 We just heard from my colleague Dave Vellante and Sudhir Srinivasan from Dell on the overview of Apex Cloud Platform. I'm Rob Streche, Analyst with theCUBE Research, and today we're going to talk to some people from Dell and Red Hat about a joint cloud offering. I'm so excited to welcome back to theCUBE Caitlin Gordon, Vice President, Product Management from Multicloud and DevOps at Dell and Chris Morgan, Senior Director of Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Yeah. This is fun because I think, again, when I look at cloud and I look at hybrid and I look at going different places, I really do think, you know, Red Hat and Dell, these are two of the major brands that are pretty much everywhere in here. So Chris and Caitlin, you know, today is really exciting because you're here to announce the Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. And I think, again, this is one of those that is super exciting in the fact that, you know, you can take your applications that you've containerized and such multiple different places. So Caitlin, can you share with us what brought you to this partner together and bringing this to market? Yeah. It is definitely an exciting day for us and our customers for a long time have continued to struggle with how do they get better agility, how do they get more flexibility in where they build, where they deploy their applications. Now that was for a number of years, virtualization, increasingly that's containerized workloads. Gardener predicts that 95% of enterprises are going to have containers deployed in production by 2028, which is not that far away. And really for customers, that means it's a combination of public cloud and on-prem. And we knew that we really wanted to help simplify that and experience on-prem. And there was clearly only one partner to work with to do that. And that was Red Hat. And that was really why it was a natural combination of Dell to simplify that experience. Red Hat is the leader of container orchestration on-prem to come together to bring this to our customers. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure out who the other 2% is that's not going to have containers deployed in production because I haven't talked to a customer who isn't building in microservices and containers. So Chris, why don't you share your thoughts? You don't have to share them particularly on Caitlyn, but I'm not sure you're offering here and what are you bringing? So for me, the journey started, I guess, 18 plus months ago. And I'll be honest with you when we were first asked, it's like Dell again. But now it's just what's been really exciting are the changes. This is about creating an experience as Caitlyn mentioned before, you know, we've had a long history with Dell where it's been about putting our operating system on a piece of metal. And this is really about now taking a lot of that and bringing it together. I mean, in many ways, you know, we've been about hybrid for a long time at Red Hat. And so this is really an extension of that we're hybrids becoming more about the experience than just a consistent technology. Yeah. And I think that that is the key is doing it together and being very integrated because that's where, you know, platform engineering needs to be easier and things of that nature. So let's kind of get into Apex Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift. And I will get it right most of this time, but you know, and Caitlyn, why don't you kick us off here and kind of tell us how this platform is different and what's special about it? Yeah. This partnership is not new, but the level of this partnership is what is new. This is truly a jointly engineered, Chris and I talk a lot because it is truly jointly engineered and it's a turnkey appliance that we have built truly to simplify the experience. But some there's a lot of really unique things about this platform, you know, a lot of what we talk about now is that this is so unique that we're having to really explain the basics of it to a lot of people because it is so unique with nothing and either of us have ever done before. A couple pieces of that, right? It's optimized for bare metal, which we'll dig into later, hopefully. That alone is very different. We've unified the application and the data plant, so you really collapse that down and you really simplify the whole stack and it brings together the compute, the storage, the container orchestration, all in one turnkey experience. I had to double check these numbers for my marketing team, but we have simplified the management and reduced the management tasks by 98%. So there's like another 2% left of something left that you still have to do. That's a popular number today. I think it's a click that you still have to do. I think you calculated it wrong. I may have to double check it, so I think it's right. I think you calculated it wrong. The simplicity, the level of simplicity that we're bringing here and the optimizations on bare metal is just extremely unique. I would add it is unique, but it's also unexpected. We here, as I'm sure all of you here, oh, we're going to the public cloud. I don't know if I could say, but it's just making bare metal sexy again in some ways. It never went away, but I think as we talked about, VMs are considered legacy now. This is really a way, if you want to modernize the infrastructure, it's a way you bring your containers and your VMs and gosh, even other clusters together on one control plane. And that, to me, is really what makes it a unique offering for those customers that are looking to upgrade their infrastructure, but keep some things the same. I mean, we all still have mainframes, right? And those were supposed to go away in the mid-90s. And so I think it's the same that we're going to see here, too. Yeah, well, it's funny because I also know that you can run OpenShift on a mainframe, which is another funny thing. I think a lot of it is about the customers and why they should care, right? I mean, customers, to our discussion already, are really leaning into microservices. And we were talking, and I think on average, the customers have, in their cloud-native applications, they have something like 18 to 20 different containers are part of applications. So again, that manageability and ease of use and that integration from the bare metal has to be there. So, Caitlin, why should customers really care about and how are they going to benefit from this collaboration? Well, the first thing is that that bare metal piece is so important. We've talked about it. That's a cost to complexity reduction. It's also a performance increase for your workloads because you really have removed that layer, and it actually gives you security benefits as well because you've really reduced the attack surface. So that piece of this is really, really unique. And then what we've built together is just something that we call it a turnkey appliance, but it's really a combination of the power of Red Hat software, the power of Dell software and the power of the Dell infrastructure really coming together to provide that unique experience to our customers. Yeah. To me, it is really about kind of the build, deploy, run aspect of it for cloud native applications. I think that to me, making platform engineering kind of easier because let's be real, platform engineering is the new IT and you can put whatever name on it, but people have to come up to speak. And we will put a new name on it. We will. And it's already happened. And I'm not surprised it's not an acronym. But how does this really, when we start with you, Chris, how does this really meet the flexibility that customers need? Because again, this isn't new, but it's new in how you make it easy for them, right? So we are, as you mentioned, there's a modernization happen. When we first did all this, it was about modernizing the apps themselves when you go to containers. And to your point, the platform engineering role continue to evolve. It's like, well, they need the infrastructure in order to support that. And when we talk about the simplicity and things that Caitlyn was mentioning, to me, there's a couple of personas there. There is that platform engineer and admin. They're going to love this. Like, literally, it's their utopia. I can't even begin to tell you it's ridiculous. And then on top of that, though, if you're a developer, if you're used to working with OpenShift for your apps and all the different things we have, it's that same experience wherever you've been doing it before, except now it's nicely integrated to a point where even Dell support is a part of this appliance. So right within the console, within the OpenShift console, there's this phone home capability, which I absolutely love myself because we don't even do that anywhere. This is just absolutely fantastic. And so what's in it for the customers is that simplicity that, you know, you've got a best of breed. You know, this is, to me, mimics offerings that Red Hat has with some of the hyperscalers and that level of partnership. And I just think the customers would just benefit greatly from all of it. Yeah, what about, what are you seeing? Yeah, I mean, I got geeked out on the infrastructure side like a little bit because I have to, you know, it starts at day one. And the deployment time, when you look at how quickly you get to deploy this, it's actually in a OpenShift and bare metal. It can take, you know, up to 10 days to deploy that and kind of a standard build-it-yourself approach. What we've been able to do here is reduce that down to hours. So a 90% reduction in deployment time, which is really powerful because that means you can be up and running, building your applications faster and deploying them faster. That means you get to really invest in your business. I mean, that's very powerful. But of course, that happened, you know, deployment happens once. So we're proud of that. But it's really, it's that day two operations benefit that we talk about that, yes, it's fully integrated into the experience, right? All a single line of support, but some of this kind of magic from the Dell side is what we call the Apex Cloud Platform Foundation software. And it really welds that whole experience together. And it does things like a continuously validated state all the way from the BIOS to the firmware all the way up to OpenShift to make sure that that entire stack is validated to work together. We ensure that when you do an upgrade, it's a seamless one-click upgrade, and you have the peace of mind that we've worked together to make sure that whole stack works. So it's easy to get up and running. It's easy to manage day to day. So then focus your energy on then using that platform to actually build those applications. Well, I'm so glad you brought that up, though, because I want to even double click further on that day, too. That's really what this is about. So in the Kubernetes community in general, I don't care what distribution it is, OpenShift or otherwise, upgrades are one of the main complaints. And so what's really beautiful about this is you're not upgrading OpenShift, right? You're upgrading the Apex platform. So maybe the next release might have an OpenShift upgrade in it, it might have another component in it. But you don't worry about that as the administrator, right? We're building the magic as it were inside to allow that kind of seamless upgrade experience. Yeah, I love the outsourcing the S-bomb to Dell, basically helping with the OpenShift stuff. Because to your point, when I talk to people like, you know, CloudNativeCon, KubeCon or wherever, or just generally at any of these other events, that is one of their big things about, like you said, being close to being hyperscaler. How do you have a true cloud platform that takes away all of that worry for you and really makes it simple? Because that has to be there, because people are so used to it. Yeah, well, that is actually was the mission statement that was given to me by the Red Hat CEO 18 months ago. He says, Chris, I want to slide in a pizza box and I want it to boot up and say, are you going to join an existing cluster or a new cluster? And that should be the experience. And we're pretty close right now with this appliance, I have to say. And everybody loves pizza boxes, I mean, and pizza for that matter. It's the best pizza box in the industry. Absolutely, they have whites. Yeah, exactly. But so let me kind of shift gears a little bit because I think we'll get kicked off the interwebs if we don't talk about AI. And, you know, pretty I'm pretty sure that, you know, for many companies, AI, and the hype around it, and there's some reality, we even have our own AI and we have our own LLM and stuff like that. But I mean, who doesn't who doesn't you don't you're not cool, you got to be one of the cool people now. And I know, you know, both companies have been investing heavily in AI. So how are, how is this solution really helping customers meet those business objectives with AI? Yeah, I'll start with the again, you know, kind of the bottoms upside a thing. But I talked about the fact that this is a truly appliance. And fundamentally, there's two core components to that there's the compute and the storage and they both play an important role here. On the compute side, we have fourth generation Intel processors, you've got the throughput, you've got that processing power to really handle those AI workloads. And at the same time, we all know that AI is pretty useless if you don't have the data. Sorry, the storage plays an important, very, very important role here, which is having that linear scalable software to find storage, something we call the universal storage layer. Not only is it the storage that is in these appliances, the Apex Cloud platform, but it also runs in the public cloud. So you got that portability of that as well. So you have the flexibility to use that AI on-prem and also the portability to be able to connect into the public cloud as well. Yeah. And thank you, by the way, because the AI itself would be upset with us if we had to talk about it. It's true. But for us, you know, we've been talking about hybrid cloud for a decade. And I'll be honest, sometimes we have to explain what that actually means. AI now is actually validated why you need a hybrid cloud. Like you just mentioned, you know, the data is everywhere and you need a consistent compute everywhere. You need to be able to, you know, fine tune your models, run your models in a different space. And so for us, this is really foundational. In fact, there's some other things we're working towards, you know, with our OpenShift AI initiatives to build on the work we're doing here that I think customers are going to love because I've seen a lot of buzzword compliance, right? Not everything is chat GPT, especially in the enterprise, you know, they like to understand things like canonical source and provenance of the things that train their models. And so for us at Red Hat, like again, it's very foundational for us to continue that story and get the foundation of a hybrid cloud to create your AI. I'm sure we can do an entire segment on this because I think the stuff that you're doing with Intel and with others underneath the hood, plus what you're doing in the OpenShift platforms, and there's multiple on top of there, I think we definitely could. But let's park that for another day and let's kind of take a look at this from and kind of bring it home from a perspective of partners. I mean, I'm partners in near and dear to my heart and Dell is really investing in. What is the feedback that you're getting from partners around this, Caitlin? Yeah, it's really exciting, especially when it comes to things like our service provider partners, the level of, you know, keeps using the same terms because it's so true, the level of experience and simplicity that we're building into this platform actually enables them to really focus on the value add services they can bring around that and they can optimize the services that they're bringing to that platform in a very unique way. So Kindral is a great example of that. They're going to be taking this new platform and expanding their existing offerings to be able to bring what already is an existing partnership both from Red Hat and Dell and really bringing that together. Yeah, that's powerful. Yeah, that's been the really exciting thing is when the partners are seeing that we're already working together. I mean, we're partners and so we're kind of coming to them as one entity and I think that's something that we've gotten a lot of feedback on as well that they're looking forward to is that best of breed. So the same benefit we've talked about for customers, the partners are seeing the same. And as Caitlin said, they're excited to be able to put their expertise on top of this and what their additional value is and it's one less thing they have to worry about. I can totally see that, especially in the managed service provider cloud service provider market, that's just huge for them to now have that container reliable container on a reliable platform that makes it easy to use because that's their margin where they get that. And that's that's great for them. I mean, it's fantastic and it's fantastic for their customers who want to get up and running really quick and keep in mind, right? We're also hearing from, you know, Kendral and others. It's also about the virtualization. Remember, within OpenShift itself, it's native that you can manage VMs containers and then even other clusters. And so it's about if you also want to modernize your apps and your infrastructure, now you've got one complete solution to that. So, Caitlin, super exciting, you know, this announcement. Where can partners and customers alike find out more information and where are you going to be talking about this? Everywhere. You can start with Dell.com slash OpenShift. Of course, you could talk to a Dell representative, partner representative and excitingly, both companies are going to be a Kubecom coming up in Chicago in November. I hear Chicago is beautiful in November. So if you'll be there, come by the booth. It's like after Detroit, didn't they learn their lesson? I mean, I was like, come on. Really? Are we choosing that again? All right. But we'll be there. I think, Red Hat, you'll also have a booth. So great time to come by. We can have some hands-on experience with what this is really going to look like. And we'll be there as well. And I'm excited to be there myself. So I think it'll be a lot of fun. I think get to talk all kinds of cloud native back then. So I want to thank you both for joining me. I think, you know, again, getting into this has been super helpful. And I really appreciate it. So thank you for joining. And thanks for having a great job. Yeah. And if you need more as well, as Caitlin said, there were some resources. There's also a resource tab down below. And we'll be back with more around this, this solution. We'll be following it very closely here on theCUBE. And we appreciate you for watching. Thank you and take care.