining in that chaos or solving complexity. And every major inflection point has this moment where yes, it gets so hard and then it kicks up to the right and grows and link gets solved. So we feel like we're in that moment. >>I couldn't agree more. And in fact, the way I say is our, our, our tagline is we make the complexity of managing cloud invisible so that you can focus on building your business apps. And you're right about the inflection point. Every time a new technology hits, you have some point of adoption and then it becomes insanely successful. And that's when the complexity hits, then you go and tame the complexity till the next technology hits. Right? That's what happens. It's happened with virtualization. Then it has happened with cloud then with containerization and now the next one will hit. And so with aria, we said, we have to fundamentally change the problem, right? We are constantly running a race of TAing, this complexity. So very excited about this announcement with which we're doing with aria. And we said, imagine if I could have a view of my environment and all the dependencies, I don't need to know everything, just the environment and its dependencies. Then I can now start solving problems and answering questions that I was unable to before. And newer technologies can keep coming and piling on, but I'll always be able to answer that, help >>Our audience understand Ari, a great name and, and what's new. Your Heka what's new from, you know, it's not just V V realize with a new name what's what's new specifically. >>Yeah. Please. No. >>Explain some people. Well, >>There's some commentary on snarky comments, but it's a product it's not a rebrand of something >>Else. It's right. It's not explain that. It's not a, yeah. So what we did is let, let me start off. Why, why we started aria? So we said, okay, native public managing environments, native public cloud environments and cloud native applications is a different ballgame, more Emeral workloads, very large scale, highly fragmented data. So we looked at that problem rounds up and said, we need to have a management solution that solves that problem focused on native public cloud and cloud native apps and the core to solving that problem was you can't just solve it for one cloud or you can't solve it for one discipline. When I say discipline, when you think about management, what do you manage? You're managing to optimize cost. You're managing to optimize performance. You're managing to optimize your security and you're managing to speed up the delivery. That is it. And so we said, we'll have a new look to this management. And what we have done with aria is we have introduced a brand new platform, which we call aria hub powered by aria graph, which allows you to deliver this man on this management challenges, by creating a map of your environment, a near real time map of your environment. And then we are able to, once we know what an application looks like and how it maps to the infrastructure, we can go and query other subsystems to tell you, what is the cost of an application? What is the performance of an application? Creating a common understanding >>This now it's a new architecture. >>I just wanted to get that out there. It's federated >>New graph database. >>Yes. It's a new architecture federated, a platform that not only gives you a map of your environment, but it federates into other sources to pull that data together. Right now, one of the data sources that it federates into is of course also we realize, yeah, yeah. Cloud health, >>You plug and >>Cloud observability. You plug everything into it. Yeah. And as part of the announcement, we didn't just announce a platform. We also announced a set of crosscutting solutions cuz we said, okay, what is the power of the platform? The big thing is it removes the swivel share management. It allows you to answer questions you couldn't answer before. And so >>Swivel share meaning going from one app to another one app logging in exactly >>Credentials in credentials. And you don't have a common understanding of app across those. So now you hire people who do integration buses, right? All kinds of cloud. So the three new end to end solutions we are announcing also in, along with the platform, these are brand new. One is something called aria guardrails. So when I have development environments today, for example, my, I do development on public cloud as well as private cloud. I have thousands of accounts, each one with its own security rules, each one with its own policies. After I initially deploy the account, it becomes a nightmare to manage that. So what aria guardrails allows you to do is set up these multi-cloud environments with the right policies. And not only is it about one time provisioning, but it is maintaining them on >>A run basis. And those credentials are also risk. Cuz you have a password on the dark web, that's exposed on one and you've got to change it. And, and there's so many things going on exactly on security, which brings me up to the point of, you know, we were talking, we're gonna see Tom later on security. We heard earlier, why wasn't security in the keynote? Oh, it's table stakes. That's what Z has said. But we're like, okay, I get that. So let's just say that security is table stakes. There's a big trend towards security as a state of something at a, at a given time. And that CSOs and CSOs are going to defensible. Yes. Meaning being defensible all the time. Yes. As an ongoing thing, which is not just running a pen test once a week. Yes. Like multiple testing, real testing. Not simulation. Yes. To be secure. Yes. So it's not about being secure. It's about having security, but defense ability is the action now not yeah. Yeah. >>Can >>You does that, how does that fit into this? Because this seems to like be in this wheelhouse of management. >>No, I think you're bringing a very important point, which is the security as a post. The fact item is no longer. Right? Right. You want to bake in security. This is a shift left of security that we talk about when you're building an application and you are deploying code in your test, you wanna say, Hey, what is the security? Is it secure? Is it meeting my guardrail? Then when you deploy it from an operations perspective, also it is a security concern. It's not just a security team's concern now. So is my configuration right? Is my configuration secure? Has, is it drifting? It's never a snapshot in time. It's constantly, you have to look at it. Is it drifting? And that is exactly what we are doing also with aria. So >>That's part of the solution you're talking about in the guardrails within being >>Able to maintain the secure configuration right now, as I said, there's always a security discipline. Yeah. Which is you are done by security teams, but you also want operations teams and development teams to enforce security in their respective practices. And that's what Ari allows you to do. >>So the question on multi-cloud comes in, okay. So this is all good. By the way, we love that shift left again, very developer. And I would argue actually we are argue on the cube. That dev ops is the development environment for cloud native. So the it operational once called ops is now in dev just saying he is, and then data ops and security ops are now the new it because that's where the hard problems are. So how do you look at the data side of it as well as security in your view of multi-cloud because you know, hybrid cloud, I can see the steady state between, you know, on premises and cloud, if it's operating cloudlike but now you're starting to look at spanning clouds. Yes. Yes. Not full spanning workloads. That's not there yet, but certainly people have multiple clouds. Yeah. But when you data seems to be the first thing spanning not necessarily the app itself, but how do you guys view that multi-cloud aspect of what you're managing? I mean, how you look at that? >>I think there are different angles to it. Right? You can look at it from the data angle and you look at it on how the, how protected a data is for us. When you look at management discipline, it is all from the perspective of configurations. Okay. If I have configured my environment correctly, then you should not be able to do something that destroys or the data. Right. So getting the configuration right. When you're developing that, getting the configuration right. When you're provisioning the app and then getting the configuration, right. Even when you're doing day two and ongoing operations, that is what we bring to the table. And to some extent, that aria visibility, that I was talking about an Ary graph, a near real time view of the configuration state and its dependencies is very critical. So now I can ask questions. Is there a misconfiguration, by the way, the answer is yes, they, yeah. >>That is a lot by the way, too, right? Yeah. >>Which, which exposes me. And then you can say, Hey, is there user activity associated with that misconfigured? Good object. Now suddenly you have go, go to a red alert. So not only something misconfigured, but there is user activity associated with the misconfigured data. You know, this is something that I have. This >>Is where AI sings beautifully because beautifully, once you have the configuration baseline done, yes. It's like securing the S3 bucket, which is like a knee has to be a like brushing your teeth. It's gotta be a habit. Exactly. It's like, you just don't even think about, you just don't leave an S3 bucket. >>It's gotta be simplified because you're, we're asking the devs now to be security pros, correct. Secure the run time, secure the paths, you know, secure the containers. And so they need help. This is not what they wake up in the morning passionate about. Right. >>But that is where the guardrails comes in. Totally. Yeah. So a a developer, why should they care? They should just say, look, I'm developing for the credit card industry. I need a PCI compliant environment. And then let us take care of defining that environment, deploying that environment, managing that environment on an ongoing basis, they should be building code. Yeah. Right. But there is a change also, which is in the past, these were like two different islands and two different views with aria graft. We also have created this unified API that a developer could query or an ops could query to create a common understanding of the environment. So you're not looking at, you know, the elephant won the trunk and the other one, the tail you're looking at it in a common way. >>Can you talk about the collaboration between tan zoo and aria portfolios? Because obviously the VMware customers are investing in tan zoo. A lot of stuff's coming outta the oven. We heard some Dave heard some stuff from Chris Wolf and he's gonna come on tomorrow. And Raghu was hinting at some other stuff. That's not yet public, but you know, this things happening, >>Things happening, lot of >>Things, you know, you know, announcements happened years ago last year. Now some fruit's coming off the tree, this is a hot product aria. It makes a lot of sense for the customers. Where's the cloud native stuff, kicking, connecting in. What's the give us the overview what's connection >>Is lots and lots of connections. So you have a beautiful Kubernetes environment and a cloud native platform. You have accelerated app development. Now you're building more apps, more microservices based apps, more fragmented data, more information. So think of aria as an envelope around all of this. So wherever you are, whether you are building an application, deploying an application, managing an application, retiring an application through that life cycle, we can bring that management. So what we are doing with Tansu is with the platform, develop and platform. Now we can hook in management with a common perspective earlier in the life cycle. I don't have to wait for it to go to production to start saying, is it secure? Is it configured? How is it performing? What is my cost trade off as a developer, I've decided to, to fix a latency issue, I'm gonna add a new region or I'm gonna scale out a particular tier. Do I know how much it'll cost me? Can I give you that right at your fingertips, potentially even within the development platform and within the ID, that's the power, right? So bringing Ary, >>Not a lot of heavy lifting on the develop. So it's pretty much almost like a query to a database or >>As simple API that they can just query as part of their development process. Yeah. So by bringing aria and Tansu and really aria en developing Tansu right. You're able to bring that power >>Developer. I just always smile because you, I remember we, we have a group called the cloud. AATI the early OG found cloud. >>AATI >>The early days of cloud. When we were talking about infrastructure as code yes. Way back when, and finally it's actually happening. So what you're describing is infrastructure's code because now there's more complexity happening under the hard and top and you know, service are being turned on and off automatically. Yes. And sometimes you might not even know what's going on. Exactly. If you have guard rail, >>But you have to discover the state, know something has turned on, understand the implication and then synthesize, synthesize it down to the insight for the user. >>You know, a lot of people have been complaining about other older companies. Like Splunks the world who have great logging technology for gen one cloud, but now these new logging logging becomes a problem. Can you talk about how you guys are handling that? Give confidence or yeah. Explain that there's everything's gonna be logged properly. Yeah. >>So, so really look, there are three disciplines that we have management. Discipl like, ultimately there are thousands of names, but it boils down to you're managing the cost. You're managing the security, you're managing the performance of your applications. That is it. Right. So what we found is when you think of these disciplines as siloed load solutions, you can't ask a simple question as what is my cost performance trade off. You can't ask a simple question as, Hey, I'm improving performance. How, what is the implication of security? And that's when you start building complex solutions that say, okay, let me collect log from here. Let me collect this from here. Then let me correlate and normalize an application definition and tell you something and then put it in a spreadsheet and put it in a spreadsheet finally for manual work. Exactly. So one of the pillars is about managing performance. >>We have very powerful capabilities today in our portfolio. Tansu observability, which is part of aria portfolio. We realize log, which is part of aria portfolio, networks, insights, and operations. So with the common, when you, when you have a common language, we have a common language. We understand each other. Similarly with Ary graph and aria hub, we have creating this common language. So once we create a common language, all the various observability and log solutions have a meaning. They have relevance. And so we are able to take the noise from all these systems and synthesize it down to what we call business insights. And that's what is one of the big announcement as part of aria, awesome take data, which we have lots of and convert it to information. >>Give us the bumper sticker on why VMware. >>Well, I I'll tell you, when you talk about various public clouds, each public cloud has their native solutions. I've got control tower, I've got cloud wash, cloud trail, different solutions, and some of the hyperscalers are also expanding their solutions to other cloud. I think VMware in a way, from a multi-cloud perspective, we are in a wonderfully neutral position. Not only do we have a wealth of technology and assets that we can bring to the game, but we can also do it evenly across all clouds. So, so look at something like cost. Do you trust one of the hyperscalers to tell you that what is the cost comparison between them and another hyperscaler? That is where the VMware value comes in? >>I think people just try to hear what the cost of one cloud. Exactly, exactly. That is often people make money doing that is a job. No, >>No, definitely. Even a single cloud. What is the cost? >>It's a cloud economist out there and we know who he is. Corey Corey, a friend of the cube. He does it for his living. So help people figure out their bill. Exactly. Just on one cloud. >>Exactly. It's one cloud. So being able, we have the unique position where, and the right sets of technologies and experiences to bring that solution to bear across multicloud. Right. Great. >>What's your vision real quick. One minute left. What's your vision for the group? What are you investing in? What's your goals? What are you trying to do? Ask you the products. New. Gonna roll that out. What's what's the plan. I >>Really, again, the biggest one, the, the, the tagline I talked about, right. I, I, I want to, you know, I'm telling customers, managing stuff is boring. Don't waste your time on it. Let us take care of it. Right? So make the cloud complexity invisible so that you can focus on building your applications and everything that we do in the business unit is targeted towards that one goal. It is not about doing more features, more capabilities. It's are you solving customers questions? And we start from question down, >>Be thank you for spending your valuable time here in the cube, explaining the new news. Appreciate it. All right. Get lunch. After the short breaks, stay more with the cube live here in San Francisco for VMware Explorer, 22. I'm John that's. Dave. >>Thank you.