 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World Live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, Keith Townsend, and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Varun Chawbra, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Dell EMC Storage and Data Production. Hey Varun. Hi, thank you for having me. Oh, our pleasure. So, the theme of, first Dell Technologies World, huge, 14,000 people. Absolutely. 5,000 plus partners here make it real. What does that mean? What are you helping customers make real as it relates to all these different transformational initiatives? Digital, IT, workforce, security. So, you know, I'm a product marketer by trade, so we throw around a lot of buzzwords, right? We've been guilty of that. But one of the things that I've observed over the last year or so is every customer that we speak to, they're really thinking about digital transformation. And you know, it could have different words, but really what it means is the economy is getting increasingly digitized, right? And when you have something getting increasingly digitized, it leaves a digital marker. Every activity leaves a digital marker. And in other words, that's basically data, right? What is data but a digital marker? And it's just fascinating. What customers that we talk to, they're very aware that there's, because of all this activity that they're able to track and draw insights out of, if they don't do that, their competitors might do it, right? Or you could have upstarts coming up and disrupting a particular business model. And in the media, we often hear a lot about, you know, Netflix, Tesla, and of course those are great examples, but we see this in every industry, right? Whether it's genomics, healthcare and media and entertainment, it's happening everywhere, whether it's companies reinventing themselves to trying to disrupt their own business models to stay irrelevant, or new startups coming in and trying to say, how can we do this differently? So let's talk about the impact of digital transformation on storage and data protection. What data is, the new oil, all the buzzwords we want to throw into that. You as a marketer, you have to translate into what that means from a technology perspective. For the boots on the ground, what does digital transformation mean to the store, people concerned with storage and data? Absolutely. It basically means data. What is underpinning, a lot of times we talk to customers, they'll say, oh, I have big data initiatives, right? Because they're trying to, to make digital transformation real, you need to pull out insights from the data. So it's big data, IOT, pick your buzzword, ML, AI. But if you take a step back, all of these initiatives, they're basically dependent on data. So you can't run an ML or AI algorithm without data. People talk about neural networks. Neural networks are networks of data. And what we find with customers is that, they know that they have a lot of data, but they run into a lot of challenges to them. So there's really three big challenges. One is, how do we, you could have data sitting in one system, you could have data sitting in another system, it's in silos. And if you have data locked in silos, you can't correlate them. If you can't correlate them, you really can't run analytics, right? The magic of insights comes out when you're correlating disparate data. That's one problem. Now, if you have everything in one single unified data lake, let's say you don't have silos, then there's just the volume of data that's growing. And it's just, it's incredible. It's not uncommon for our customers to tell us that they're seeing 30, 40, 50% year over year growth in their data. I mean, if you think about it, that's, you're talking exponential growth in a few years, right? So how do you, how do you harness all that growth? How do you keep it on your systems of record without, you know, going bankrupt? Because often it is a question of just managing all that data growth. Now let's say that's challenge number two. Let's say you've done that as well. And you need to be able to draw insights out of it, right? Just because you have data sitting somewhere, doesn't mean that you're going to be able to pull out analytics. Doesn't mean that your processes and systems are really organized with it. All of this is basic, is this is really what we help try to do with customers. I mean, we have products like Isilon and ECS that are at the forefront of unstructured data, which is really 80% of the data today is unstructured. You know, we help create unified data lakes for our customers because they don't have data sitting in silos. And then these platforms are scaled up platforms so they scale very cost effectively. And then they all support analytics natively. So you can run big data analysis on the storage platform itself. You mentioned insights and that's, you know, actionable insights, another marketing buzzword there. But it's imperative for an organization to be able to have a foundation to be able to act on those insights. So you talk about, you know, people say data, more buzzwords, the new oil. Really kind of think of it as a former biologist as a... Because you know, companies that do it well, that transform well, are able to apply data to different multiple use cases at the same time. Combine it, recombine it. And but then they also need to have this agile infrastructure to be able to take advantage of that, be able to adapt their software, use things like sensors and smart devices that are telling them how customers are interacting with products and services and deliver something that's differentiated. So as Dell EMC is doing that yourselves, is there any point that pops to mind that this is a great hallmark of digital transformation? Yeah, yeah. And you know, to just talk about what you, to extend what you said, we actually are starting to call data a capital asset. You know, it's not very different from the other things that you have in your balance sheet. They're just isn't a scientific method or an agreed upon method to really value it yet. But I am sure that 10 years from now, or maybe earlier, just like we have stock exchanges, you could probably have data exchanges, right? Where you have data being traded, it's monetized, it's valued. So, you know, a classic example of what you said is, we had a customer come in that owns a sports franchise, a very popular sports franchise in the United States. They also own their own arenas, right? So they have Bluetooth sensors, 80 Bluetooth sensors sitting all over their stadium. They have loyalty apps for their customers. When they come in, they open the app up, you know, with permissions, it connects to the Bluetooth sensors. And now, to your point about the data unlocking or catalyzing different, the sheer number of things that can be done with that data to help improve the experience, both for the viewer, but also for the businesses that support, you know, the restaurants that are in the, the vendors that are in the arena as well, is just mind-boggling. So for example, you can now, these people can now track when someone's walking, whether they're walking towards, let's say a barbecue joint or vendor in the arena. And if they're standing there first, they actually know if they're standing or if they're just walking by. And if they're standing, they have digital signage close to, you know, these places where they can serve up ads and say, hey, here's a discount, right? Because you're probably looking at the barbecue joint and thinking, do I really want to eat this? Or maybe I should, do I mind the mood for ribs today? And then presto, you get an ad next to you saying, hey, we have a two for one or something, right? And so that's great from a commerce perspective, but then also for like the restroom lines. So if you know that a lot of people are congregated in one restroom, you can actually say, hey, like direct people towards other areas, right? And then beer kegs, like they have sensors under their beer kegs that are tracking when a beer keg is almost empty. All right, you're going to send a signal to the kitchen, you're going to roll out a beer keg before it gets over, right? Think about how that reduces wait times while you're replacing beer kegs. And so it's all one set of data enabling so many different things for just improving experience. Wherever this places, let's go. Yeah, this sounds like a cool place. So let's kind of blow out a section of your title. That's deceptive, I think, in a sense. To protect that access. But data protection has now become, I think, a catch-all for much more than just data protection. These products backing data protection are all not just about protecting data, but adding mobility to data. Can you talk about the need to be able to take data and move it from where it's ingested to where it can be further crunched from a... Yes, absolutely. Mr. Keene learning perspective? That's a great point, Keith. So we talk about data originating in different sources, the edge, the core, or the cloud. And really that mobility is super critical. If you just expand out a little bit more and just think about the Dell Technologies portfolio, we have data that's being generated on the edge with sensors and devices. With the advent of sort of the edge computing, you're beginning to see a lot more new computing models. So now you have this notion of the fog. And so you have many data centers that are collecting data. You could be running some real-time analytics on there. High-level real-time analytics to make decisions about let's say you're in a factory. You could have a fog data center in a factory that's, or you could call it the edge as well, basically detecting defects in a particular spare part, right? And then you have real-time analytics going on there. But then all of that data also gets pushed into a central data center where you're running machine learning algorithms and you're training your real-time analytics systems to be that much more effective, right? To be that much more accurate. And in these situations, like every single point decimal makes a huge difference in a company's bottom or top line. So yes, I think data mobility from the edge to the core to the cloud or the fog, whatever you want to call it, is very, very critical. And different use cases in different areas are driving that mobility. I'd love to understand what some of the differentiators are. What, you know, we're at Dell Technologies World, the first one indicative of the absorption of the EMC Federation companies within Dell. What differentiates what you're delivering and helping customers achieve in your competition? Yeah, I mean, my specific areas of expertise are basically ISOLAW and ECS, our file storage platform and object storage platform. And really, there are three things that differentiate us. We are really focused on creating, eliminating silos. So unifying everything into one data lake, whether it's in the edge, the core or the cloud, we want to provide a common data lake experience for our apps and for our users. The second thing is we're hyper focused on providing cost-effective scaling mechanisms. So if you scale, you're going to be able to handle that data in a much more cost-effective manner than if you have a product that's not scaled out, for example. And the third thing that we do is that's really different is that we support inline analytics on the storage platform itself. If you think about a large model, a large part of the model for analytics today is directed at storage. And I think that's going to continue to have a large place to play. But shared storage is becoming increasingly a viable option for running analytics without having to moving it somewhere, running the analytics on it and moving it back. It's just more efficient. We just basically run analytics on it. Just really those three things that we think differentiate us from our competition. So we can't have a conversation about storage and data without talking about cloud. So you talk about the cloud strategy that integrates with your product portfolio. Absolutely. You know, as Michael said in the keynote yesterday, cloud is not a destination, it's a model, right? And really what we find is every customer has their own cloud roadmap, right? So as a vendor, it doesn't behoove us to say we have this one-size-fits-all solution for you. It's really incumbent upon us to really meet the customer where they are. So whether it's with Isilon or with ECS, we have a host of different consumption models. So you could have, you could run it as an appliance from us, right, buy it from us. You could run, for example, ECS as a software-defined platform. So if you're running, if you want to be really agile and you want to have servers that are running industry standard servers versus proprietary hardware, we can do that as well. And then as we start thinking about the public cloud, we just announced, actually Michael announced yesterday that we're now offering Isilon with Google Cloud. So you could actually run Isilon systems, co-located with your Google compute clusters. So all the wealth of the analytics capabilities that Google has and then the compute capabilities that they have, you now don't have to compromise in terms of your file storage platform. You can actually run enterprise-ready scale, scalable file system in the Google, or co-located with the Google cluster as well. So that's a new, I guess that's a new model that we're looking at with customers because customers are telling us they love our products. On-premises, there is a place for that, but they also want to be able to, if they're making bets on some of the big cloud providers, they want to be able to consume our products and take advantage of the features that they have on-premises in the cloud as well. So we're definitely trying to meet customers where they are in the cloud. And last question as we wrap up here, 5,000 channel partners, technology partners that are here. What are you hearing from the channel as oftentimes the channel partners are at the forefront? We're talking with customers about a digital transformation strategy. What's some of the feedback from the channel then? The first thing that I noticed as a product marketer, our partners always keep us honest. And the minute they hear a buzzword, you see their face frown, right? But I will tell you that in my meetings this year, anytime I talk about digital transformation, they are looking at us with rapid attention because they are validating to us that their customers, just like ours, are in our customers together. This is top of mind for them, right? And the other thing that I'm hearing from partners a lot is this notion that data actually has value, that it's an asset that customers are starting to value. It's honestly a great time to be in the tech space, great time to be in the storage space because we're able to show customers what, how we can help transform their business. I mean, five or six years ago to be able to say that about a storage platform was probably marketing speed, right, but it's real right now. And thanks so much for stopping by sharing what's new. And as we've kind of talked about, digital transformation isn't a buzzword, it's not a nice to have, it's a mandatory. So thanks for your time and clarifying things. It was very, very informative. And thanks for dealing with this loud music show that's going on here. We want to thank you for continuing to watch the queue. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend Live from Dell Technologies World 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.