 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got a CUBE alum back with me talking about managed services. David Menzing is here, the Senior Director of Product Management for Dell Technologies Services. David, it's great to see you, thanks for joining me today. Thank you, good to be here. So here we are, very, very socially distant since the whole event is socially distant this year. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on with managed services with Dell. You guys have been in managed services for a long time, but there's some new stuff coming out. Talk to us about that. Sure, yeah, Dell, I mean, from a Dell Technology Services perspective, there's a lot that we do, from consulting, support, deployment, education, managed services has been one of those other areas that we've been working on for over 15 years. We've been managing a variety of different environments for many large enterprise customers. And so what we're trying to do right now is take a lot of that capability and start making it more widely available to more of our customers. And today what we're focusing on is in the data protection space and offering a standard managed service or data protection that's available with our FlexOnDemand consumption model. So FlexOnDemand consumption model was announced last year towards the end of calendar year 2019. Remind us what the FlexOnDemand consumption program is and then let's dig into why data protection was one of the first managed services launched through it. Yeah, so last year when we announced FlexOnDemand, what we wanted to do is come up with a different consumption model where customers don't have to pay anything significant upfront as part of a CAPEX investment. They pay for what they consume. And so we're offering that today on our PowerProtect data domain products, our Avamar networking software, as well as our integrated data protection appliances. And so customers can pay only for what they have to consume and then we'll charge them extra for as they consume beyond that minimal commitment. And then now we have managed services that's one of those options that we can provide as part of that solution. What about some of the trends? Oh, go ahead, sorry. No, but I think you asked the question though as well is why did we choose managed services for data protection to start with versus doing something else? And it's an excellent question because there's a lot of different environments that we do manage today. I mean, storage, data protection, hyperverge, cloud and we're doing that with a variety of different global customers around the world. Now, what we've seen though is that these customers are running to a lot of common challenges particularly around the complexity and growth in their environment. And so that's where we've been doing a lot of research with IDC and with others to focus on what specifically they're seeing in their environment. And so what they found, particularly IDC came back and told us that, yeah, one of the number one concerns that customers have with a flexible consumption model is backup and recovery. And so that's why we went with this service essentially from what we were already seeing from our existing customers but also from what we were hearing from analysts. So since that survey that you did research with IDC I'm curious, in the COVID era we've seen so much going on with respect to security ransomware is way up. I think a ransomware attack right now happens every 11 seconds. We're seeing hospitals as targets, the New Zealand stock exchange was targeted, the department of veterans affairs, social media. Is there any additional or one additional data from IDC or others shows that backup and recovery is even more critical since so many people are working from home accessing networks from personal devices. Well, what's the influence been on COVID on really accelerating this data protection manage service? Well, I think there's two things to it. Number one with COVID, we're hearing from a lot of our customers that their IT staff are having to focus on more things than they did before. Like you were saying, there's more security, there's more compliance, there's more other issues. And so by offering a managed service in a space like backup and recovery, we're able to reduce some of their workload, free up their time so they can focus on other more critical projects. Now furthermore, when we surveyed these customers we found that most of them say, and it was 64% said they lack the confidence that they can fully recover systems or data from all their platforms in the event of a data loss. And so that's one of the things that we can provide by being able to troubleshoot, monitor at 24 by seven. You know, when a backup job fails, you know, there's a lot of different things that may be going on. And so we'll use the expertise that we have in our tools to go ahead and troubleshoot those so that our customers can spend their time in more important areas. So as we look at the multi-cloud world in which so many businesses across industries live, we talk about multi-cloud, we talk about complexing IT. A lot of businesses have multiple data protection solutions within them, some maybe for on-prem, some protecting cloud applications. Talk to me about how this managed service would enable a business in any industry to get that centralized management and that visibility into everything they're backing up from physical servers to VMs to SaaS applications, for example. That's a great question there. So, you know, going back to one of the things I mentioned earlier, I mean, we're number one right now in the marketplace for data project software and appliances. And so all of our products provide those different flexible options to whether you're managing an on-prem environment that you need to do data protection for or a hybrid or public cloud environment. And so with that, as part of the managed service, we'll run a series of different reports and monitoring. We'll be able to unify all those different pieces into a couple of different dashboards and reports, provide that visibility back to the customers about what's being backed up, what they need to go ahead and restore at that particular moment, as well as see some of the other trends that are going on with their environment. So let's talk about the actual consumption of this. You talked a little bit about when the Flex On Demand program was launched towards the calendar end of 2019. So much has changed since then. For many, many months, many businesses globally were really in this, how do we survive mode? The pivots were so quickly, there were a lot of them, they're still happening. So talk to us about how this Flex On Demand program is, I imagine a facilitator of some businesses being able to get to survival and eventually to being able to thrive in this new era. It's a great point. The great thing about the option that we now have with Flex On Demand is, like I said before, customers don't have to pay everything upfront. Generally speaking, when we sell a product, we're thinking about a multi-year commitment that a customer has that they pay all up front at that point. With this, they're only paying month to month. And that can be anywhere from 40% consumption of the box or 80% consumption of the box. And then they can pick and choose whether that's over a one-year, two-year, three-year or even a five-year term. And so we'll establish a rate so that, hey, based off that commitment, you'll know exactly what you pay for 40%. If you exceed that, you'll know exactly what you'll be charged for that as well. So that provides not only some predictability in what the customers need a budget for pay every month, but more importantly, they're saving a lot of money from the standpoint of, hey, they're not having to pay for that all upfront anymore. They can actually spread that out over time. And so that flexibility, particularly in the economic space we are right now, is really, really important. So no more risk of over-provisioning and then having in three to five years to buy more, even if you haven't used that capacity now that's one of the challenges that we hear often in that space. Correct, correct. Now, I mean, the great thing with data is we're generating more data every single day, but it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it in the fact that, hey, you can make a commitment at 40% consumption. You can work with that. If you find a couple of months later that, hey, we need to readjust that to another level, we can absolutely work with you to do that as well. So I'm curious what the, what the kind of split is between what the managed services group does and what the customers can do, knowing that there's a lot of experts on the managed services team, what actions can customers take? For example, you talked about, we'll determine with them what percentage between 40 and 80 they pay per month. When things change on their end, how can they adjust that? Now, so it's a great point. When we talk about managed services, that's always the first question that comes up of, hey, exactly what are you going to manage for me? Versus, what does my staff need to continue to look at? And so we're going to go ahead and manage the jobs. We'll make sure that they run. And if there are issues where we need to go in there and troubleshoot and make changes, we'll go ahead and do that. And really what we're designing here is a process to where the customer doesn't have to call us. We're going to call the customer to let them know when, hey, we see an issue, we need to make a change in their environment and notify them. But we still want to give the customers the flexibility of, hey, if they need to make a change to their backup policy because their environment has changed, call us, submit a ticket, let's talk through it. Let's make those changes together so that you've got the right protection strategy. Furthermore, the customer, if they need to restore a file, they can submit a ticket. And we'll go ahead and assist to make sure that we can get that data restored back for them with the right version and the right place as part of that. Any interesting stories? And we talked a minute ago about, when the pandemic hit, there was this massive pivot to work from home. And suddenly you had people that were either taking a desktop out of their physical location, bringing it home, or they were having to use one of their own devices connecting to a corporate network. We think about endpoints as being even absolutely critical. There's a lot of business critical data on endpoints. What are some of the restorations that you've seen? For example, if someone deletes an entire mailbox or a calendar or there's corrupt data on a, somebody gets hit with ransomware, how quickly can your data protection, managed data protection service recover data? You know, it's a great question. And, you know, we've got a variety of different ways to approach that, you know, depending on the customer environment, it may be something where it's acceptable to wait a few days or longer to restore files. It may not be critical, but certainly if it is very critical data and it is something that you need up and running right away, you know, you've got to look at not just the managed service approach, but you've also got to look at, what is the software and the hardware approach to data protection? How many copies do you have? How closely, how closely located is some of that equipment? And more importantly, have we looked at the networking latency impact of, hey, if we did have to do a critical restore, how long would that take? And so that is a part of what we can do for managed services is address, hey, is the policy and the strategy we have in place, is it actually meeting our customer needs? Is it the outcome that they're looking for? And so at that time, you know, we may find that, hey, this may not be the right size solution. There may be some adjustments we need to make. Furthermore, it may be just simply making some changes in the configuration in the policy to make sure that, hey, we've got multiple copies that we're doing backups, maybe a little bit more frequently. But that's always a really good discussion point with our customers to make sure, do we have the right data protection strategy in place with not just the hardware and software, but with the service strategy we're applying against it? You mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that I forget if it was IDC or a different one that you mentioned that 64% of the IT folks surveyed said, we don't have confidence so we can fully recover. Given what you are talking about here, data protection as a managed service offered through the Flex on Demand program, at Dell Technologies World, those folks in the 64% of we don't have that confidence, what can they learn? What can they expect? And how can this new managed service help move them over the line to getting that confidence that they can recover anything they need? Yeah, the confidence that we can help them with on that is transparency. Like I mentioned, we want to change the paradigm to where customers are not having to call us, we're calling them, but even from that standpoint, it's really important for us to be able to demonstrate through the reports, through the other work that we're doing that we are doing the backups, that we are restoring and we're meeting the service level objectives that we defined with those customers. And so as part of that, we have a service delivery manager that will work with the customer on a scheduled meeting every month to go through those reports, check with them about their expectations, make sure that we're doing everything that they need us to answer any questions. And then if we need to meet with them more frequently than once a month, we absolutely can, but we want to ensure that the service is totally addressing what the customer is looking for and that they're seeing the right amount of information and data to give them confidence that we're delivering the services they need them to. Sounds to me like proactive support. Is that something that you think the customers in that majority who don't feel confident, have they not had data protection services that were proactively saying, hey guys, here's what's going on in your environment? Yeah, so certainly in the industry, I mean, there's a lot that we provide from proactive services. We'll proactively notify you when we see a hardware error in your environment, but in the absence of managed services, the customer is in charge. The customer is the one that is running the environment. They're having to monitor all the different events. If a backup job fails that you need to figure out, well, did it fail because I had a networking issue or because the system had too much IOPS at that point or was it just, we had two conflicting jobs trying to run at the same time. I mean, the customer takes on all that complexity themselves when they go ahead and manage it. And for a lot of customers, that may be the right solution. They may have the right expertise at house. They may have the right requirements to require that, but there's a lot of other customers who are finding particularly in the state we are right now with COVID that they want to go ahead and move some of that complexity over another partner, which is what we're offering with the managed services. Last question at Dell Technologies World, the digital experience this year. Tell me about what you're going to be talking about. What can folks expect to learn from you? We're going to talk a lot more about the managed services for data protection. We're going to talk about how that aligns very, very cleanly with the flex on demand and talk about the benefits you get from both of those different models. Excellent. David, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today, sharing what's going on with flex on demand program, managed services for data protection and how you can help customers navigate their complex data protection needs in a very strange world. We appreciate your time. Thank you. For David Menzing, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020.