 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Welcome to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. theCUBE is live at Dell Technologies World 2022. Dave, how great. Live, we are live, we are in person, we are 3D. We are also here on the first day of our coverage with an eight-time, that's right, eight-time CUBE alum. Gail Schnurson joins us as the Senior Vice President of Edge Portfolio Solutions at Dell Technologies. Welcome back, our friends. Thank you, it's great to be here in this forum with live people, you know, in 3D. Isn't it, we're not via a screen, this is actually real. So Gail, a lot of us, great attendance at this first event since 2019, lots been going on since then. We're talking a lot about Edge. It's not new, but there's a lot changing. What's going on there? Well, you know, Edge has been around for a while. Actually, since the beginning of time, people were doing, you know, compute and applications in the physical space where data is created, but more and more, data is based on sensors in cameras and machine vision. And if you want to make real-time decisions, there's a few reasons why you can't just send everything back to a data center or a cloud. Maybe you don't have the right latency. Maybe it's too costly. Maybe you don't have the right bandwidth. Maybe you have security challenges. Maybe you have compliance challenges. So the world's moving more and more resources towards what the data is created and to make real-time decisions and to generate new business values, things are changing and they're becoming much more involved than before, much more. So basically that's what's changing. You know, we need to deal with distributed architectures much more than we needed before. I think one of the things we've learned in the last very dynamic two years that access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have. It's table stakes for whether we're talking about retail, healthcare, et cetera, so that the real-time data access is critical for everybody these days. Right, and it could be a real-time decision or it could even be data collection. Either way, you need to place some device, some computer next to the source. And then, you know, you have a lot of them and you just multiply by multiple use cases and you basically have a very complex problem to solve. And if you ask me what's new is that complexity is becoming more and more critical to solve. Oh, good, please. I was just going to say, talk to me about some of the, from a complexity resolution perspective. What are some of the things that Dell is doing to help organizations as they spread out to the edge more to meet that consumer demand, but reduce that complexity from an infrastructure standpoint? So we focus on simplifying. I think that's what people need right now. So there are two things we do. We optimize our products, whether they need ruggedization or different temperature envelopes or management capability, remote management capability. And we create solutions. And so we develop solutions that look at specific outcomes and we size it and we create deployment guides. We do everything we can to simplify the edge use cases for our customers. You know, you guys, it's talking about, it's not new. And I know you do a lot in retail. I think of like the NCR cash register as the original edge, you know? But there's other use cases. There's, Gil, you and I have talked about AI inferencing in real time. There was a question today in the analyst forum. I think it went to Jeff, nobody wanted to take it. No, maybe it was Michael, about the metaverse. But there's edge space is the edge, industrial IoT. So how do you, I mean, the TAM is enormous. How do you think about the use cases? Are there ones that aren't necessarily sort of horizontal for you that you don't go after, like EVs and Tesla cars or how are you thinking about? It depends, no, I agree that the edge business is very verticalized. At the same time, there are very, there are themes that emerge across every industry. So we're trying to solve things horizontally being dealt we need to solve for repeatability and scale. But we do package vertical solutions on top of them because that's what people need. So for example, you said NCR being the original edge. If I ask you today, name, how many applications are running in a retail store to enable your experience? You'd say, well, maybe there's self-checkout, maybe there is fraud detection. It's a handful. It's a handful. The fact is it's not. It's about 30 different applications that are running. So you have digital labels and you have a curbside delivery and you have inventory management and you have crowd management and you have safety and security. And what happens today is that every one of those solutions is purchased separately and deployed separately and connected to the network separately and secured separately. Hence you see the problem, right? And so what we do when we create a solution, for example, we say, okay, infrastructure, what can we consolidate onto an infrastructure that could scale over time? And then we look at it in the context of a solution. So the solution we're announcing or we announced last week does your step. On the left side, it looks at a consolidated infrastructure based on VxRail and VMware Stack. So you can run multiple applications. On the right side, it's working with a company called Deep North for Insure Analytics. And actually people that attend the show, they can go and see this in action in our fake retail store back at the Edge booth. But the point is those elements of siloed applications and the need to consolidate, they're true for every industry. And that's what we're trying to solve for. I was just wondering, you said they're true for every industry. Every industry is facing the same challenges there. What makes retail so prime for transformation right now? That's a great question. So using my example from before, if you're faced with this savvy shopper that buys online and they now are coming back to the stores and they need to, they want the same experience. They want the stuff that they search for, they want it available to them. And in fact, we researched that 80% of people say if they have a bad experience, will not come back to a retail store. So you've got all of those use cases that you need to put together. You've got this savvy shopper that comes in. You've got heightened labor costs. You've got a supply chain problem in most of those markets. It's a perfect storm and you want to give an experience, right? So CIOs are looking at this and they go, how do I do all of that? And as I said before, the key problem is management. Management of all of those things is why they can innovate faster. And so retail is in this perfect storm where they need to innovate and they want to innovate and now they're looking for options and we're here to help them. You know, a lot of times we talk about in industrial IoT, we talk about the IT and the OT schism. Is there a similar sort of dissonance between IT, your peeps, Dell's traditional market and what's happening at the near edge? The retail infrastructure, sort of different requirements. How are you thinking about that and managing that? About 50% of Edge projects today are somehow involving IT. Usually every project with a lot of IT for networking and security. So they have to manage it either way. And today there's a lot of what we used to call shadow IT when we talked about cloud. This has happened at the Edge as well. Now this happened for a good reason because the expertise are the OT, people have the expertise on the specific use case. It's true for manufacturing, it's also true for retail. Our traditional audience is the IT audience and we will never be able to merge the two worlds unless IT was better able to service the OT buyers. And even in the show, I've had multiple conversations today with people to talk about the divide, how to bring it together. It will come together when IT can deliver a better service to the OT constituents. And that's definitely a job for Dell, right? This is what we do. If we enable our IT buyer to do a better job in servicing the OT crowd or the business crowd in retail, more innovation will happen across those different dimensions. So I'm happy you asked that because that's actually part of the mission we're taking on. Where is one of the things I think about when you talk about that consumer experience and we're very demanding as consumers, we want to have, as you described, we want to have the same experience we expect to have that regardless of where we are. And if that doesn't happen, you mentioned that number of 80% of people surveyed said, if I have a bad experience with a merchant, I'm out. I'm going somewhere else. So where is the rest of the C-suite in the conversation? I can think of a COO, the Chief Marketing Officer, from a brand value, brand reputation perspective. Are you talking with those folks as well to help make the connected store a reality? I don't know that we're having those conversations with those business owners. We're a system and infrastructure company. So we get involved once they understand what they want to do. We just look at it and so if you solve it one way, it's going to be one outcome. Maybe there is a better way to look at it. Maybe there's an architecture. Maybe there's a more thoughtful way to think about the problems before they happen. But the fact that they're all looking shows you that their business owners are very, very concerned with this reality. They're key stakeholders. Can we come back to your announcement? Can we unpack that a little bit for those who might not be familiar with it? What is it called again? And give us, peel the onion a little bit, Gil. Yeah, so we call it a Delta Technology Validated Design. It is essentially reference architecture. We take a use case, we size it, so we save customers the effort of testing and sizing. We document the deployment step by step. We just make it simpler. And as is before, we look for consolidation. So we took a VxRail, which is our leading HCI product based on VMware technology, with a VMware application management stack with Tanzu. And then we look at that as the infrastructure and then we test it with a company called Deep North. And Deep North are store analytics. So through machine vision, they can tell you where people are queuing up. If there is somebody in the store that needs help and nobody's approaching. If there is a water spill and somebody might slip and hurt themselves, if a fridge is open and something may get spoiled. So all of those things together through machine vision and real-time decisions can help this much better experience. So we put all of this together. We created a design and now it's out there in the market for our partners to use, for our customers to use. This is an extension of our manufacturing solutions where we did the same thing. We partnered with a company called PTC, you may know of obviously, and a company called Litmus to create industrial analytics solutions. So this whole word of solutioning is supposed to look at the infrastructure and the use case and bring them together and document it in a way that simplifies things for customers. Do you ever see that becoming a skew at some point in time or? Personally, if you ask me, I don't think so. And the reason is there's still a lot of variability in those and skewing. But that's a very formal internal discussion. The point is we want people to buy as much of it as they need to and we really want to help them. If a skew could help them, we will get there, but we need to see repeatability before creating skews. Can you give us an example of a retail or a manufacturing customer that's using this Dell-validated design, this DVD, and that really has reduced or eliminated that complexity that was there before? So this solution is new. I mean, it's brand new, we just announced it, so no. But I don't know what names I can call out because referentability is probably an example. But I will tell you that most of the large retailers in the US are basing their stores on Dell Technologies. A lot of the extra is in those stores. And you're talking about thousands of locations with remote management. What we're doing here is we're taking it to the next step by looking at new use cases that they have not been implementing before. The same look, same infrastructure is valid. You know, scalable is scalable. And here are the new use cases with machine vision and other things that you might need to add. Here is how you do that. But we're seeing a lot of success in retail in the last few years. So what should we expect looking forward? You know, any gaps that customers are asking for that you're trying to fill? Two to three years out, what should we expect? I think we're going to stay very true to our simplification message. We want to help people simplify. So if it's simplifying maintenance, if it's simplifying management, if it's simplifying through solutioning, you're going to see us more and more and more investing in simplification of edge. And that's through our own IP, through our partnerships. There is a lot more coming, if I may say so myself, but it's a little too early to talk about it. So for those folks that are here at the show, they're good to see it and play with it and touch it and feel it, what would you say some of the biggest impacts are that this technology can deliver tomorrow? Well, first of all, it's enabling to do what they want. See, we don't have to go and tell people, oh, you probably need to move things through the edge. They know they need to do it. Our job is to tell them how to do it in a secure way, in a simplified way. So that's the nice thing about this market. It's happening whether we want it or not. People in this show can go see some things in action. They can see the retail solution in action. They can see the manufacturing solution in action. And even more so, and I forgot to say, part of our announcement was a set of solution centers in Limerick Island and in Singapore that was just open and soon enough in Austin, Texas. And we will have people come in and have the full experience of IoT and edge devices in action, so AR and VR and IoT and sensor technology and scanning technology. So they could be thinking about the out of the possible. Thinking about this immersive experience that will help them invent with us. And so we're expecting a lot of innovation to come out of those conversations for us and for them. So doing a lot of testing before deployment and really gleaning that innovation. Testing before deployment, solution architecture. Just ideation if they're not there yet. So, and I've just been to Singapore in one of those. They asked me to pretend I was a retail scanner in a distribution center. I didn't do so well, but I was still impressed by the technology, so. Well, eight time Q alumni. Now you have a career to fall back on if you need to. Exactly. Gil, it's been great to have you. Thank you so much for coming back, talking to us about what's new on day one of Dell Technologies World 22. Thank you for having me again, Gil. Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2022. This is day one of our coverage. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.