 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Day one Dell Technologies World 2022, live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We've been here the last couple of hours. You can hear probably the buzz behind me. Lots of folks here. We're thinking around seven to 8,000 folks and the Solution Expo, the vibe is awesome. We've got two guests helping to round out our day one coverage. Ryan Fournier joins us, Senior Director of Product Management, Edge Solutions at Dell Technologies and Munyeb Menhazadeen, Vice President of Edge Computing at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. Oh, glad to be here. Isn't it great to be in person? Oh man, yes. The vibe of day one is awesome. Oh yeah, no. I think it's fantastic. Like people give energy off to each other, right? Absolutely. So lots of, some good news coming out today so far on day one. Let's talk about, let's start, Ryan will start with you, with Edge. It's not new, we've been talking about it for a while, but what are some of the things that are new? What are some of the key trends that you're seeing that are driving changes at the edge? Great, good question. We've been talking to a lot of customers, okay? A lot of customers and the different verticals really find that is a common theme happening around a massive digital transformation and really based on the pandemic, okay? Which caused some acceleration in some, but also not, but many are kind of laggards left behind. And one primary reason is the culture of the OT, IT, you know, lack of barriers or something like that. The OT is obviously the business outcomes, okay, focused, where the IT is more enabling the function. It'll take retail, for example. That's accelerated a significant usage of an in-store frictionless experience, okay? As well as supply chain, automation, warehousing, logistics, connected inventory, a lot of the new use cases in this new normal post that pandemic. It's really that new retail operating landscape. Consumers, we're so demanding. We want the same experience that we have online that we have and we want that in the store and that's really driving a lot of this out of consumer demand. Oh yeah, no, I think, you know, retail, you know, the way you shop for milk and bread changed during the pandemic, right? There was pre-pandemic, the online shopping in the United States was only 5%. But during the pandemic and afterwards, that's kind of caught up to 25, 30%. That's huge. How do you bring new processes in? How do you create omnichannel consumer experiences where online as well as physical are blended together becomes a massive challenge for the retailers? So yes, Edge has been there for a long time. Innovation hasn't happened. But a simple credit card swipe, when you used to pre-pandemic just to go do your checkout, now has become into a curbside pickup. Integration with like, it's just simple payment card processing is not complicated like, you know, crazy. So people are forced to go in a way and that's happening in manufacturing because there are supply chain issues, kid me not. So a lot of that has accelerated this investment and what's kind of driving Edge computing is if everything ran out of the cloud, then you almost need infinite bandwidth. So suddenly people are realizing that everything runs out of cloud, I can't process my video analytics in a store. That's a lot of video, right? Yep. So we often ask ourselves, okay, who's going to win the Edge? You know, we have that conversation, the cloud guys, VMware, you know, Dell, how are they going to go at it? And so to your point, you're not going to do a round trip to the cloud, too expensive, too slow. Now cloud guys will try to bring their cloud, basically on-prem or out to the Edge. You're kind of bringing it from the data center. So how do you see that evolution? No, great question. As the Edge market happens, right? So there's market data now which says, enterprise Edge workloads in the next five years are going to be the fastest growing workloads. But then you have different communities coming to solve that problem. Like you just said, John, is, you know, hyperscalers are going, hey, all of the new workloads were built on us. Let's bring them to the Edge. Data center workloads move to the Edge. Now important community here are, you know, telcos and service providers because they have assets that are highly distributed at the Edge. However, they're networking assets like cell towers and stuff like that. There's opportunity to convert them into compute and storage assets so you can provide Edge computing pops. So you're seeing a convergence of a lot of industry segments, traditional IT, hyperscalers, telcos, and then OT, like Ryan pointed out, is naturally transforming itself. There's almost this confluence of this pot where all these different technologies need to come together. From VMware and Dell perspective, our mission is a multi-cloud Edge. We want to be able to support multi-cloud services because you've heard this multiple times, is at the Edge, consumers and customers will require services from all the hyperscalers. They don't want to buy one hyperscaler suit to not solution. They want to mix and match. So not bound, we want to be multi-cloud. Southbound support IT and OT environments. So that becomes our value proposition in the middle. So Ryan, you were talking about that IT OT schism and we talk about that a lot. I wonder if you could help us parse that a little bit because you were using, for instance, retail as an example. Sometimes I think about the industrial and I think the OT people are kind of like have an engineering mindset. Don't touch my stuff. They're kind of like the IT guys too, but different. So there's so much opportunity at the Edge. I wonder how you guys think about that, how you segment it, how you prioritize it. Obviously retail, telco are big enough that you can get your hands around them. But then there's, to your point about all this data that's going to compute, it's going to come in pockets. And I wonder how you guys think about that schism and the other opportunity out there. So great question. In manufacturing, there's a true OT persona and that really is focused on the business outcomes. Things like predictive maintenance use cases, operational equipment effectiveness. Like that's really about bottleneck analysis and the process that go through that. If the plant goes down, they're fine. They can still work on their own systems but they're not needing that high availability solution. But they're also the decision makers and where to buy the Edge computing. Okay, so we need to talk more to the OT persona from a Dell perspective, okay? And you know, add on to Ryan, right? So, industrial is an interesting challenge, right? So one of the things we did, and this is VMware Dell working together, at VMware world, it was virtual, we announced something called Edge compute stack. And for the first time in 23 years of VMware history, we made the hypervisor layer real-time. What that means is in order to capture some of these OT workloads, you need to get in and operate it between the industrial PC and the program of logical controllers at a sub millisecond performance level because now you're controlling robotic arms that you cannot miss a beat. So we actually created this real-time functionality. With that functionality in the last six months, we've been able to virtualize PLCs, IPCs. So what I'm getting at is we're opening up an entire white space of operational technology workloads which was not accessible to our market for the last 20 plus years. Now we're talking. Yeah, that allows us that control plane infrastructure, the Edge compute, there's purpose built for Edge, allows us to pivot and do other solutions like analytics with the adoption of AI analytics with our recent announcement of Deep North, okay? That provides that in-store video analytics functionality. And then we also partnered with PTC based on a manufacturing solution working with that same Edge compute stack. Think of that as that control plane where, again, like I said, you can pivot off of different solutions, okay? So we leveraged PTC's thing works. So, okay, right. So I wanted to go to that. So real-time is really interesting because much of AI today is modeling done in the cloud. Yes. The real opportunity is real-time inferencing at the Edge. Got it. Okay, now, this is why this gets so interesting and I wonder if Project Monterey fits into this at all. Absolutely does. Because I feel like, so why did Intel win? Intel won, they crushed all the Unix systems out there because it had PTC volumes. And the Edge volume's going to dwarf anything we've ever seen before. So I feel like there's this new cocktail, you guys describe this convergence and this mixture and it's unknown what's going to happen. That's why Project Monterey's so interesting, right? Because you're bringing together kind of hedging a lot of bets and serving a lot of different use cases. Maybe you could talk about where that might fit here. Oh, absolutely. So the Edge Compute Stack is made up of vSphere, Tanzu, which is vSphere's our VM container and Tanzu's our container technology and vSphere contains Monterey in it, right? And we've added vSAN for storage at the Edge and connectivity is SD-WAN because a lot of the times it's far location so you're not having a large footprint, you have one or two hosts, it's more wide area network. So the Edge Compute Stack supports real-time, non-real-time workloads, VMs and containers, CPU, GPU, right? NPU, NPU, DPU, accelerators, DPUs, all of them, right? Because what you're dealing with here is that inferencing real-time because to Ryan's point, when you're doing predictive maintenance, you got to pick these signals up in like milliseconds. So we've gone our stack down to microseconds and we pick up an inform because if I can save this predictive maintenance in two seconds, I save millions of dollars in, you know, wastage of product, right? You may not even persist that data, right? You might just let it go. I mean, how much data does Tesla save, right? I mean. You're absolutely right. A lot of the times all you're doing is this volume of data coming at you, you're matching it to a inferencing pattern. If it doesn't match, you just drop, right? It's not persistent, but the moment you hit a trigger, immediately everything lights go off. You're logging, you're applying outcomes. So it's like super interesting at the edge. And the compute is going to go through the roof. So, yeah, my premise is that, you know, general purpose X86 running SAP is not going to be the architecture for the edge. You're absolutely right. It's going to be low cost, low power, super performance because when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, you're going to blow away the performance that we've ever seen on the curves. There's also a new application pattern. I've called out something called edge native applications. You know, we went through this client-server architecture era. We built all this, you know, a very clear architecture. We went through cloud native, where everything was hyperscale in the compute in the cloud. Both of the times we optimize our own compute. At the edge, we got to optimize our own data because it's not fmoral compute that you have in hyperscale compute space. You have fmoral data you got to deal with. So a new nature of application workloads are emerging. We call it edge native apps. And those have very different characteristics, you know, to client-server apps or, you know, a cloud native apps, which is amazing. It's driven by data analysts like developers, not like .NET Java developers. It's actually data analysts who are trying to mine this with fast patterns and come out with outcomes, right? I love that. Edge native apps, Lisa, that's a new term for me. All right, just trade market on me. I made it up. You heard it first. Can you guys talk about a joint customer that you've really helped to dramatically transform in the last six months? You want to start? I can go. I think my industry is fine. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at VMware, we talked about Oshkosh, which is, again, like in the manufacturing space. We have retailers and manufacturers and, you know, we also brought in, you know, Procter and Gamble and et cetera, et cetera, right? So the customers look at us jointly because, you know, this edge doesn't happen in its own silo. It's a continuum from the data center to the cloud to the edge, right? There's the continuum exist. So if only edge was in its own silo, you would do things. But the key thing about all of this, there's no right place. It's about that workload placement. Where do I place the workload for the most optimal business outcome? Now, for real-time applications, it's at the edge. For non-real-time stuff, it could be in the data center. It could be in a cloud. It doesn't really matter. Where VMware and Dell Strengths comes in with Oshkosh or all of those folks is, we have the end-to-end from, you want to place it in the data center? You want to place it in your own choice of public cloud? You want to derive some of these applications? You want to place it at the far edge, which is a customer prem, or a near edge, which is a telco. We've done joint announcements with telcos like South Korea Telecom, where we've taken their cell towers and converted them into computer and storage so they can actually store it at the near edge. So, this is 5G solutions. I also own the 5G part of the VMware business, but it doesn't matter. Compute network storage, we got to find the right mix for placing the workload at the right place. You call that the near edge? I think of it as the far edge, but that's what you mean, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Way out there. Way out there. In the hinterland, right, okay. Tell them about just optimizing operations, reducing costs, increasing profitability for the customer. So, you said edge, not its own silo, and I agree. It's not a silo. Is mobile a valid sort of example or a little test case? Because when we develop mobile apps, it drove a lot of things in the data center and in the cloud. Is that a way to think about it as opposed to like, PCs work kind of their own silo. Yeah, we connect to the internet, but is mobile a reasonable proxy or no? Mobile is an interesting proxy. When you think about the application again, you know, you've got a platform. By the way, you get excited by this. We've got mobile developers, mobile device manufacturers. You can count them on your fingers. They want to now have these devices sitting in factory floors because now these devices are so smart. They have sensors, temperature controls. They can act like these multi-sensory device at the edge. But the app landscape is quite interesting. I think John, where you were going was, they have a very thin shim app layer that can be pushed from anywhere. The notion of these edge native applications could be virtual machines, could be containers, could be this new thing called WebAssembly, WASM, which is a new type of technology, very thin shim layer, which is mobile-like app layer. But all of these are a combination of how these applications may get expressed. The target platforms could be anywhere from mobile devices to IoT gateways, to IoT devices, to servers, to massive data centers. So what's amazing is this thing can just go everywhere. And our goal is consistent infrastructure, consistent operations across the board. That's where VMware and Dell went together. And I was just talking to a customer today, a major airline manufacturer about the airport of the future with the mobile device just being frictionless. Okay, no one wants to touch anything anymore. You can use your mobile device to do your check-in and you avoid kiosks. So they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the kiosk. Now you need a kiosk for checking baggage. You can't get away with that, but at least that frictionless experience for that airport of the future. But it brings in some other issues. It does, but I like the sound of that. Last question, guys, where can customers go to learn more information about the joint solutions? So you can go to our public websites, obviously search on edge. And if you're here at the show, and there's a lot of hands-on labs, there's a booth over there, a lot of edge solutions that we offer. Yeah, no, as Ryan pointed out, our websites have this. We've had a lot of partnership announcements together because one of the things as we've expressed, manufacturing, retail, when you get in the use cases, they involved ISPs. So they bring the value of not just having a horizontal AI platform. We like opinionated models of fraud detection. So we're actually working with, you know, ecosystem of partners to make this real. So we may even hear more at VMworld. They enrich the vertical solution, I call it, the ISVs, they enrich our vertical solutions. Oh, VMworld's going to be revolutionary. All right, can't wait. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me today and talking about what Dell and VMware are doing together and helping retailers, manufacturers really convert the edge to incredible success. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thanks Lisa, thanks Sean for having us. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. We're wrapping up day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. We'll be back tomorrow. John Furrier and Dave Nicholson join us. We'll see you then.