 I'm Dave Nicholson and welcome to Dell Technologies World 2022. I'm delighted to be joined by Tony Bishop. Tony is Senior Vice President, Enterprise Strategy at Digital Realty. Tony, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Happy to be here. So Tony, tell me about your role at Digital Realty and give us a little background on Digital Realty and what you do. Absolutely. So my job is to figure out how to make our product and experience relevant for enterprises and partners alike. Digital Realty is probably one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It's the largest provider of multi-tenant data center capacity in the world. Over 300 data centers, 50-some metros, 26 countries, six continents. So it's a substantial provider of data center infrastructure capacity to hyperscale clouds to the largest enterprise in the world and everywhere in between. So what's the connection with Dell? What are you guys doing with Dell? I think it's gonna be a marriage made in heaven in terms of the partnership. You think of Dell as the largest leading provider of critical IT infrastructure for companies around the world. They bring expertise in building the most relevant, performant efficient infrastructure, combine that with the most, the largest most relevant full spectrum capability provider of data center capacity. And together you create this integrated pre-engineered kind of experience where infrastructure can be delivered on demand, secure and compliant, performant and efficient and really unlock the opportunity that's trapped in the world around data. So speaking of data, you have a unique view at digital realty because you're seeing things in aggregate in a way that maybe a single client wouldn't be seeing them. What are some of the trends and important things we need to be aware of as we move forward from a data center, from an IT perspective, frankly? Yeah, yeah, it's an excellent question. I mean, the good part of the vantage point is we see emerging trends. As they start to unfold, because you have the most unique diverse set of customers coming together and coming together, almost organized like in a community effect because you have them connecting and attaching to each other's infrastructure sharing data. And what we've seen is an explosion in data being created, data being processed, aggregated, stored and then being enriched. And it's really around that, what we call the data creation life cycle where what we're seeing is that data then needs to be shared across many different devices, applications, systems, companies, users. And that ends up creating this new type of workflow driven world that's very intelligent and is going to cause a radical explosion in our eyes of needing more infrastructure, more infrastructure faster and more infrastructure as a service. Yeah, when you talk about data and you talk about all of these connectivity points and communication points, talk about how some of those or explained to us, some of these are outside of your facilities and some of them are within your facilities. We, in this virtualized, abstracted world we live in, it's easy to think that everything lives in our endpoint mobile device. But talk about how that gravity associated with data affects things moving forward. Absolutely, you know, I'm glad you brought up about the mobile device because I think it's probably the easiest thing to attach to to think about how the mobile devices has radically liberated and transformed into users and in versions of mobile devices, even being sensors, not just people on a mobile phone in proliferating everywhere. So that proliferation of these endpoints that are accessing and coming over different networks, mobile networks, Wi-Fi networks, corporate networks all end up generating data that then needs to be brought together and processed. And what we found is that we found a study that we've been spending multiple years and multiple millions of dollars building into an index and a tool called the Data Gravity Index where we've been able to quantify not only this data creation lifecycle, but how big and how fast and how it creates a gravitational effect because as more data gets shared with more applications, it becomes very localized. And so we've now measured and predicted for 700 mentors around the world where that data gravity effect is occurring and it's affecting every industry, every enterprise and it's going to fundamentally change how infrastructure needs to be architected because it needs to become data-centric. It used to be connectivity-centric, but with these mobile phones and endpoints going everywhere, you have to create a meeting place and it has to be a meeting place where the data comes together and then systems and services are brought and user traffic comes in and out of. So in other words, despite your prowess in this space, you guys have yet to solve the speed of light issue and the cost of bandwidth issue moving between sides. So it was a fair to say that in an ideal world you could have dozens of actually different customers, separate entities that are physically living in data center locations that are built and posted and run by digital realty, communicating with one another. So when these services are communicating, instead of communicating over 100 miles or 1,000 miles, it's like one side of the chicken wire fence to the other. Not that you use chicken wire in your data center, but I think you get the point, is that fair? It is, it's like the mall analogy, right? You know, you're building these data malls and everybody's bringing their relevant infrastructure and then using private secure connections between each other and then enabling the ability for data to be exchanged, enriched and new business be conductive. So no, physics hasn't been solved, Dave, just to add to that. And what we're finding is it's not just physics. One of the other things that we're continuing to see and hear from customers and that we continue to study as a trend is regulations, compliance and security are becoming as big a factors as physics is. So it's not just physics and costs, which I agree with what you're saying, but there's also these other dimensions that's then affecting placement, connectivity in the management of data and infrastructure. Basically, in all major metros around the world where companies do business and providers support them or customers come to meet them both physically and digitally. It's kind of, it's an interesting trend, right? I think a number of the industry and let's call it a digital twin where there's a virtual version or if a digital version or a physical version and that's probably the best way to think of us is that secure meeting place where each can have their own secure infrastructure of what's being digitized but actually being placed physically. Yeah, that's interesting. There's a lot of, when you look at this from the Dell Digital Realty Partnership perspective, we know here at theCUBE that Dell is trying to make consumption of what they build very, very, very simple for end-user customers. Removing the complexity of the underlying hardware. There's a saying that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. You hear things referred to as serverless or no code, low code. Those sort of abstract away from the reality of what's going on under the covers but Apex as an example from Dell allows things to be consumed as operational expense, dramatically simplifying the process of consuming that hardware. Now, if you go down to almost the concrete layer where digital realty starts up, you're looking at things like density and square footage and power consumption, right? Yeah. And so tell me, you mentioned infrastructure, tell me about the kind of optimization from a hardware standpoint that you expect to see from Dell. Yeah, it's a, you know, in the data center subset of an industry, they call it digital or mission critical infrastructure, the space, the power, the secure housing. How do you create physical isolation? How do you deal with cooling and containment? How do you deal with different physical loads? Cause some of the more dense computers likely working with Dell and some of the various semiconductors that Dell takes and wraps into intelligent compute and storage blocks, they're, you know, the specialized processing for use cases like artificial intelligence and machine learning and up required, they run very fast. They generate a lot of heat and they consume a lot of power. So that means you have to be very smart about the critical infrastructure and the type of server infrastructure storage coming together where the heat can be quickly removed. The power is obviously distributed to it so it can run as constant as fast as possible to unlock insights and processing. And then you also need to be able to deal with things like, hey, the cabling between the server and the storage has to be that when you're running parallel calculations that there's an equal distance between the cabling. Well, if I don't think about how I'm physically bringing the server storage and all of that together and then having a space that can accommodate and ensure the equal cabling in the layout. Oh, and then handle these very heavy physical computers so that physical load into the floor it becomes very problematic. So it's hidden. Most people don't understand that engineering but that's the partnership that why we're excited about with Dell is you're bringing all that critical expertise of supporting all those various types of use cases of infrastructure combinations. And then combining the engineering understanding of how do I build for the right performance, the right density, the right TCO and also do it where physical layout of having things in proximity and contiguous space can then be the way to unlock processing of data and connecting to others. Yeah, so from an end user perspective, I don't need to care about any of what you just said. All I heard was wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Okay, okay. I will consume my Apex delivered Dell by the drink as a service, as OPEX, however I want to consume it but I can rest assured that you and the digital realty in Dell are actually taking care of those meaningful things that are happening under the hood. Maybe I'm revealing my long-term knuckle dragging hardware guy credentials when I just get that little mention in. That's a good one, you've got it. Performance, secure, compliant and I don't need to worry about it. The two of you are taking care of it and you're taking care of it for me and every major mentor around the world delivered in the experience that needs to be delivered to. So from the digital realty point of view, what are the things that not necessarily keep you up at night worrying but sort of wake you up in the morning early with a sense of renewed opportunity when it comes to the data center space. A lot of people would think, well, we're in the era of cloud, no one's building any data centers except for the monster cloud players but that's definitely not the case, is it? I mean, there's a demand for what you folks are building and delivering. What are the, so first, what's the opportunity look like? And then what are the constraints that are out there, is it dirt, is it power? What are the constraints you face? You have probably all the above is the shortest answer, right? So we're not want, want, want, want, right? But what we are is the way that the opportunity is huge because it's not one platform. There's many platforms. There isn't one business that exists today that doesn't use many applications, doesn't consume many different services both internally and externally and doesn't generate a ton of data that they may not even know where it is. So that's the exciting part. And that continues to force a requirement that says, I need to be able to connect to all those clouds which you can do at our platform. But I also need to be able to put infrastructure or the storage of data next to it and in between it. So it's like an integration approach that says, if I think physical first, think physical that's within logical proximity to where I have employees, customers, partners, I have business presence, that's what drives us. And in our industry continues to grow both and we see it in our own business. It's a double digit growth rate for both commercial oriented enterprises and service providers in the telco, cloud, or content kind of space. So it's kind of like a best of both worlds. I think that's what gets us excited. If I could take the second part of the question, what ends up worrying is like all of us, it is a physical world, physical world start with, do we have enough power? Is it durable, sustainable and secure? Is it available? Do we have the right connectivity options? Keeping things available is a full time job making it so that you can accommodate local nuances when you start going in different regions and countries and metros. There's a lot of regional policy compliance or market specific needs that have to be factored in, but you're still trying to deliver that consistent physical availability and experience. So it's a good problem to have, but it's a critical infrastructure problem that I would put in the same kind of bucket as power companies, energy companies, telecommunication companies, because it's a meeting place for all of that. So you've been in this business, not just at digital reality, but you've been in this part of the IT world for a while. How has the persona of a customer for a digital reality changed over time? Have we seen the kind of consolidation that people would expect in this space in terms of fewer, but larger customers coming in and seeking floor space? Well, I think it's been the opposite of what probably people predict. And I pause there intentionally to kind of just, being very candid and open. And it's probably why that using data as a proxy to understand is that it's a many to many world that's only getting bigger, not smaller. As much as companies consolidate, there's more that appear. Innovation is driving new businesses and new industries or the digitization of old industries, which is then creating a whole multiplier effect. So what we're seeing is we're actually seeing a rapid uptake in the enterprise side of our business, which is why I'm here and driving that, that really was much more nominal, five years ago. For being the provider of the space and capabilities for telcos and large hyperscalers continues to go. Because it's not like a once and done. It's a, I need to do this in many places. I need to continue to bring as there's a push towards the edge. I need to be able to create meeting places for all of it. And so to us, we're seeing a constant growth in more companies becoming customers on the enterprise side, more enterprises deploying in more places, solving more use cases and more service providers figuring out new ways to monetize by bringing their infrastructure and making it accessible to be connected to on our platform. So if I'm hearing you right, you're saying that people who believe that we are maybe a few years away from everything being in a single cloud are completely off base. That is not the direction that we're heading from your view, correct? We love our cloud customers. They're going to continue to grow. I would think of it, but it's not all going to one cloud. I think what you would see is that you would see where a great way to assess that and break it down is enterprise IT, Gartner's forecast, 4.2, four and a half trillion a year in spend, less than a third of that's hitting public cloud. So there's a long tail, first of all, it's not going to one cloud if people look, there's like seven or eight major players. And then you go, okay, well, what do I do if it's not in seven or eight major players? Well, then I need to put it next to it. Oh, that's why we go to a digital reality. Makes a lot of sense. Tony Bishop, digital reality. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Have a great Dell Technologies World. From me, Dave Nicholson. Stay tuned for more live coverage from Dell Technologies World 2022 as we resume in just a moment.