 Hello, and welcome to this analyst brief where we're discussing how Dell is attempting to elevate your multi-cloud experience with Dell Apex Navigator and initiate what Dell calls multi-cloud by design. Dave Vellante and Rob Strecci and I will unpack what the latest Dell announcements mean to customers. First, let's take a reminder look at cloud usage, some data from ETR, the movement between public and private cloud continues. But looking at the data, we're seeing the market become much more balanced. This chart from enterprise technology research shows the percent of usage of public clouds relative to private clouds, specifically within the S&P 500, which represents a very large portion of IT spend and is generally considered a bellwether. The data shows about 43% usage of public cloud today growing to 55% by January, 2026. And note that the expected 2026 figure is down from 10 months ago, implying that the market is reaching, let's call it a more balanced state, maybe not quite an equilibrium, but many more workloads are where they belong is the point there. And steep momentum to migrate off-prem has generally stabilized. And the cloud growth is coming from new workloads on existing cloud platforms versus a lift and shift approach. And Rob, what do you make of this data? Yeah, I think that it's really clear that that equilibrium is being balanced and people are not just going to cloud first, but they're going to cloud when right or doing it right. And I think a big piece of that is, hey, we want to make sure that we put new workloads where they deserve to be. We always talk about AI and you bring it to AI to the data or you're bringing data to the AI. And I think people are trying to make a balance of that now as well. All right, now I recently talked to Shannon Champion of Dell Technologies and discussed the Apex cloud platform family and the universal storage layer. Then Rob spoke with Maggie Kapoor and Allison Langen from Dell about the SaaS control plane that is Apex Navigator for multi-cloud. Dell recently announced the expansion of Apex storage for public cloud with the availability of Apex Navigator. Rob, what are the salient points here, the customer requirements that people should know about? Yeah, I think what Dell is really doing a good job is really working backwards from that customer and understanding that TCO is really king right now and understanding cloud is an operating model, not just a place. So what they're looking at is how do you bring that with centralized management and seamless integration, seamless data mobility, also being able to bring data from on-prem up into the cloud and vice versa and really trying to bring those things to, I guess you could say to fruition through what they were talking about with the Dell Apex cloud for public storage for public cloud and this Dell Navigator for multi-cloud which really tries to bring that all together. So how do you think specifically this addresses the customer requirements and do you think it changes customer requirements? In other words, will it force them to kind of rethink what's capable with multi-cloud? Yeah, I think really it is a big piece of it because when we talk about it, multi-cloud is here to stay. I mean, people are not using just one cloud, they never have been, but they're also looking for a platform and operating system that brings them across all of those clouds, both on-prem, in-colow and out in those public clouds. And I think a big piece of it is really how do you do that securely? So they're looking at it from a security perspective, they're looking at it from an automation perspective, they're really looking at it from a management perspective as well. And then kind of on the fourth is you've got to be able to manage and monitor everything across all of those different domains, which is huge. And kind of the fifth piece, and really I think we've talked about it because and they talk about it a lot is the data mobility aspect of it. Customers are really struggling with when do you get to that next level? And I think really people are looking at how do they extend their on-premises to the cloud and to other locations and making sure that they're using the same stack. And really that move is, how do I bring these critical applications that have some unique performance characteristics? Because a lot of things were either cloud native by design but then we had the lift and shift and some things moved back to be reformatted not repatriated but necessarily but brought back to be reformulated. I think that's been a big piece of it. And then integrating with those cloud services is a big piece of it as well. When you start to look at, hey, I'm bringing my data up to the cloud because they have some unique cloud services I want to use. I really think that that's a key for where Dell is building this platform, that unified storage layer with this SaaS delivered Dell Navigator to help with customers managing what they have existing. And I think what was interesting when we talked to them was that also it's about using it smartly from a cost perspective. And how do you really lower those costs? And a big piece of that was, how do you use Dell credits that you have with a contract with them or how do you use your AWS credits? How do you work with partners and do that? And that's a big piece of what they're trying to bring to service. I also wonder, Rob, how generative AI is going to affect this whole multi-cloud play because if you think about the early days or even recent days of cloud prior to, you know, Gen AI, it was really, okay, I got AWS to get the best cloud infrastructure. I'm going to keep stuff on-prem, my crown jewels on-prem. I'm going to use Azure for my collaboration. You know, I might like to use BigQuery for some of my data. And they were generally sort of stovepipe environments. Now when you think about what we've done with the power law of Gen AI, which basically says there's going to be a lot of specific domain-specific AI, much of that could be on-prem. There's also a lot of different optionality in clouds, Azure obviously with open AI, AWS with bedrock, you've got Google with Gemini, you've got Lama 2 from Meta. I don't know if you saw, Stanford just came out with the Gen AI or LLM transparency index, which showed a very wide disparity in the transparency around each of the LLM. So I would think the customers are actually going to be looking to do more workload movement, cloud mobility, where each of the clouds is not so much a stovepipe, but they've got capabilities that they want to operate on coherent datasets. What do you think about that? Yeah, 100%. And I think that also adds to the TCO aspect of it, which Dell went and did a really big story, did an early study with some early adopters of Navigator and the Unified platform and saw that 87% reduction in costs over native cloud storage, for instance. And I think when you start to look at that, what does Gen AI do? It consumes tons and tons of data. And I think that's why people are looking at, how do I put the right data in the right place with the right AI to really get leverage? So if I'm doing my financial data, I want to keep it secure. I want it to be able to be mobile between places that it's supposed to be, have that zero trust security around it, and really then use that for maybe doing my 10Ks and building those types of, like you said, specific applications or SLMs, as we've been kind of joking about, as segmented or small language models. And I think that's key. And I think, like you said, the transparency is key because it is the crown jewels of an organization. It is their data. And in fact, it's the intellectual property of that company. All right, Rob, thank you. And thank you for watching this analyst brief. We'll see you next time on theCUBE.