 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin, welcoming back to theCUBE, one of our distinguished alumni, Travis V. Hilde, SVP of Product Management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. Hey, how's it going, Lisa? Not bad, nice to connect with you virtually. Of course, this year, everything is so different. You've already done virtual CUBE, so welcome back to our very social distance program. Third one, 13 lucky, all right. So back in May, you were on theCUBE talking about the launch of PowerStore, really what Dell Technologies was doing to kind of converge formerly overlapping technologies, like acquisitions, compelling, extreme IO. Give us an update in the last few months on what's going on with PowerStore, customer adoption, momentum, stuff like that. Yeah, it's been almost six months that we've launched the product and it's been an unbelievable experience. Let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, we had to launch PowerStore into a very different world than we had anticipated. The global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everything around the world. Our first priority at Dell is the health and safety of our customers, of our team members, of our partners. And it was a very interesting experience in that this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad backdrop against which we had to launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic momentum. Since launch, we've shipped worldwide over 40, we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. But I think to really talk about momentum and what's going on, it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Start maybe with a healthcare example. Healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt Power Store as a multi-million dollar deal. And what they were trying to do was modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. There was a lot of technical debt and they wanted to modernize things, make things more autonomous and at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into, still they had data centers across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites. And with Power Store because of the efficiency, because of the deduplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual op-ex they had related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year by going to Power Store. So that was a big one. Another good example was an Amia high-tech customer. They adopted Power Store because of Power Store's ability to scale performance and capacity independently. And in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications. And the other is kind of a variable and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this nearly million dollar deal with them. And then one other one that's one of my favorites, an entertainment company in the APJ region, obviously with all of us staying home, I can speak for my kids that are remote learning right over my shoulder. There's a lot more video games going on. And so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing Power Store. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decrease cost of storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development and decreased cost. So those are just a couple of the examples that we have for Power Store. We're seeing great adoption, great traction and really customers and partners are really excited about what we've brought to market. You talked about some of the things that are essential that even back in May when Power Store was launched, no one would have thought here in October 2020 we'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company and APJ being essential as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption. For example, the healthcare organization that you talked about in North America, how quickly were you able to enable that organization to upgrade or migrate to Power Store so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site if it was on-prem because of course that was all the challenges there, right? Yeah, you know, it's a really good question and we had to do, you know this was a brand new product for us and in order to enable proof of concepts in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product is taken an enormous amount of coordination and enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so, you know, it's actually taken a little bit more time than, you know had we been able to fly people around the world to do it but we've gotten very proficient at organizing with the customer being able to host the demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely be able to do our customer briefings remotely. So it is a new world and a new way of doing it but we're doing it very effectively. So Power Store was big from the beginning there were like a thousand engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history. The largest beta that we'd ever done, yes. Launching it during a pandemic that was unpredictable and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through when you're talking to customers what are some of the key differentiators that really make Power Store unique? Yeah, you know, I like to start at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about Power Store because with storage products the architecture is the thing that all future features and capabilities are built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of Power Store, it was a ground up design a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today and the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that be NBME or NBME or SEM. It was microservices based so that, you know it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. You know, when we first launched this array and this fact is true today we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today that was seven times more performant and three times more responsive than any previous mid-range array that we had brought to market. So that core performance is kind of point number one. Point number two, data reduction. Data reduction is the new normal. And with Power Store we have a guaranteed four to one data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of mid-range storage devices that in their particular environment they saw 4.6 to one data reduction and the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than four to one. So being very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture and I talked about it in the high tech company that I mentioned, the European high tech company the ability to scale performance and capacity independently in our scale out design is another differentiator for folks that have been around storage arrays a long time, traditional storage array you would add capacity sometimes when you needed performance or you'd add performance sometimes when you needed capacity by being able to separate those two things customers can really get optimized in their environment for what they're trying to, what their needs are they need more performance, they can add more performance they need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners. And then above and beyond that we brought some industry only capability to market in that we are the only purpose built storage appliance with a built-in VMware ESXi hypervisor. So what this allows customers to do is run VMware based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage that's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables a whole new host of use cases where customers can change the way that they're optimized in the core and also there's a lot of good edge deployments that this new capability can help enable. So it's being architecturally advanced in performance, efficiency and scale up and scale out and bringing industry only capabilities in our integration especially with VMware to market that have really resonated with our customers. Tell me about some of those new use cases that the VMware integration is enabling especially in today's climate with massively scattered workforce that some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding device proliferation what are some of the new use cases that what power store can deliver uniquely as you said is gonna be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? Yeah, I think that there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core but I think the new either remote site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less. And so if you can have hardware that is able to provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device which leads to easier manageability lower total cost of ownership than having to deploy multiple devices. So you great with the stats you show you articulated the value that Dell technology set out to establish with power store all the testing what you're seeing actually in customer environments which is fantastic. When you're talking with analysts looking at what Dell technologies has done when it's in to develop power store. And like I said, you know merging technologies from Component and Extreme IO, et cetera are analysts looking at this as maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing? Yeah, you know, there was some press that was written when we announced that the release of power store established a new benchmark of what was expected from a mid range storage array which was something that was really fulfilling especially after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about that ended the innovation that we had put into it over the course of a multi-year journey. And so what we're seeing whether it be from partners whether it be from analysts whether it be from customers is people really understanding that we have taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio that we're able to direct our R&D investments into a single platform to bring more and more capability to that platform over time. And that message is resonating very strongly. So wrapping things up here power store is in its first five or six months. And during that time, you know crazy things have happened in the world we're in a state of still disarray if you will no pun intended. What is next for the second half of power stores first year? How is Dell Technologies going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now into thriving so that they can be the winners of tomorrow? Yeah, you know, I think the second half of this year the first half of this year was all about getting the product out into market getting people educated on it getting partners trained up on it getting those key early wins, you know establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of more customers getting it into that, you know enabling our partners to, you know amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're gonna see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of more adoption, more momentum and more success on power store. And for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come, when new media comes when new interfaces or interconnect technologies come when we invest in even tighter integration with VMware like at VMworld just a couple of weeks ago we announced that we're partnering with VMware on a new interconnect technology and VME over TCP. That core architecture is so flexible that it can adopt, you know with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me it was getting it out into the market getting it adopted and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market evolves. And as our evolution is sort of unclear the flexibility that you talked about the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well. Travis, thank you so much for sharing with us the moments on the first half of PowerStore's first year and what we can look to see in it's not just second half but going forward, we appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Lisa. My pleasure for Travis B. Hill, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 digital experience.