 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of Sousa's partners. We have Mark O'Regan. He is the CTO of AMIA for Dell Technologies. Mark, it is great to see you. We all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa D'Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland. So thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here, really looking forward to getting you guys here. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be, but once we're all safe and well, great to talk. Yeah, well, absolutely. That's the important thing. Everybody is safe. We've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I had actually circled this one on my calendar because I wanted to get back to the Emerald Isle. But Mark, let's talk first, the Dell and Sousa relationship disclaimer. I've got a little bit of background on this. I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them many moons ago. So I know the Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with Sousa go back a couple of decades, but bring us into what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. Yeah, sure Stu. So quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with Sousa and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate. We've been doing that with Sousa for 16, 17 years right back to Sousa Enterprise Linux sitting on PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into some of the developments and collaborations that we worked through with the Sousa teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then fluid cash technology. So when you look at OLTP kind of environments what you want to kind of get away from is the read, write, commit and latency that are inheriting those types of environments. So as you start to build and get more users hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and Sousa has been absolutely instrumental to helping us build out an architecture and with our fluid cash technology back in the day. And the Sousa technology sitting around and under that. And then of course, in more recent times really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess has been absolutely a pleasure to watch it to be involved with, to see it mature. So some of the cool platforms that we're developing with Sousa together it's pretty neat. So, one of those being... So Mark, yeah, bring us up to speed. Right in the early days, it was Linux on the Sousa side, it was servers and storage from the Dell side. Today, it's microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So bring us up to speed as some of the important technologies and obviously both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio than they would have years ago. Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building out architectures that are suitable for small, medium and enlarge environments. The common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise-grade architectures. Now, the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them by the letter of the law, but they are a framework by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like this Sousa Enterprise storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So it's built on self-architecture under the hood, but both ourselves and Sousa have brought a level of innovation into an arena where you need cost and you need low latency and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess, a moment ago and into this new cloud-native ecosystem that you've just spoken to a few months ago. So on the cloud-native side, we're also heavily collaborating in near-co-engineering with Sousa on their CAS technologies. So here, it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data-hub and SAP. So part of the Intelligent Enterprise for SAP, this is where Sousa and Dell Tech together really get into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You may have Oracle, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel, and you're trying to extract data and information from that data from those different side of the environments. And the CAS technology brings its micro-OS capability to the fore in that regard. And our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to bring that scale out platform, cloud-native platform into the ecosystem. All right, so, Mark, you've got the CTO hat on for the European Theater there. When we've been talking to Sousa, when they talk about their innovation, obviously the community and open source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud-native pieces. Give us what you're seeing when it comes to, how is Dell helping drive innovation? And how does that connect with what you're doing with partners like Sousa? Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech, we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. We have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate. And we get the chance to go ahead and work with Sousa and other partners as well. What Sousa and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously take technologies, we'll take them apps into the office of the CTO, look at new emerging tech look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And Sousa very much one of those partners as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with Sousa in one of the labs in Waldorf in Germany where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. Another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms. They need to look at this cloud-native world, they need to look at how they can platform for success in this cloud-native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess, about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in in the past, but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is native world. Yeah, Mark, you talk about customers going through these transformations. Wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers' overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that touch on the cloud. You know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and Sousa and like SAP solutions. We've been looking at how those modernize. So, you know, where does cloud fit and would love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion? Yeah, sure. So, again, ourselves and Sousa go back in history. You know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So, we had an open-stack platform that we both collaborated on. And, you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multi-cloud world that we're kind of living in right now is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, yes, of this open-cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across those types of domain? The other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. As we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinarily accurate and an extraordinarily performant way. And having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So, I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub, a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, as a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework. So, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as we can. And that means having to, in some way, get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, number of decades, into a more horizontally-scale-out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value for the users and for the users and for the providers of the services who are building these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CAS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of problems and those types of challenges. And on the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the storage solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So, I was involved to a number of years ago in a CEP program on the Irish government network. And so, these would have been very big. And one of the earliest, to be honest, CEP farms that I was involved with, probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now, was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire CEP scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So, yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond. And that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. So, Mark, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. Sure. You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impacts partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times. Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess, of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry that we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic. We have a problem that's distributed by its very nature. And I'm trying to find patterns, I guess. I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment, but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatment for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things, then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount. So, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partner's infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much 0% finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology. And to these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying upfront. They can start to look at a financial model that will suit them. And that will hopefully accelerate their time to market and trying to solve some of these problems that we've been speaking. Well, Mark, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. Stu, my pleasure. Thank you. Take care and stay safe. Thanks. Same to you. All right. I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more covered from Susakan Digital 20. Thank you, Solis, for watching The Cube.