 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. We have been here since Monday evening, about seven to 8,000 folks here. It's been a fantastically well attended event that Dell has done. Lots of talk about announcements, including Apex. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, we're going to unpack more of Apex with our next two CUBE alumni who are returning. Akansha Mehrotra, VP of Apex Product Marketing joins us and Chad Dunn, VP of Product Management, Apex. Guys, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you for having us. It's really great to be back. So just in case there's anybody out there that's been under a rock since Monday, Apex has now been what GA for a year, celebrating a momentous year and some big news. Akansha, walk us through that and then talk about some of the feedback you've gotten on what you guys announced just two days ago. Yeah, so it's been an exciting week, like you said. Apex, just for sort of background, is our portfolio of as-a-service solutions. We introduced it a year ago. We have now 10 plus services in our portfolio. We added our very first full stack managed service for cyber recovery this week. The feedback from customers over the past year and in the conversations we've had over the course of this week has been phenomenal. If I had to really summarize it, I would say the pain point that we're looking to solve, helping organizations manage data across disparate and fragmented environments across a variety of different clouds, on-premises, in a cold low, on the far edge, at a hyperscaler or in the telco edge is resonating. This is a very real pain point for them. And our goal and our vision to create a consistent and a secure experience across all of these different silos of data, if you will, is something that they really want more of from us. Chad, talk a little bit about the influence of the customer in the last couple of years. Well, in the last year, in terms of releasing the cyber recovery solution on Apex, we have seen a threat landscape massively change. It increases every day. It increases every day. Ransomware is no longer a, is it going to happen to us? It's a matter of when. Talk to us about the influence of the customer, this being the first full stack solution on Apex. Sure, I don't think there's a boardroom in the world where this isn't being discussed as just such a high risk environment for cyber attacks. It's damaging to lose your data. It's damaging to your reputation. It's financially damaging. So it's incredibly important to our customers. And we're finding that many of them don't necessarily have all the expertise to be able to defend against it themselves. And so that's where an as a service solution, like the one that we're offering, really makes sense to them, right? They're much more apt to consume as a service when the competency doesn't necessarily already exist in their IT organizations. So we've been doing this for a few years as a solution with managed services. And in fact, we've deployed over 2,000 of these and making that a standardized offering with t-shirt sizing, subscription basis really seems to be a winner. And every customer I've talked to has been absolutely over the moon with it. All right, so we have Chad in product management. Akankcha, you're in product marketing. So you knew going into this that it was going to be different. So I'm interested in kind of what your learnings were. That internal transformation, which is ongoing now, I understand that. But how did it change? How you manage, you know, deploy the lifecycle of the product and communicate that? I'll get us started and I'm sure Chad will add on. So, you know, to your point, when we started this journey internally, before we started it externally, we knew this was going to be a multi-year transformation for us and a multi-year transformation that affects every part of the company, how we build products, how we market products, how we bring them to market, how we sell them, et cetera. And so we made a very conscious effort to kind of secure that buy-in early on and it starts Michael on down. This is a strategic priority for him as I'm sure both of you know. And each function has kind of established, you know, areas where they know they need to transform and a North Star goal for where they want to get to. So I'll speak for marketing as a place that's, you know, close to my heart. We know as we get into this space, we're going to be talking to different types of folks and having conversations with different types of personas within an account than we have had before. Using Cyber Recovery Solution as an example. Yes, we want to talk to, you know, IT administrators and CIO who we've been talking to. But as Chad said, this is something that CISOs care about. This is something that security teams care about. Those are a different set of personas for us to market to communicate with whose pain points we need to understand better. So that's an example of a change. Another one is moving from a, I mean, events like this are great and we certainly love to be back in person. But as a service model, we want to have much more frequent communication with your intended audiences. So we've moved to more of an always-on marketing motion leveraging our blog, leveraging other vehicles. And that's that has also been a transformation for us. On the marketing side, I'm curious, sorry Dave. Chad, you brought up one of the big things that is a huge challenge for any organization in any industry with respect to the cybersecurity and that threat landscape is brand reputation. Are you having more conversations at the CMO level? I'm just curious if they're involved in this. We got to make sure that we don't have, we're not the next one on the news because customers will churn like crazy. Is that at all part of the conversation and then persona change? It is certainly part of it. But we don't want to be motivated by fear, right? We want to be motivated by preparation and securing the business and growing the business. So it is a C-level discussion to understand how we need to protect our critical data. But it's really from a lens of how do we, how do we grow and we grow more quickly? And if you look at Apex overall, yes, we've made a lot of internal changes to get where we are and we're going to continue to make those and I'll talk through some examples. But this is also a journey for our customers, right? The change to consuming by the drip, consuming Apex, consuming as a service, you could take two companies with identical size and an identical vertical and they're going to have different priorities about how they want to consume this infrastructure and these services. So we're on that journey with them just as we have to transform ourselves internally from the way that we do accounting, from the way that we do sales compensation, from the way that we actually build product. And in fact, we just changed up the model by which we're developing product in Apex today. So I'm about 90 days into my role in Apex, I came from the HCI business and I'm here with my engineering leader who was also in the HCI business. So we were able to be fortunate enough to work in an organization that went from zero to four billion and pretty quickly. So let's see if we can apply some of that learning to this but it's an incredible partnership inside of Dell with people like Dell Digital and our transformation office because we've done things roughly the same way for about 30 years and this is all very new to us. So it's a pretty amazing journey. I'm interested in what's different. You weren't first to market. The public cloud guys might say, that's not cloud. Okay, so how are you different than public cloud and how are you different from your traditional on-prem competitors? Again, I'll get us started and chime in. I would say I'll take your first example. I want to go back to kind of what our customers, where they want help from us and what are they're asking us for. As I said, the debate is over. They have told us pretty definitively and our data and your data shows it that they will and the data will continue to grow in all these different fragmented silos. What they want is an experience that orchestrated across all of these different environments by a vendor that they trust, right? And that's what we are committed to delivering to them. That's our north star, that's where we're going. I would argue that any one of the hyperscalers don't have incentives to kind of make that same experience happen across all those different environments. A vendor like Dell, who has been trusted by many years, for many years from our customer, who doesn't have a single dog in the race but is looking to partner with folks across the entire ecosystem, is looking to innovate with our software, our services and our infrastructure, is best positioned to help them orchestrate across. Well, if you're wondering what's different, you really have to look at what the value proposition is for public clouds versus keeping data on-prem or keeping it in a place where it's accessible to multiple clouds. I think if you haven't been under a rock here at the show, you know this is all about multi-cloud and you know that we're absolutely embracing it from your project Alpine where we're putting storage endpoints in public cloud to what we're doing with Apex and our data storage services and the move of our customers into co-locations where that data can be accessible to multiple clouds. I think that getting the commerce capabilities in place that we've done over the course of the last year is a great first step. But look for us to double down on the day two management and operations using that platform that we've created for Apex and that's going to allow us to create more velocity and bring more solutions into the fold more quickly and then provide more day two management optimization and operation of the solutions by our customers. Okay, so sorry. So definitely agree with the public cloud. I'm not going to trust them to do my multi-cloud or what I call super cloud. What about your traditional competitors? Is it the normal sort of what we'd expect for the Dell differentiators portfolio, supply chain, et cetera? Or are there Apex specific differentiators? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so they're absolutely the Dell differentiators the breadth of our sales force through both our direct sales teams as well as our partners, our secure supply chain, our services team and the expertise that they've built which we're obviously bringing to bear with this market in the software. Those are kind of the Dell wide advantages that we bring to bear with this. But specifically for Apex against the on-prem, traditional on-prem competitors, I would say the simplicity with which we are bringing our offers to market is a differentiator for us and it's one that our customers in the past year have reiterated back to us. So the commerce experience that Chad was just talking about, we have made very conscious efforts to simplify and abstract away that complexity from our customers so that they are picking very easy to understand outcomes that they care about and then not really worry about the piece parts, whether it's the hardware, the software or the services that help make that service level outcome happen. I would argue some of the other competitors, traditional competitors that we have haven't done that and it's more of a, that complexity is still there and what we hear from our customers is I want the, I want the simplicity and agility that public cloud provides. That's something that hyperscalers did get right and we're bringing that experience to our infrastructure. I think the other way that we'll differentiate ourselves is going to be by the breadth of the solutions. So we've got a tremendous amount of IP in solutions like cyber recovery, right? This wasn't a new thing for us. This is something we've been doing for a few years as there's tremendous consulting capabilities, services capabilities, the underlying products, of course. Well, there's a pipeline of solutions lined up behind that. So as we move into high performance compute as a service, ML ops as a service, we can draw on those solutions that we've offered but in a very custom way in the past now at a high velocity manner in the console. And the high velocity these days is critical as we've seen the last two years things have changed so dramatically for customers in every industry that needed to pivot with speed and accelerate their transformation. And the transparency, right? So going back to the example and having that price transparency, you can go to our website and look at the pricing, pick in the two or three very simple options and see it right there and order it through the console in a matter of minutes versus, you know, wait for two weeks to get the code and then wait for a month to get the hardware and then wait for the services team to show up. So what we're hearing, I mean, we have truly been able to take deployments that used to take several months to a matter of days. And so that's how the simplicity kind of, you know, pays off not only in that initial deployment but over the course of the subscription, the day two operations that Chad was just talking about and the innovation and the work that we're doing to simplify their lives in that process allow them to focus in other areas. Oh, absolutely. Time to value, time to market has never been more critical. And the ability to, to your point, I'll count it to allow folks to be able to focus more on the strategic initiatives that will actually help move the business forward and allow it to be competitive and differentiate itself is critical for everybody in every industry. Chad, I wanted to kind of pivot on multi-cloud for a second. You talked about that. And we had Chuck Whitton on yesterday. He was talking about, you know, multi-cloud, a lot of organizations, many, many, many in multi-cloud by default. Yeah, what Dell wants to do is change that. Multi-cloud by design. Is Apex going to be a facilitator of multi-cloud by design? Talk to us about that for customers. We absolutely will be. So if you, if you look at what made customers multi-cloud by default, it's them going for the services that exist in the cloud and looking for best of breed service, whether it's machine learning, speech recognition, database, they're going to those best of breed players. And so the value proposition for us is that you're in those, in those clouds. You want access to your data and you want it centrally so you can see it, leverage it, use it from any of those clouds. But you may have other reasons for keeping your data or even your computer on-prem or in a co-location. It could be data sovereignty. It could be policy compliance. It could be data gravity. So we want to make the concept of having your workloads or your data anywhere very seamless for our customers. Right, so it's really embracing the concept of multi-cloud and making it easier. The cyber recovery solution is really interesting to me. I was talking to one of the partners here and they said, hey, this was a really good show for us. And they probably had a quasi-competitive solution. I don't really know, but like a lot of, a lot of customers and you know, they got a lot of leads out of it great. So it's the hot topic. And that's what they said. This is cyber, everybody wants cyber. So how did that solution come together? Because I know you, you're really, it's always been security conscious, but I never really fully rocked the security solution. And now here it is in Apex. It's like, boom, out of the box or out of the service. How'd that come about? It really started back in 2014 specifically. It's funny when you can point to an event where you know, something started like this. So there was a fairly high profile ransomware attack in 2014. And that caused us to look at the assets that we had from our data protection portfolio from a software and storage perspective and say, hey, we can put something together that can really address this, right? Through novel use of existing technology. So we built out reference architectures. We built out the consulting service on how you protect your data. We partnered and built software to be able to secure the data in an air-gapped immutable vault and offer the services to be able to manage that, monitor that, restore the data when needed. So we did that in a very custom way for years. In fact, as I said, over 2,000 systems deployed this way. So having a vehicle like Apex that has the as-a-service capability built in, the subscription capability built in, the ease and velocity of purchasing operating was really a natural fit. So we expect this is going to be a very high volume solution for us. Awesome. Aconkash, can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem involved here in Apex? You know, when I think about ransomware and data protection, I think organizations need to be able to protect apps, users, data, platforms. But we think of how data is so spread out. Customers want that single pane of glass to be able to manage all that and know that that data is protected. Talk to us about how you're working with partners. I know the partner ecosystem at Dell is huge. How are you working with partners and how can they build upon Apex? Yeah. So our partners are a very important part of our ecosystem. They help expand our reach. They also help complement our capabilities. For example, in specific verticals, they may have services or expertise in a particular area. For the Apex portfolio, we actually offer a wide variety of ways for partners to engage with us. Starting out, they could refer our solutions and refer some of our services if they want to take more of an advisory role in some capacity. They could resell our services with additional services included. In this scenario, for example, they would leverage our console, include some of their services in there, and then offer it to their end customers. They could host Apex offers in their own data center or in a COLO data center and build their practice on top of it. A lot of our partners and customers, we've got kind of joint customer partners that, for example, have built a healthcare practice on top of an Apex solution where they've added their services or built their business on top of it. And then finally, there's, of course, technology and ISV partners, right? And that is where we might leverage some of their technology, built it to be part of a service or a solution that we're doing that jointly go to market. So I think the answer is there's lots of ways for partners to engage with Apex and we absolutely are engaging with them in a wide variety of ways, and I think cyber recovery is no different. Well, there must be not a dull moment with what you guys have going on with Apex. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us about that. Sounds like the momentous year that you've had is going to continue, and it sounds like you've gotten great feedback from the customers and the partners so far. Thank you for joining theCUBE and telling us what's going on. We can't wait to hear more next year. I'm sure there will be lots more next year. Yes, indeed. Thanks guys. Thank you very much. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.