 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 experience this year. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined by two CUBE alumni from Dell AMC. Please welcome Joe Caradana, the VP of Cloud Stories CTO. Joe, good to see you again, even though quite socially distanced. Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. And Devin Reed is also joining us, the Senior Director of Product Management. Devin, how are you? I'm good, how are you? Nice to have you. Good. Nice to be here, thank you. Nice to be chatting with you guys, although very, very socially distanced, following the rules. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World without having you guys on theCUBE, so we appreciate you joining us. So let's dig in. So much has happened in the world since we last spoke with you, but one of the things that happened last year around a year ago was the Dell On Demand program was launched. And now here we are nearly a year later when Michael Dell was just talking about, hey, Dell's plan is to go and deliver everything as a service. We've heard some of your competitors kind of going the same route, some kind of spurned by COVID. Talk to us, Devin, we'll start with you about what this direction to shift to as a service means and what it means specifically for storage? Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, what we talked about last year with respect to on demand, Dell Technologies on demand, we've had great success with that program. But before I get into what we're doing with as a service, I really want to talk about why we're doing the as a service. And when we talk to customers and partners and when we look at the trends in the market, what we're seeing is that customers are more and more wanting to consume technology infrastructure as a service in an OPEX manner. And analysts are revising those estimates up almost daily. And what we're seeing is, one of the things that's driving that is actually why we're here in this remote session as opposed to being in Vegas doing this. And it's really the global uncertainty around the pandemic. So it's driving the need to free up cash and consume these infrastructure more as a service. Now, as Michael said, yeah, as Michael said, we have the broadest set of infrastructure offerings in the market and we're number one in most categories. And we're in the process of building out an offer structure that cuts across all the different infrastructure components. But to get real specific on what we're doing with storage as a service, we are in the process of building out the first true storage or as a service offering for our infrastructure, starting with storage. It'll be private preview as a Q4 by the end of this fiscal year and generally available in the first half of next year. And what we're doing is taking the infrastructure, the Dell Technologies storage and we're flipping the business model as opposed to buying it outright. The customers actually just consume it as a service. So they have a very simple consumption model where they just pick their outcome, they pick their storage service, they pick their performance, they pick their capacity and we deliver that service to their on-premise site. Let me unpack outcomes because I saw that in some of the information online, outcome driven, what do you mean by that? And can you give us some examples of those outcomes that customers are looking to achieve? Yeah, so in today's world, the way people mostly consume infrastructure is or at least storage is that they say, I need a storage product. And what the customers do is they work with our sales representatives and say, I need a XYZ product, maybe it's a power store and I need this much capacity, I can tweak all of the components, I can pick the number of drives, the type of drives there are and that's really from a product perspective. And what we're doing with the as a service is we're trying to flip the model and really drive to what the business outcome is. So the business outcome here is really, I need block storage, I need this performance level, I need this much capacity and then we basically shift the infrastructure we think that better suits those outcomes, right? And we're making changes across our entire infrastructure value chain to really deliver these service. So we try to deliver these much quicker for the customer. We actually manage the infrastructure so it enables customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time actually operating the service, paying attention to their business outcome. Got it, and that's what every customer wants more of is more time to actually deliver this business outcomes and make those course corrections as they need to. Joe, let's talk to you for a bit. Let's talk, what's going on with cloud? And the last time we saw you, a lot of changes we talked about, but give us a picture of Dell's cloud strategy from what you guys are doing on-prem to what you were doing with cloud partners, what is this multi-pronged cloud strategy actually mean? Yeah, sure, I mean, our customers want hybrid cloud solutions and we believe that to be the model going forward. And so actually what we're doing is, if you think about it, we're taking the best of public cloud and bringing it on-prem. And we're also taking the best of on-prem and bringing it to the public cloud. So, Devin just talked to you about how we're bringing that public cloud operation model to the data center. But what we've also done is bring our storage arrays to the cloud as a service. And we've done that with PowerStore, we've done that with PowerMax and we've done that with PowerScale. And in the case of PowerScale for Google Cloud, I mean, you get the same performance and capacity scale out in the cloud as you do on-prem. And the systems interoperate between on-prem and cloud. So it makes it easy for fluid data mobility across these environments. And for the first time, it enables our customers to get their data to the cloud in a way that they can bring their high performance file workloads to the cloud. So talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned PowerScale for Google Cloud service. Is that a Dell hardware-based solution? How does that work? Yeah, the adoption's been great. I mean, we launched back in May. And since then we brought on customers in oil and gas and e-commerce and health as well. And, you know, we're growing out the regions. You know, we're going to be announcing a new region in North America soon. And we're going to be building out an APJ and AMIA as well. So the customer response has been fantastic. Looking forward to growing it up. Excellent. Devan, back to you. Let's talk about some of the things that are going on with PowerProtect DD, some new cloud services there too. Can you unpack that for us? So Joe was talking about how we were taking our storage systems and putting them in the cloud. So I'll just back up and kind of introduce real quickly or reintroduce our Dell Technologies cloud storage services. And that's really, we have our primary storage systems from Unity XT to PowerStore to PowerScale to ECS. And that's housed in a co-locations facility right next to Hyperscalers. And then that enables us to provide a fully managed service offering to our customers to a multi-cloud. So what we're doing is we're extending the Dell Technologies cloud storage services to include PowerProtect DD. So we're bringing PowerProtect DD into this managed services offering. So customers can use it for cloud long-term retention, backup, archiving, and direct backup from a multi-cloud environment. So extending what we've already done with the Dell Technologies cloud storage services. So is that almost kind of like a cloud-based data protection solution for those workloads that are running in the cloud VMs, SaaS applications, physical servers, file data, things like that? Yeah, there's several use cases. So you could have a primary block storage system on your premises, and you could actually be providing direct backup into the cloud. You could have backups that you have on-premise that you could be then replicating with PowerProtect data domain replication to cloud. And you could also have data in AWS or Azure or Google that you could be backing up directly to the PowerProtect data domain into this service. So there's multiple use cases. Got it, all right. Joe, let's talk about some of the extensions of cloud. You guys have both been talking about the last few minutes. One of the recent announcements was about PowerMax being cloud-enabled. And that's a big deal to cloudify something like that. Help us understand the nature of that, the impetus, and what that means now, and what customers are able to actually use today. Yeah, sure. I mean, we've launched PowerMax as a cloud service about a year and a half ago with our partner faction. And that's for those customers that want that tier zero enterprise grade data capabilities in the cloud, and not just a cloud. It also offers multi-cloud capabilities for both file and block. Now, in addition, at Dell Tech World, we're launching additional cloud mobility capabilities for PowerMax, where let's say you have a PowerMax on-prem, you could actually do snapshot shipping to an object repository. And that could be in AWS, that could be in Azure, or it could be locally to our local ECS object store. In addition, in the case of Amazon, it goes a step further, where if you do snapshot shipping into Amazon S3, you can then rehydrate those snapshots directly into EBS. And that way you can do processing on that data in the cloud as well. Give me an idea, Joe. The last few months or so, what some of your customer conversations have been like? I know you're normally in front of customers all the time, Dell Tech World is a great example. I think last year there was about 14,000 folks there, huge. And we're also used to that three-dimensional engagement. More challenging to do remotely, but talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you've had and how they've helped influence some of their recent announcements. Yeah, sure. Customers, it might sound a little cliche, but cloud is a journey. It's a journey for our customers. It's a journey for us too, as we build our capabilities to best serve them. But their questions are, I want to take advantage of that elastic compute in the cloud. But maybe the data storage doesn't keep up with it. In the case of when we go to PowerScale for Google, the reason why we brought that platform to the cloud is because you can get hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput through that. And for our customers that are doing things like processing genomic sequencing data, they need that level of throughput. And they want to move those workloads into the cloud. The compute is there, but the storage system is to keep up with it, we're not. So by us bringing a solution like this to the cloud, now they can do that. So we see that with PowerScale. We see a lot of that with file in the cloud because the file services in the cloud aren't as mature as some of the other ones, like with block in object. So we're helping filling some of those gaps and getting them to those higher performance tiers. And as I was mentioning with things like PowerMax and PowerStore, it's extending their on-prem presence into the public cloud. So they can start to make decisions not based on capability, but more based on their requirements for where they want to run their workloads. And let's switch gears to talking about partners now. Dell has a huge partner ecosystem. We always talk with those folks on theCUBE as well every year. Devin, from a product management perspective, tell me about some of the things that are interesting to partners and what the advantages are for partners with this shift in how Dell is going to be delivering from PCs to storage to HCI, for example. Yeah, exactly. So Joe mentioned that it's really a journey and Joe talked a lot about how customers aren't, maybe not satisfied completely going to a hyperscaler or to a complete public cloud. And what we're hearing is there's a lot of customers that are actually wanting the cloud-like experience, but wanting it on-prem. And we're hearing from our partners almost on a daily basis. I have a lot of partner and customer conversations where they want to be involved in delivering this as a service to their customers. They want to maintain the relationship, drive that value, and in some cases even provide the services for them. And that's what we're looking to do as the largest infrastructure provider with the broadest base of partnership, we have an advantage there. Is there any specific partner certification programs that partners can get into to help start ruling this out? At this point, we are trying to build it, but at this point we have nothing to announce here, but that's something that we're actively working on and stay tuned for that. I imagine there will be a lot of virtual conversations at the digital deltuk world this year between the partner community when all of these things are announced. And you get those brains collectively together, although obviously virtually to start iterating on ideas and developing things that might be great to programatize down the road. And Joe, last question for you, second to last question actually, is this year as we talked about a number of times, everyone's remote, everyone's virtual, it's challenging to get that level of engagement. We're also used to being in person all of the hallway conversations even that you have when you're walking around the massive show floor, for example, what can participants and attendees expect from your perspective this year at Dell Technologies World? Will they be able to get the education and that engagement that Dell really wants to deliver? Yeah, well, clearly we had to scale things back. There's no way around that, but we have a lot of sessions that were designed to inform them with the new capabilities we've been building out, and not just for cloud, but across the portfolio. So I hope they get a lot out of that. We have some interactive sessions in there as well for some interactive Q&A. And you're right, I mean, a challenge for us is connecting with the customer in this virtual reality. We're all at home, right? The customers are at home. So we've been on Zoom like never before, reaching out to customers. They better understand where they want to go, what their challenges are, and how we can help them. So I would say we are connecting. It's a little different and requires a little more effort on everyone's part. We just can't all do it in the same day anymore. It's just a little more spread out. Well, then it kind of shows the opportunity to consume things on demand. And as consumers, we sort of have this expectation that we can get anything we want on demand. But you mentioned, Janice, that's not gonna last question. This is the last one. As you mentioned, everybody's at home. You have to tell us about that fantastic guitar behind you, what's the story? Every guitar has a story. I'll just say for today, look at, this is my tribute to Eddie Van Halen. We're gonna miss him for sure. And I'll have the audience know I did ask Joe to play us out. He declined, but I'm gonna hold into that for next time because we're not sure when we're gonna get to see you guys in person again. Joe and Devin, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. It's been great talking to you. Lots of things coming, lots of iterations, lots of influence from the customers, influence from COVID, and we're excited to see what is to come. Thanks for your time. Thank you so much. For my guests, Joe Caradonna and Devin Reed. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience.