 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's continuing coverage of SuperCloud 5, the Battle for AI Supremacy. I'm your analyst and host, Rob Streche. Today, I'm joined by Todd Lee, Vice President of Cloud Partnerships with Dell. Allison Johnson, who's the senior manager of worldwide channels for AWS Marketplace. And Raphael Meyerwitz, who's the Vice President of Technology Solutions and Strategic Partnerships for Presidio, a partner of both AWS and Dell. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for having us. Yeah, I mean, I know Raphael, you've been on before and Todd and Allison are joining us for the first time. So this is great that we're gonna get to jump in and really talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is really cloud marketplaces where you kind of look at it and say, okay, this is such a simplistic way to go and get up and running so quickly with the technology. But it's always that case of, okay, now what? I've bought it. Now, how do I institutionalize it? How do I make it part of the corporate standard? How do I start to have it as a piece going forward? And what are the ways to use that? And to that extent, let's kind of jump into the AWS Marketplace, the relationship that you all have together. And let's start with Raphael because I think you're kind of the glue between a lot of the ISVs and the different solutions providers. And you have that relationship with Dell and AWS that have been longstanding. Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey with AWS and Dell. Adult partnership is over 20 years old. AWS partnership is searing on seven years now. And what started out on the AWS side is mostly an engineering partnership has become a very, very strategic partnership for Presidio. We now have over 500 AWS customers that we are providing services for and relate to. And we have over 3,000 Dell customers through our history that we provide services to. So we like to say, as you said, we like to say we the glue that basically stitches it together, not just from a procurement standpoint of the Marketplace but also the engineering that we can provide whether it's on-premises or public cloud and we can bring those together. Yeah, I think that to me, you know, again, having been on the IT side a long time ago in the early 2000s and I always leaned on my service providers to help me understand. And because I was never, you know, I was always a heterogeneous shop. I always had different technologies in there. And I think with cloud that definitely is true now more so than ever where you have stuff on-prem you have stuff in the cloud you wanna stitch it all together. Todd, kind of let's break down what the significance of having providers like Presidio that are partnering with you on your journey as you guys put a lot of stuff into the Marketplace. Yeah, so I'd be happy to do the first thing though as I like to ask you a question like, what do you think of the cloud jacket? I love the cloud jacket, I think it's fantastic. I'm kind of jealous to play with it. I mean, this is the second time on theCUBE, you know, I had to show up and at least do something as a rookie. So anyway. You're rocking it. I had to ask it, Allison, I had to ask it. But to your question, I think that today more than ever the conversation with customers is about the ecosystem of partners that they use. So whether it used to be in the data center that ecosystem was like different vendors or whatever on the data center floor it is dramatically broader than that now. And so from a Dell perspective to partner with AWS to partner with Presidio to bring all of that capability to a customer in conjunction with what Dell already does that's the game changer, right? And that is what customers need. It's not like what they're looking for. It's like what they need to actually be successful. So that's how we think about it. No, I think when you start to look broader at this and I think this is where it's key. I mean, again, you can go and get so many different technologies out of the marketplace. You know, back to you, Raphael, with how do you look at it and help your customers who are joint customers of AWS and Dell, how do you help them figure this all out and bring it all together? Yeah, so we have many, many customers that procure today through the marketplace through Presidio. Technology is very, very important but actually if you go back to there's a comment that Allison made earlier during the prep when you look at customers today they actually know what they wanna buy because they're researching that other 60% of customers know what they wanna buy before they actually talk to you. So the marketplace has become much easier mechanism to procure the infrastructure that customers do need. And one of the things that customers still wanna try to understand is while I have on-premises backup or storage or infrastructure that I need to figure out how to bring to the cloud or leverage the cloud for maybe it's disaster recovery, maybe it's AI, maybe it's production workloads that's really where Presidio can come in and provide engineering expertise around that. And we provide our customers with pre-sales expertise, post-sales expertise and managed services expertise around all of that today. Yeah, because it's, I mean again, a lot of your customers they're not having massive AWS divisions that are going out and doing all that cloud procurement and things like that. I mean, you do have some large customers but at the same time it's, you have different personas who had to be brought along in this process. Yeah, we have to talk to different parts of the customer. Sometimes it may be marketing that looking to do certain things and maybe specifically IT that may be involved. And as you said, sometimes in the bigger customers they do have a split methodology for on-premises and public cloud. And we really, that bridge that can bring all of that together. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I think Allison, let's bring you in here a little bit on this. And I think it would seem that having partners like Presidio can really just glue things together. And I know both you and Dell have been leaning it hard to partners over the last couple of years and in particular around these cloud offerings because I think there's, people don't just have cloud, they don't just have on-prem. It's definitely in the research that we've done it, it's really settled in at like a 50-50 split at this point. How does really marketplace help through people like Presidio help those organizations get a start? Yeah, I mean marketplace started 11 years ago. And as we evolved from a full price kind of self-service mechanism to more of a platform where customers could buy discounted software, almost immediately our customers were requesting, this is a great platform, but if I can't buy through trusted advisors like Presidio, I'm not gonna be able to use it. And so back in 2018, we rolled out our channel partner private offer program which enabled partners like Presidio to be able to work with their customers and procure software much as they do outside of marketplace. And then in 2020, when we added professional services to the catalog, that's when partners began to really harness the power of marketplace so they could have listings in there that customers could find and buy. And so I think we have, for the last five years, we have been building a strong channel offering for partners like Presidio. And what's really unique is Presidio was one of the first partners that we ever worked with. So Rafael was talking about how long the relationship has been with AWS. And I was their first channel account manager in my first job at AWS. And so I have a longstanding relationship with them and they really helped us co-develop what is now available to thousands of partners. Rafael, how's that ride been? I mean, again, being one of the first and again, having full disclosure, I worked for that for Amazon. It's easy, friction free. It's seamless. Always seamless. It's always seamless. It's a good marriage. So I mean, again, you've grown in this relationship with both. I mean, you had a longstanding Dell and even prior to that EMC relationship. How has this grown up for you? Well, it's been fantastic. I think we're one of the largest CPPO partners today, worldwide, and if Allison has any comments on that, but to let me speak about that, but not just having Allison on our team to begin with, but also Allison knows that the forefront of developing these private offers. And the first private offer that we actually did with a customer over five years ago was actually procurement that came to us that said, we want to purchase the software from you, but we want to leverage our EDP that we have with AWS. And that's very important because customers do have existing contractual obligations with AWS. So this is a way that they can draw down on those contractual obligations. And the ease of use back then, even with five years ago, it was very, very easy for this customer to actually purchase those other $5 million worth of software at their time. Wow. Allison, any comments on that? I mean, if you think about it, just to add on, if it takes a couple of minutes to spin up a few instances of AC2, but then you have to go through a six month procurement cycle for the software that goes along with that purchase, it's not really helpful, right? And so to be able to buy in the way that we've created where our customers can spin up, spin down software just in time with their migration, I mean, that's been, I think, what they have told us is that that's been really helpful for them as they're migrating to the cloud. So yeah. That makes sense and I think, again, this is where Dell has been leaning in. And I think it doesn't, it's pretty tough having done it myself at different startups and to get into the marketplace and make it look seamless to your point, Allison. I mean, I think, you know, if it doesn't spin up quickly, if it doesn't, you know, it's not effective and you got to wait and go through procurement process, you know, Todd, Dell's been doing a lot in this area and what are kind of, you know, your views on what you have in marketplace and how it really helps organizations? Yeah, I mean, if I go back a little bit, if you think about Dell in a market share model, if you look at the market share in the data center, we're market leader in all kinds of different categories, right, servers and primary storage and backup, et cetera. So we're simply thinking about, all right, let's just take that IP, that software IP and let's drop it into AWS and allow our customers to take what they're already using and apply it into the marketplace of AWS. So now, as Allison said, you get the benefit of taking that budget wherever that budget exists and bringing that into their cloud business so that they now have a true multi-cloud story that actually expands from whatever they're using today into those new deployments in the cloud. And then you take a Presidio and you weave that together. So we have capabilities like, I'll give you a customer example, okay? So we have a large global customer that was running native storage on our stuff in their data center and inside the marketplace, sorry, inside AWS. We get engaged, we bring kind of enterprise class services for block storage in this case to that environment. We now bring enterprise class replication, business resiliency, operational resiliency. We did a cost efficiency play where we were able to run at a higher performance and take out cost. So you think about all of the models we use in the data center, we're bringing that same model into the market or into AWS and then with Allison's team and Allison's marketplace environment, we're able to procure it in a way that matches what the customer's needs are because depending on the time of year, they might say, I just wanna use my software agreement and bring it in. Or I have budget, I have EDP that I wanna use, I'll use that in the marketplace. And then with Presidio, we can get it deployed, we can run it, we can combine to create that ecosystem that creates that benefit. So that's what's playing out with customers all over the world. Yeah, I get a little excited about that. I think that's the great thing is really, it's about what is the use case and what are the customer success criteria that they're gonna actually see, benefit ROI, TCO, out of that because I think knowing the engineering team on the APEX side, for instance, I know the cloud platform versus cloud storage and things of that nature and what they're doing there, they're doing some really innovative things that they're actually cross engineering with AWS. And I think to that, there's still people who are using Dell product on-premise and they wanna have that same experience and that consistency with their cloud experience. And I think Raphael, you were kind of mentioning there was a media and entertainment customer that really kind of captures that a little bit from your perspective. Yeah, I mean, Todd also is wearing a wonderful jacket. I think every APEX customer should get one of those jackets. That's a whole nother marketing spin on this, right? Well, I'm sure the marketing people will see this video and we can try to see if we can make that happen. That's it. But back to the media and entertainment customer, this customer, what you find a lot of times when customers leverage AWS, sometimes they don't think about backing up the infrastructure in the public cloud. And APEX, one of the products within APEX is data protection within the cloud. And this customer leverages APEX data protection to back up their AWS infrastructure today, which is really, really important. It makes it a lot easier for the customer to use and also it's a SaaS based offering and it's pretty much point and click and very, very simple for customers to leverage. So whether they backing up the on-premises application or public cloud, very straightforward to use these tools today. Yeah, and I think that is probably one of the keys to the marketplace is the fact that it's gotta be simple, it's gotta be easy to use, it has to be point and click to get up and running. And I think again, Dell's done a really good job with that and growing into that over the years. I guess, from all of this, to all of you, kind of open up, what should organizations think about when they're approaching marketplace and they're looking for a solution? Cause like you said, 60% already know what they want before they get to you, get to Presidio, they know what they want to procure or they think they know what they want to procure. What are the things that they should think about? I think the first thing is specifically for customers is think about how you actually gonna deploy and use that infrastructure whether it's software, hardware infrastructure, cloud-based infrastructure, that's very important. And how are you gonna operationalize it? One of the key aspects and Todd mentioned this is performance is important, but also making sure that you're, if you have a storage team, that your storage team understands what is actually available in the start so they can actually leverage the same APIs, leverage the same consistent deployment model and also a management model as well. That's very, very important. So we talked to customers a lot about that because customers don't wanna incur costs to actually bring on new resources to do that. Allison, from your side of things, yeah, I was gonna throw it to you. I think marketplace is really viewed as a modern procurement platform, right? And so as different business units are looking at products on marketplace, wanting to procure them, years ago, maybe procurement wasn't as important to involve in the equation, but today, since procurement does own that spend commitment with AWS, I think it's critical that these business units that are looking to buy on marketplace to tap into that spend, it's critical to involve procurement and show them how marketplace works that they don't know. Typically, if they're more of a modern procurement team, they're familiar with it, but I think it's critical to involve procurement early on in the process. Ben, Todd, I'll give you the last say in real, what do you see when organizations are engaging with Dell and how they can leverage marketplace and per-cidio to really accomplish those use cases? Yeah, man, I think one of the things that I think is critical is that customers still need to go through a technical and operational and a financial evaluation. This is not nirvana, right? If I think about, I don't know, maybe one of the reasons I wear cloud jackets is because I get crazy because I have four kids and they open up their phones and they just click and they buy stuff and it shows up on their phones and I get the bill and then they don't use it three months later, right? We wanna avoid those scenarios inside the cloud because the marketplace makes that procurement analysis so efficient and easy that we still, to your point, you need to do your technical architecture. Does it fit into your technical strategy, your North Star? How are you gonna operate it? Do you have per-cidio providing managed services? Do you have a deployment capability? How does it fit into the infrastructure and applications you already own? And then what is your current financial scenario? Do you have capital dollars? Do you have operating dollars? Is it a marketplace transaction that snaps right into your EDP? And so just don't lose track or sight of what you're really trying to accomplish technically, operationally, and financially. And when you do that, then the marketplace is that speed, right? It becomes the speed and agility that allows you then go execute what your plan is. Yeah, I think that's one of the keys and I think bringing it all together and having a strong partner like a per-cidio to help bring them stitched together, I think, again, being that this is the week of reinventing all things cloud have been going on and we'd be remiss if we didn't say the word AI once more. I think people need to have a strategy going forward around their data, how to protect it, how to move it, how to get the performance out of it. And I think, again, that seems to be where this partnership really has strengths and legs. Rob, this stuff is not easy, right? When I go talk with customers, they used to have these buildings that had all their stuff in it and they could walk in it and touch it and feel it and work on it, those rules have changed. They have SaaS providers, they have AWS and per-cidio and partners, AWS, per-cidio, Dell, we got to work together to help customers navigate this. This isn't an option anymore, this is critical, right? And so I'm a little excited, right? Our average enterprise customer is managing like 600 vendors a year, right? So I mean, there's a lot that goes into it and I mean, what's interesting, working with per-cidio as long as I have, the very first meeting I had with them, we talked with them about what percentage of your business is professional services. It was very small at the time. And now I know it has really shifted into different direction because our customers, they not only need the software, but the services that partners like per-cidio provide to help them on this journey are really critical to their success. And so, yeah, it's just been fascinating to see the evolution of how our customers are using the marketplace and partners. I think that's a great place to leave it. I think that, again, when we start to look at this, this really is one of those places where people could get out in front of their skis and buy stuff without having an understanding of how to use it and bring it in. And I think this kind of partnership and getting this out there that this is going on is huge because I think this is really key to those organizations. So, you know, Allison, Todd, Raphael, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thanks, Rob, thanks for having us. Thanks for having me. Well, yeah, and welcome to the party. So stay tuned for more coverage of SuperCloud 5, the battle for AI supremacy. I'm your host and analyst Rob Streche. You're watching theCUBE. You're a leader in enterprise technology, news and analysis. Stay tuned for more.