 Organizations are rapidly adopting container technologies to accelerate agile cloud native application development delivery. But with the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments, organizations need partners to help them take the guesswork and risk out of DevOps and platform engineering workflows. Dell and Red Hat have joined forces to introduce the Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, which is designed to address the challenges and simplify cloud native deployments. Welcome to the future of native infrastructure is now. I'm Dave Vellante and I'll be one of your hosts. Later in this episode, CUBE research analyst Rob Streche will be joined by Caitlin Gordon of Dell Technologies. Caitlin is the VP of ISG Product Management for Multi-Cloud and DevOps and she'll be joined by Chris Morgan, Senior Director, Technical Marketing and Partner Products Executive for Red Hat's hybrid platforms. And they're going to talk about their new joint cloud offering. But first, I had the opportunity to talk with Sudhir Srinivasan, Senior Vice President, Multi-Cloud and Data Solutions and CTO Emeritus at Dell Technologies about some of the challenges of managing multiple clouds. So get ready because the future of native infrastructure is now. The rise of cloud native concepts created a rush to cloud, enabling a more agile development and deployment for applications. The challenge is multiple clouds create complexity in terms of variances in operating environments, tools and processes. And with me is Sudhir Srinivasan, who's the Senior Vice President of Multi-Cloud and Data Solutions at Dell Technologies to talk about some of these issues. In studio, welcome Sudhir. Thanks for coming in. Thank you Dave. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. Now about a month ago, we met with Shannon Champion from Dell Technologies to discuss your new family of Apex cloud platforms. And today Sudhir and I are going to discuss what's new and we're going to take a closer look at how this next generation technology is bridging the cloud divide for IT. So Sudhir, let's recap if we could, the Apex portfolio approach, the strategy, the challenges that you're focused on for your customers and then specifically, what should we know about Apex cloud platforms? Awesome, thank you. Thank you Dave. I think it starts with what you said, exactly what you said, which is the complexity. The number one problem that we see our customers facing is more and more operational complexity because it's multi-cloud. Most of our customers are still trying to get hybrid done right and now they're having to deal with multiple clouds. So we talked about in the past our multi-cloud by design strategy and that really has three legs or three pillars, I would say. The first is we're enriching the public clouds by bringing our software defined storage assets into the public cloud so we can offer the same level of capabilities, enterprise-grade storage capabilities in the cloud. That's what we call our ground to cloud piece. The second piece is connecting the cloud operating environments back on-prem and that's what we call cloud to ground and that's what we're going to talk a little bit more about today, the announcement we're going to talk about. And then the third piece is optimizing that experience, multi-cloud experience to be able to give that cloud consumption experience subscription as a service, no matter where you are, whether you're in the cloud or you're on-prem. So it's this, we've taken a holistic approach to multi-cloud that really simplifies operations across cloud, on-prem, edge, wherever. And the trick is how do you deliver that consistency at all layers of the stack, right? All the way from infrastructure, all the way up to the application layer. And that's where this new stuff comes in. Okay, so the new stuff, the Apex cloud platform family, you're saying addresses operational consistency and this includes on-prem, correct? Can you tell me more about what these are? Yeah, so if you think about sort of cloud native, as you said, there's a lot of applications, modern applications are being developed in the cloud or in modern app dev environments like Kubernetes and containers, right? So what we set out to do was to bring those operating environments to the customers on-prem as easy as it is to consume in the cloud. And we've done this in the past with on-prem infrastructure like VMware, right? We've had a lot of success, years of success delivering that level of ease of use and automation in hyper-converged infrastructure on-prem. We're doing that now for multi-cloud as well. So we, just like we did in the past, we're now collaborating very closely with three partners, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware to co-engineer these turnkey solutions. They're really turnkey solutions that dramatically reduce your operational complexity and ease of use. All right, so you got to giving customers choice, that's important and we've talked before about the need for this. I'm sorry, yeah, we're giving choice, consistency and control. That's what the Apex cloud platforms offer. Okay, you got the three Cs, choice, consistency and control. Okay, so choice is, in other words, any cloud on-prem consistency, we've talked in the past about sort of the need to abstract all that underlying complexity and have a common experience that obviously gives you control. How do you actually do that in these platforms? Yeah, great question. I think the three Cs actually start with consistency. That's the founding, the base capability. And we achieve that through using common building blocks across all of the Apex cloud platform family. And the building blocks are actually three of them, right? The first is the hardware. So we bring to our industry best industry leading power edge servers. The next generation is sort of the latest generation of power edge servers, which are all based on the Intel fourth generation Xeon scalable processors. So you're getting the best compute across all of them and it's common. The second piece is the software defined storage. Now that again, independent of which stack you're using, which cloud stack, you're getting the same software defined storage across all of them. So you get that consistency. And then the last piece is the management and orchestration software that makes this platform be what it is, which is a turnkey solution, right? Extreme levels of automation that give you a sass time to value. And that's also common across all of them. So discussions like this, I like to invoke Einstein, like an adapt an Einstein saying. So my take on this is move as much data as you need to, but no more. Now, but you still have to have data mobility. So how are you addressing data mobility for customers? That's actually, we talked about infrastructure complexity. Data is actually another yet another level of complexity for customers. Data is everywhere. Sometimes you have to move the data to where the application is. Sometimes you move the workload to where the data is. And we set out to solve this using what we call our universal storage layer, right? We talked about the common storage. So it's this storage stack that's available both on-prem and in the clouds. That's how the two pieces come together, the cloud to ground and the cloud, the ground to cloud. So we get, the customer can get the same storage services and operational interfaces everywhere. And not only that, because it's the same storage stack on both sides, we can actually leverage very efficient data mobility techniques or mechanisms between them. So we're moving data in much more efficient ways. And because it's the same operational interface, customers don't have to re-platform their application, whether you're going from in the cloud to on-prem or vice versa or so. Yeah, so obviously moving data can be time consuming and expensive. So you could give us some use cases where data mobility, where you're kind of making that an enabler as opposed to a roadblock for customers. Sure, I mean the most common one we get is again the application delivery one, right? Where customers might want to spin up a development environment in the cloud to enable their developers to actually develop the application, but they may choose to deploy it in production on-premises. You can do that now without having to worry about it being different across the two locations. The one that's even more compelling I would say is the world of data and especially now with AI, right? The speed at which or the rate at which customers need to consume resource infrastructure to do analytics and to do AI is just incredible. And so you may not always be able to have those resources in one location. And with the universal storage layer now, you can actually move data to wherever you need, wherever you might have the GPUs, for example, to be able to do your AI or machine learning over there and then bring the results back. Got it. Okay, so you got this common framework for management and orchestration. Can you add a little bit of color there and tell me more about that? Yes, that's what we call our Apex Cloud Platform Foundation software, you know. This is the software that we have spent years now developing in the world of, excuse me, in the world of hyperconversion infrastructure and software-defined infrastructure. What we've done now is taken that software which delivers all the automation and lifecycle management and make it available to beyond just the hyperconversion into this multi-cloud infrastructure. And because of the experience that we've built into this, you know, customers are seeing as much as 90% reduction in deployment time, for example, or 88% reduction in the number of steps required to deploy a stack, a development environment stack. And this, not only do we do the automation across the Apex Cloud Platforms, we've also integrated this foundation software into the partner's management plane. So what that does is it gives a customer that similarity with their cloud environment. So they can still leverage that, but it also gives consistency across the cloud environments. So it's the best of both worlds. This is good. I mean, it's impressive. You guys taking a holistic approach to the problem. You're addressing this complexity, you know, head-on, which is what customers want you to do. Any closing thoughts, Sidir? Oh, look, we are very excited to bring the Apex Cloud Platform family. Last month, we announced the one for Azure and today we're announcing the one for Red Hat and OpenShift. And it's going to bring tremendous value to our customers and partners and giving them choice, consistency, and control across their multi-cloud estate. That's good. You guys doing some good work. Thanks for coming into the studio today. Thanks, Dave. You're welcome. All right, about a month ago, Dell introduced the first platform in this new Apex family with the Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft, Azure. Now it's time for everyone to hear more about the next offer to market the Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. So stick around as Chris Morgan, who's the Senior Director of Product Management at Red Hat, joins Caitlin Gordon, who is the Vice President of Product Management from Dell, to dig into this exciting new offer and explain its potential to transform OpenShift operations on-prem. We just heard from my colleague Dave Vellante and Sidir Srinivasan from Dell on the overview of Apex Cloud Platform. I'm Rob Streche, Analyst with theCUBE Research, and today we're gonna talk to some people from Dell and Red Hat about a joint cloud offering. I'm so excited to welcome back to theCUBE Caitlin Gordon, Vice President, Product Management from Multi-Cloud and DevOps at Dell, and Chris Morgan, Senior Director of Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Yeah, this is fun because I think, again, when I look at cloud and I look at hybrid and I look at going different places, I really do think Red Hat and Dell, these are two of the major brands that are pretty much everywhere in here. So Chris and Caitlin, today is really exciting because you're here to announce the Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. And I think, again, this is one of those that is super exciting in the fact that, you know, you can take your applications that you've containerized and such multiple different places. So Caitlin, can you share with us what brought you to this partner together and bringing this to market? Yeah, I mean, it is definitely an exciting day for us and our customers for a long time have continued to struggle with how do they get better agility? How do they get more flexibility in where they build, where they deploy their applications? Now that was for a number of years, virtualization increasingly that's containerized workloads, Gardner predicts that 95% of enterprises are gonna have containers deployed in production by 2028, which is not that far away. And really for customers, that means it's a combination of public cloud and on-prem. And we knew that we really wanted to help simplify that and experience on-prem. And there was clearly only one partner to work with to do that. And that was Red Hat. And that was really why it was a natural combination of Dell to simplify that experience. Red Hat is the leader of container orchestration on-prem to come together to bring this to our customers. Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out who the other 2% is that's not gonna have containers deployed in production because I haven't talked to a customer who isn't building in microservices and containers. So Chris, why don't you share your thoughts? You don't have to share them particularly on Caitlin, but I'm the joint offering here and what are you bringing? For me, the journey started, I guess, 18 plus months ago. And I'll be honest with you, when we were first asked, it's like Dell again. But now it's just what's been really exciting is are the changes. This is about creating an experience, as Caitlin mentioned. Before, we've had a long history with Dell where it's been about putting our operating system on a piece of metal. And this is really about now taking a lot of that and bringing it together. I mean, in many ways, we've been about hybrid for a long time at Red Hat. And so this is really an extension of that where hybrid's becoming more about the experience than just a consistent technology. Yeah, I think that that is the key is doing it together and being very integrated because that's where platform engineering needs to be easier and things of that nature. So let's kind of get into Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. And I will get it right most of this time. But you know, and Caitlin, why don't you kick us off here and kind of tell us how this platform is different and what's special about it? Yeah, in a lot of ways, our partnership is not new, but the level of this partnership is what is new. This is truly a jointly engineered. Chris and I talk a lot because it is truly jointly engineered. And it's a turnkey appliance that we have built truly to simplify the experience. But there's a lot of really unique things about this platform. You know, a lot of what we talk about now is that this is so unique that we're having to really explain the basics of it to a lot of people because it is so unique with nothing any either of us have ever done before. A couple pieces of that, right? It's optimized for bare metal, which we'll dig into later hopefully. That alone is very different. We've unified the application and the data plan. So you really collapse that down and you really simplify the whole stack. And it brings together the compute, the storage, the container orchestration, all in one turnkey experience. I had to double check these numbers from my marketing team. But we have simplified the management and reduced the management tasks by 98%. So there's like another 2% left of something left that you still have to do. I think it's a click that you still have to do. You've really just. I think you calculated it wrong. I mean, you may have to double check it. So I think it's right. I think you calculated it wrong. The simplicity is at the level of simplicity that we're bringing here. And the optimizations on bare metal is just extremely unique. Yeah, and I would add, it is unique, but it's also unexpected. We here, as I'm sure all of you here, oh, we're going to the public cloud. And I kind of, I don't know if I could say, but it's just making bare metal sexy again in some ways. It never went away. But I think as we talked about, there's VMs are considered legacy now. And so this is really a way, if you want to modernize the infrastructure, it's a way you bring your containers and your VMs and gosh, even other clusters together on one control plane. And that, to me, is really what makes it a unique offering for those customers that are looking to upgrade their infrastructure, but keep some things the same. I mean, we all still have mainframes, right? And those were supposed to go away in the mid-90s. And so I think it's the same that we're going to see here too. Yeah, well, it's funny because I also know that you can run OpenShift on a mainframe, which is another funny thing. But I think a lot of it is about the customers and why they should care, right? I mean, customers to our discussion already are really leaning into microservices. And we were talking and I think on average, the customers have in their cloud native applications, they have something like 18 to 20 different containers are part of applications. So again, that manageability and ease of use and that integration from the bare metal has to be there. So Caitlin, why should customers really care about and how are they going to benefit from this collaboration? Well, the first thing is that that bare metal piece is so important. We've talked about it. That's a cost to complexity reduction. It's also a performance increase for your workloads because you really have removed that layer. And it's actually gives you security benefits as well because you've really reduced the attack surface. So that piece of this is really, really unique. And then what we've built together is just something that we call it a turnkey appliance, but it's really a combination of the power of Red Hat software, the power of Dell software and the power of the Dell infrastructure really coming together to provide that unique experience to our customers. Yeah, I think to me it is really about, kind of the build, deploy, run aspect of it for cloud native applications. I think that to me, making platform engineering kind of easier because let's be real, platform engineering is the new IT and you can put whatever name on it, but people have to come up to speed. And we will put a new name on it, which we will. It's already happened. And I'm not surprised it's not an acronym, but how does this really, why don't we start with you, Chris? How does this really meet the flexibility that customers need? Because again, this isn't new, but it's new in how you make it easy for them, right? So, as you mentioned, there's a modernization happen. When we first did all this, it was about modernizing the apps themselves when you go to containers. And to your point, the platform engineering role continued to evolve. It's like, well, they need the infrastructure in order to support that. And when we talk about the simplicity and things that Caitlin was mentioning, to me there's a couple of personas there. There is that platform engineer and admin. They're gonna love this. Like, literally it's their utopia. I can't even begin to tell you it's ridiculous. And then on top of that though, if you're a developer, if you're used to working with OpenShift for your apps and all the different things we have, it's that same experience wherever you've been doing it before. Except now it's nicely integrated to a point where even Dell support is a part of this appliance. So right within the console, within the OpenShift console, there's this phone home capability, which I absolutely love myself because we don't even do that anywhere. This is just absolutely fantastic. And so what's in it for the customers is that simplicity that you've got a best of breed. This to me mimics offerings that Red Hat has with some of the hyperscalers and that level of partnership. And I just think the customers would just benefit directly from all of it. Yeah, what about, what are you seeing? Yeah, I mean, I got geeked out on the infrastructure side like a little bit because I have to. It starts at day one. And the deployment time, when you look at how quickly you get to deploy this, it's actually in a OpenShift and bare metal it can take up to 10 days to deploy that and kind of a standard build it yourself approach. What we've been able to do here is reduce that down to hours. So a 90% reduction to deployment time, which is really powerful because that means you can be up and running, building your applications faster and deploying them faster. That means you get to really invest in your business. I mean, that's very powerful. But of course that happened, deployment happens once, so we're proud of that. But it's really, it's that day two operations benefit that we talk about, that yes, it's fully integrated into the experience, right? All a single line of support, but some of this kind of magic from the Dell side is what we call the Apex Cloud Platform Foundation software. And it really welds that whole experience together. And it does things like a continuously validated state all the way from the BIOS to the firmware all the way up to OpenShift to make sure that that entire stack is validated to work together. We ensure that when you do an upgrade, it's a seamless one click upgrade. And you have the peace of mind that we've worked together to make sure that whole stack works. So it's easy to get up and running. It's easy to manage day to day. So then focus your energy on then using that platform to actually build those applications. Well, I'm so glad you brought that up though because I want to even double click further on that day too. That's really what this is about. So in the Kubernetes community in general, I don't care what distribution it is, OpenShift or otherwise, upgrades are one of the main complaints. And so what's really beautiful about this is you're not upgrading OpenShift, right? You're upgrading the Apex platform. So maybe the next release might have an OpenShift upgrade in it. It might have another component in it. But you don't worry about that as the administrator, right? We're building the magic as it were inside to allow that kind of seamless upgrade experience. Yeah, I love the outsourcing the S-bomb to Dell basically in helping with the OpenShift stuff because to your point, when I talk to people like CloudNativeCon, KubeCon or wherever or just generally at any of these other events, that is one of their big things about, like you said, being close to being hyperscaler. How do you have a true cloud platform that takes away all of that worry for you and really makes it simple? Because that has to be there because people are so used to it. Yeah, well, that is actually was a mission statement that was given to me by the Red Hat CEO 18 months ago. He says, Chris, I want to slide in a pizza box and I want it to boot up and say, are you going to join an existing cluster or a new cluster? And that should be the experience. And we're pretty close right now with this appliance, I have to say. And everybody loves pizza boxes. And pizza for that matter. It's the best pizza box in the industry. Absolutely, they have whites. Yeah, exactly. But so let me kind of shift gears a little bit because I think we'll get kicked off the interwebs if we don't talk about AI. And I'm pretty sure that for many companies, AI and the hype around it, and there's some reality, we even have our own AI and we have our own LLM and stuff like that. I mean, who doesn't? Who doesn't? If you don't, you're not cool. You've got to be one of the cool people now. And I know both companies have been investing heavily in AI. So how is this solution really helping customers meet those business objectives with AI? Colin? Yeah, I'll start with the, again, kind of the bottoms upside a thing. But I talked about the fact that this is a truly appliance and fundamentally there's two core components so that there's the compute and the storage and they both play an important role here. On the compute side, we have fourth generation Intel processors. So you've got the throughput, you've got that processing power to really handle those AI workloads. And at the same time, we all know that AI is pretty useless if you don't have the data. So the storage plays a very, very important role here, which is having that linear scalable software defined storage, something we call the universal storage layer. Not only is it the storage that is in these appliances, the Apex Cloud Platform, but it also runs in the public cloud. So you've got that portability of that as well. So you have the flexibility to use that AI on-prem and also the portability to be able to connect into the public cloud as well. Yeah, and thank you, by the way, because the AI itself would be upset with us if we had to talk about it. It's true. But for us, you know, we've been talking about hybrid cloud for a decade and I'll be honest, sometimes we have to explain what that actually means. AI now is actually validated why you need a hybrid cloud, like you just mentioned. You know, the data is everywhere and you need a consistent compute everywhere. You need to be able to, you know, fine tune your models, run your models in a different space. And so for us, this is really foundational. In fact, there's some other things we're working towards, you know, with our OpenShift AI initiatives to build on the work we're doing here that I think customers are gonna love because I'm seeing a lot of buzzword compliance right now. Everything is chat GPT, especially in the enterprise, you know, they like to understand things like canonical source and provenance of the things that train their models. And so for us at Red Hat, like again, it's very foundational for us to continue that story and get the foundation of a hybrid cloud to create your AI. I'm sure we can do an entire segment on this because I think the stuff that you're doing with Intel and with others underneath the hood, plus what you're doing in the OpenShift platforms and there's multiple on top of there, I think we definitely could, but let's park that for another day and let's kind of take a look at this from and kind of bring it home from perspective of partners. I mean, I'm partners in near and dear to my heart and Dell is really investing in. What is the feedback that you're getting from partners around this, Caitlin? Yeah, it's really exciting, especially when it comes to things like our service provider partners, the level of, you know, keeps using the same terms because it's so true. The level of experience and simplicity that we're building into this platform actually enables them to really focus on the value at services they can bring around that and they can optimize the services that they're bringing to that platform in a very unique way. So Kindrel's a great example of that. They're gonna be taking this new platform and expanding their existing offerings to be able to bring what already is an existing partnership both from Red Hat and Dell and really bringing that together. Yeah, that's powerful. Yeah, that's been the really exciting thing is when the partners are seeing that we're already working together. Because I mean, we're partners and so we're kind of coming to them as one entity and I think that's something that we've gotten a lot of feedback on as well that they're looking forward to is that best of breed. So the same benefit we've talked about for customers, the partners are seeing the same and as Caitlin said, they're excited to be able to put their expertise on top of this and what their additional value is and it's one less thing they have to worry about. I can totally see that with especially in the managed service provider cloud service provider market, that's just huge for them to now have that container reliable container on a reliable platform that makes it easy to use because that's their margin where they get that and that's great for them. I mean, it's fantastic and it's fantastic for their customers who want to get up and running really quick. And keep in mind, right? We're also hearing from, you know, Kindrel and others, it's also about the virtualization. Remember within OpenShift itself, it's native that you can manage VMs, containers and then even other clusters. And so it's about if you also want to modernize your apps and your infrastructure, now you've got one complete solution to do that. So Caitlin, super exciting, you know, this announcement. Where can partners and customers alike find out more information and where are you going to be talking about this? Everywhere. You can start with dell.com slash OpenShift. Of course you could talk to a Dell representative, partner representative. And excitingly, both companies are going to be at Kube.com coming up in Chicago in November. I hear Chicago's beautiful in November. So if you'll be there, come by the booth. It's like after Detroit, didn't people learn their lesson? I was like, come on. Like really? Are we choosing that again? All right. But we'll be there. I think Red Hat, you'll also have a booth. So great time to come by. We can have some hands-on experience with what this is really going to look like. And we'll be there as well. And I'm excited to be there myself. So I think it'll be a lot of fun. I think get to talk all kinds of cloud native back then. So I want to thank you both for joining me. I think, again, getting into this has been super helpful. And I really appreciate it. So thank you for joining. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Rob. And if you need more as well, as Caitlin said, there were some resources. There's also a resource tab down below. And we'll be back with more around this. This solution will be following it very closely here on theCUBE. And we appreciate you for watching. Thank you and take care. Oh, welcome to this analyst brief, where we're discussing Dell's Apex Cloud Platform to Red Hat OpenShift and their announcement around that. I'm Dave Vellante and Rob Streche and I will unpack the market for cloud computing and what the Dell Red Hat announcement means to customers. First, let's take a reminder look again at cloud usage. You know, the movement between public and private clouds, it continues. But looking at the data from ETR, we're seeing that the market is becoming much more balanced. It's not really reached in equilibrium yet, but it's definitely the balances tipping back toward on-prem. And this chart from ETR shows the percent of usage of public clouds relative to private clouds, specifically within the S&P 500, which represents a very large portion of spending well over half of IT spend and is generally considered a bellwether. Now the data shows about 43% usage of public cloud today growing to 55% by January, 2026. Now note that the expected 2026 figure is down from 10 months ago, implying that the market is reaching a more balanced state. As we said, i.e. many workloads are where they belong and the steep momentum to migrate off-prem is stabilized. Rob, what do you make of this data? Yeah, I think it's super interesting in the fact that cloud has become not a place, but it's really an operating model. And I think a lot of what they're looking at is the fact that this equilibrium is because there's better tooling coming to the on-premise. And things like the Apex Cloud Platform are one way that people are looking at how they simplify their life. And AI, of course, is going to be the next battleground here for tooling. Oh, absolutely. Okay, let's look at another set of data. At this time, we're going to look at the overlap of Dell inside 144 Red Hat accounts within the ETR dataset. So the chart shows net score or spending momentum on a platform that's on the Y axis. And presence in the dataset or overlap in these accounts is on the horizontal axis. We see that 46% of those 144 Red Hat customers also have Dell infrastructure installed. So you can see on that X axis, Dell is the dominant player with a greater share inside of these Red Hat accounts, more so than any other competitor. And Rob, I recently talked to Sadeer Srinivasan of Dell and discussed the Apex Cloud Platform family. Then you spoke with Caitlin Gordon of Dell and Chris Morgan, who's Senior Director of Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat. Dell recently announced expansion of the Apex Cloud Platform with the addition of Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. So Rob, what are the relevant customer requirements that people really need to know about? Yeah, I think what they're really looking for is how do they deal with demand for agility and flexibility? I think that's at the top of the list. And they're trying to understand, hey, it is a cloud operating model. We're going to expand, we're going to keep expanding. How do we really deal with that in an easy way? And it's also a shift towards containerized workloads. I think you and I have been talking for quite a while as people go to microservices and build those next-gen applications. A lot of it is in these containerized workloads where there may be 10 to 20 containers that actually make up an application. And I think there's also a simplified combination of cloud experiences because they're not just going on-premise with their cloud, they're going to other places, like they're going to co-location, they're going to other hyperscalers. And they need a operating model that goes across all of those. And also I think they're looking at it and saying, hey, we're a Red Hat shop and we really like Red Hat's experience and their expertise. So we're trying to leverage that and we have their tooling already. And I think also part of the big thing that they're looking for is a true partnership between the organizations and how do they jointly engineer these things together? Because as they move towards a hybrid experience, it's really important to know that you have that supportability going forward. Yeah, one company can do it alone these days. How do you think in your expert opinion, this announcement addresses customer requirements and or changes them? I think it really is about the unified application in the airplane that the IPEX cloud platform is bringing to bear for customers is a really a big piece of it. It's an operating model that is very unique to what they're bringing out. It is very cohesive. I think it's also they're looking for that all in one solution which compute storage and container orchestration is built in so that when they're getting up and running, it's really quick to get up and running and they know where they're gonna go and it's the same tooling across everything. I think the simplified management, modernized infrastructure to your point, hey, how do I get GPUs and other pieces of infrastructure into the compute layer where I'm building these microservices applications? And I think, again, it's the adoption of those microservices and containers that's really pushing it to be more than just, hey, we go out to the cloud and this is where we're always gonna build. I think bare metal has an appeal from a cost factor perspective as well and the benefits of bare metal are really coming true and starting to ring true, but it has to be turnkey. It can't be the old rack and stack, power and ping and connecting everything up. So double-click on the announcement. What exactly did Dell and Red Hat announce and why should customers care? Well, I think they really are going after the simplicity and that cloud operating model. It's not just a rehashed, hyper-converged infrastructure, HCI as we've talked about before. It's not just gen two of that. It's really a cloud operating model on top of the hardware and software that's integrated in there. So I think really that makes it cloud-native and cloud-native applications really easy to deploy and run. The Apex Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift really takes advantage of the leadership role that OpenShift has in Kubernetes. And I think Red Hat really has a developer ecosystem, a DevOps ecosystem that is super strong and allows people to use the kit in the stack for DevOps that they're using today and apply it to this platform. It's a powerful, I would say relationship, not only for Red Hat, but for Dell, especially in their channel partners where they're leaning into the channel where organizations are going, hey, how do I have a better hybrid experience and looking to that channel partner? And really, ultimately, customers are spending with their money because they want an operating model that not only works on-premise or in colo, but also can scale up to those hyperscalers for when they're using that for production. And it gives optionality to the customers and to the channel. I think both of those constituents have been looking forward to this day for quite some time. So, Rob, thank you, appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Okay, and thank you for watching this Analyst Brief. We'll see you next time on theCUBE.