 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here in our CUBE studios in Massachusetts getting ready for the first in-person DTW since 2019. You know, Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor and former Oracle exec once said on theCUBE, friends don't let friends build data centers anymore. It's just not the best use of capital for most companies unless you happen to be in the data center business like Sixterra. Organizations want to make hybrid connections with the cloud. They need a partner that knows how to build and manage world-class data centers that are both efficient and resilient. And in this segment, we're going to talk about the importance of hybrid strategies for organizations, how they're approaching hybrid and why a partner strategy is important to support the next decade of digital transformation initiatives. And with me are Randy Roland, who's the COO of Sixterra and Holland Barry, who is the field CTO for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Good to be here, thanks for having us. Hey, Randy, as a relatively new player, unlike a lot of data center operators, Sixterra, you're not shackled by decades of technical debt. Tell us more about the company. Yeah, so as you already discussed, Sixterra is a data center company and we're one of the few providers that can provide co-location globally. And so that allows our customers to scale across the globe as our business scales. We operate in 28 markets. We have over 60 data centers and we continue to add more dots to the map based on customer demand. And the primary way we differentiate is that we've built a true global data center platform. And what do I mean by that is that we have a combination of 2,300 customers, enterprises, technology service providers, government agencies, we're a leader in interconnection. We have a commitment to carry neutrality and to provide low latency access to all the different cloud platforms. And we've made major investments in developing our own technology and house. And this will come out as we talk about hybrid cloud is to make our data centers easier to consume. We live in a cloud-first world and so we've got to be able to be responsive and be able to deliver capacity on demand and to allow our customers to dynamically connect to each other so they can start to consume these valuable services. And so that's really what we're doing in Sixterra. You know, Randy, just a follow-up is because when the cloud first came out, everybody said, oh, companies like yours, data center operators, this is a toast. And the exact opposite happened. It was like this rising tide lifted all boats. The business is booming. It's actually quite remarkable, isn't it? Yeah, actually, it's a good point. We actually lean into cloud consumption. I think if you remember, the cloud operates in four walls. And so when a company actually starts to deploy and leverage more cloud, they need a place to land their digital infrastructure hub where they can make connections to all the different cloud solutions they're going to consume and they're using their own internal resources at the same time. And so the more that we adopt cloud and lean into cloud, the more likely our customers are going to choose us. And back to your opening comment about the quote from the Oracle executive. In my career, I've been in the data center business for a long time and it's definitely a generational thing. We have newer generation of IT leaders that when they think about their internal data center, their actual internal data center is ours. They're not thinking about their own four walls sitting on their own property like they did historically. And so they view internal data centers as the contracts they have with six Terra and companies like six Terra. Excellent. All right, Holland, let's bring you into the conversation. What are you seeing with hybrid cloud strategies? Why are companies choosing hybrid? Give us some color there. Yeah, I think we as a company sit in an interesting confluence of some workload movements, if you will. So I think there's been, in some cases, an overcorrection into public cloud. People thought that a cloud first strategy meant that you have to throw everything up into public cloud, especially over the last couple of years when we had the surprise of a large remote workforce. And as you mentioned at the top of the call, Dave, we also have folks with a shrinking appetite to own and operate their data centers. So the hybrid approach is a selective methodology to really look at the applications, look at the strengths of each one of those venues where you can run your applications and workloads and really choosing the one that uses the strengths. And there's several drivers behind that, some of them are costs, some of them are performance, some of them might have to do a security or data sovereignty. So you can really match those requirements and the business outcomes that you're looking to achieve and align them with that platform that's best suited to serve it. So you mentioned a few of them, but I want to sort of stay on that for a minute. Is it egress cost, everybody talks about that? Latency, proximity to the cloud. I mean, I think there's a lot of times I think the ideal situation is you put your high performance transaction, low latency stuff in one of your data centers. And a lot of the data is in the cloud that you might need access to, but is there other innovation? Talk a little bit more about the drivers that you're seeing with customers. Absolutely, I think as it relates to data gravity and the potential relation to egress charges, that is a huge consideration because there's a cost and a performance component to that. If you decide you want to take that data and move it somewhere else, if it's in the public cloud, you're going to pay some pretty large egress fees. But there's certainly other drivers, performance being another big one. If I've got a data lake or a big data analytics platform or maybe an AI platform that needs to live close to the data, and especially if those workloads are associated with crunching the data are kind of high, steady state, maybe even mission critical workloads. But it's certainly a workload profile that's better suited to run within our four walls. You can have the CPU or GPU compute nodes sitting right next to those large data sets operating with each other at land speed. So in terms of the drivers behind making a venue change, if you will, I think cost is one of the biggest ones that we see and maybe performance and security following close after. So how are customers approaching hybrid? Can you paint a picture of kind of what that connection looks like and how they land on their strategies? Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing what I like to call a workload appropriateness exercise. And as they think about recalibrating where those workloads live, exactly what I said before, they're looking at the strengths of the platform and lining up those application profiles to live in the appropriate place. We have a unique advantage because of our interconnection profile and our adjacency to public cloud platforms where people want to have application tiers that may be set on both sides of the fence, if you will. We have super, super low latency connections. You can connect layer two, maybe out to AWS and have your DPC on one side, have dedicated single tenant environments on our side and have those applications interact with each other in a super low latency fashion. Hey, let me just ask a follow-up question on that because I remember the Y2K days, there was a lot of activity, a lot of spending and then CIOs wanted to look at their portfolio and rationalize that portfolio. When you talk about workload appropriateness, are you seeing a similar application rationalization exercise going on or is it just like, hey, keep spending? Absolutely, we're seeing rationalization and I think what's happening is folks are getting a little more savvy about forecasting the growth of their application, the growth of the data associated with it, what the cost may be associated with needing to move them around to different venues. And so we're definitely seeing people look at those numbers and make decisions about workload placement based on that analytics and kind of knowledge of what it means down the road and also where the data might need to live locally too. We're seeing people being a little more cognizant geographically around data, where it lives and how that relates to where the compute associated with that data is. Yeah, makes sense. Hey, Randy, can you tell us a little bit more from a business perspective about the Dell partnership? How did that come about? Who does what? What are the swim lanes, overlaps? Maybe you can help us understand that. Yeah, so we're very excited about our Dell partnership. As you can imagine with as many customers and many data centers as we've got deployed, we have Dell located in a large percentage of our customer environments. And so it's just natural that we work together to figure out how we can continue to meet our customer's needs. And so the core idea that I'm excited about around Dell is that Dell has an excellent technology platform on all fronts. They've got great compute and storage and all types of software solutions. And what we wanna do is help them make their platform more on demand. And so what do I mean by that? If you think about the historical time it takes to deploy a traditional COLO environment, from the time you spec the cage, to you ship the equipment and install the network, you rack and stack the equipment and load the cloud stack, it takes weeks to months to deploy. And so what we're doing is working very closely with Dell to look at our existing customers and new prospects that are interested in their platform and how can we pre provision that capacity in the data center, make it so it's already plugged into the data center already is powered up. It's connected to the network and a customer can purchase it on demand. And so the idea behind this is how can we give our customers all the benefits of COLO, which is what Holland was talking about a minute ago, but deliver that platform at the speed of cloud. And that's really the essence of the partnership we have with Dell. We think it could be explosive. We think there's a lot of opportunity, not only for us, but also for Dell as they continue to retain their customers and their customers go through tech refresh cycles, if they can have on demand technology that they're already familiar with, they can get the benefits that you get from co-location at the speed of cloud. And that's what are the basis of our relationship. Yeah, thank you so Holland. I mean, as Randy was saying, one of the pillars of Dell tech world this year is the whole as a service thrust. And essentially what it is, my viewpoint is Dell's building out its own cloud. It's aspiration, I think, is to connect on-prem through hybrid, to public clouds, across clouds, out to the edge, extract out all that complexity. And you guys would be a key part of that. From a CTO's perspective, that's a different mindset. I mean, it changes the way we manage, think about, procure, spend, and maybe even the technical configurations of how we deliver and consume IT. Can you give us some thoughts on that? Absolutely, look, I think what we're doing is we're laying the foundation for a truly hybrid experience. Randy mentioned us going through great lengths with our technology partners like Dell to make the data center consumable in an automated fashion. And so as we increasingly move into technology as like containers and using coordinators, managers like Kubernetes, we really now have the ability to make a true hybrid experience. And if you think about the experience of deploying in a data center, whether it's your own or a code like ours, that was, you know, a 60 to 90 day conversation to get that infrastructure spun up. And so now if you can consume public cloud resources, just like we've been used to doing where you can swipe a card and get access to infrastructure in a matter of minutes or hours, have the same experience with us, we've kind of closed that last mile of infrastructure delivery. And the other neat thing about this is if you have a cloud-first mandate, if some of those workloads are running in a six-terra data center, we check all those same boxes, right? We have infrastructure that sets off back to have a global platform. We have, you know, highly automated environments. So you can really now start extracting yourself a little bit from the infrastructure and start focusing on the important stuff, which the applications that sit on top. So from a security standpoint, you have a similar, you know, the cloud guys talk about the shared responsibility model. Is that a similar model that you guys have? Can you describe that? Yeah, it's very analogous to the shared responsibility model. And then public cloud, we give a little bit more control to our customers, like things like, you know, dictate maintenance windows. We give a little bit more control in terms of access to the infrastructure. It's one of the reasons that organizations like running infrastructure with us is because we can hand off control to these certain things at the lower levels of the infrastructure stack versus the higher level of abstraction that happens with public cloud. And what kind of skills are you after these days? Is it people that can squeeze, you know, more power and, you know, more efficient cooling? Is it infrastructure management? You mentioned Kubernetes before. What matters to a company like yours from a skill standpoint? Yeah, in terms of our staff, it is at the lower levels of the stack, if you will. So maybe going, you know, up to layer two or three, if we think about the OSI model. So certainly power engineering, cooling engineering, the stuff that physically runs our data center. That's our meat and potatoes. That's important to us. But as you consider a digital platform, certainly networking, know how, knowledge of the entire stack, knowing how things are architected, understanding how cloud work, understanding how cloud connectivity works. These are all super, super important skills set. So we span the spectrum a bit, but it's less on the upper ends of it, you know, kind of going up to layer seven. Although I'd imagine that data center automation is obviously a big part of your IP, right? Is that something that you guys bring to the table? Yes? Yeah, it's actually one of our key innovations is around how we've architected our software platform, how we do our automation, how we run our network. We've built a super, super innovative SDN fabric that powers all of our Metro regions that enables to delivery the infrastructure that hangs off of it. So yeah, a huge percentage of our IP is around that software innovation and that networking automation. Great, Randy, I wonder if you could close it out for us, I'd love your thoughts on where you'd like to see the Dell partnership go and any other information you'd like to leave the audience with. Yeah, I think you've asked a couple of questions about the perspective from a CTO and the way that we want to build our solutions is if you are a CTO or if you're a cloud architect, what we're trying to build is a set of Legos to allow you to assemble your ultimate hybrid IT solution to use a combination of traditional co-location where you have equipment that you own that you manage, on-demand bare metal from great partnerships like we have with Dell that can augment what you have in Colo, have access to a rich ecosystem of technology providers that sit in the same data center markets so that you can start to actually augment your IT architecture with a lot of our solution providers that sit within our markets, access to cloud on ramps so you get low latency, access to public cloud and start to leverage some of the technologies they have and also have the ability to switch, right? If you start with one cloud provider and at some point you find something more cost efficient or a little bit more architecturally built that we can facilitate that switch and then also to have connectivity to all the different network carriers that we have and also to do it globally, right? And so our mission is to give the CTO and the cloud architect the ultimate set of Legos to build their custom solution that's highly cost effective and meets all the technology requirements. Yeah, hedging that risk and having exit strategies I think is huge. Every customer needs to think about that before they dive into the cloud. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great discussion. Thank you, thank you for having us. And thank you for watching our ongoing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. The in-person live version where we insert great deep dive interviews like this one that focus on key customer topics. 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