 Welcome to Dell Technologies World. It's the premier technology event of the year. Join John Furrier, Dave Vellante, and Lisa Martin as they talk to the trailblazers and trend setters of future technology. Dell Technologies World 2023 and theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging high-tech coverage. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at Dell Technologies World 2023 from beautiful sunny, pretty toasty Las Vegas. We're at Mandalay Bay, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, kicking things off. As you called it this morning, tonight, CUBE After Dark, you got the sleeves rolled up, ready to dig in. A lot of news today. We have some great conversations tonight. You know what the highlight was for me today? Michael Dell's a walk-on song. Starman. Did you catch that? It was David Bowie's Starman. It was unbelievable. That's right. I don't know, do you know what you'd pick for your walk-on song? I think it would be something, a really upbeat, maybe celebration. A little cool in the gang. All right, a little throwback. We're speaking of throwbacks. We have a couple of alumni back with us. Caitlin Gordon joins us. VP of product management, cross-platform software installations at Dell. Great to see you again in person. It is so good to see you again. I know. It's so nice. And Sudhir Srinivasan is here as well. SVP Product Development Engineering at Dell Technologies. Guys, it's great to have you here. This place is packed. The keynote this morning, we were commenting on that, Dave. It looked like north of 7,500, 8,000, 9,000. We're hearing lots of good numbers. People were ready to be, well, we were back last year, but it looks like it's even bigger this year. Caitlin, a lot of news. I think one of the words of the day is Apex. Talk to us about what's going on there and some of the great things of the Apex Cloud Platform that Dell announced today. We did make a few Apex announcements today. One of those is a whole new portfolio of the Apex Cloud Platforms. And it's a really exciting, I mean, usually we introduce a new product, maybe a couple new products, but we introduced new portfolios this year. We were very excited to come back this year. And really the Apex Cloud Platforms, it's really built for what we call our cloud to ground strategy. How do we help our customers bring these cloud operating models, these cloud operating environments to their data center and really transform the way that they can run their on-premises infrastructure. It's built on a common set of building blocks of Dell Technologies infrastructure, common compute, common software-defined storage, and automated management and orchestration stack that really simplifies infrastructure. And yet it's also vertically optimized and vertically integrated with our partners. We have announced three new platforms, the Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, the Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, and of course the Apex Cloud Platform for VMware. Exciting new extensions to our partnerships with these three partners. Well, you talked about the portfolio emphasis, Caitlin. Explain the nuance there, portfolio versus what, just product? Yeah. Explain that. I've been here for almost 18 years. I've been launching product, product, product. And this time it wasn't about building a single product for a single problem. It was how do we build a portfolio of products that have common elements and then unique elements with each partner? So it's both supporting this open ecosystem of partnerships and really important strategic partnerships, but also how do we do that in a way that's common across those environments? Ultimately, our customers have a variety of different challenges, including skills gaps. How do we help them have a similar infrastructure, but yet support that choice across the different ecosystem partners? Shadir, thinking about where you allocate your resources, how are you placing your bets? You got $100 to spend, where are you spending it? So you don't get stretched too thin, but you're solving the problems the right place at the right time. Thanks, Dave. I think as you heard today, the hot topic for us is multi-cloud, and that's what we're out of the $100, probably $80 are going into multi-cloud. That's the Apex Cloud platforms, the Project Alpine that's now become a reality with Apex Storage for public clouds. Those are the big things that we're focused on. Last year we stood up here, we were here, we were talking about multi-cloud by default, and as we talked to our customers over the last year, it's just coming more and more clear that the pain is real, the pain of the complexity of a multi-cloud by default. And I think over the last year, it's also become clear the cost, the cost of having to do that. If you think about the cost of, if we all know that cost is, I mean, cloud is more expensive than owning your own equipment, doing that across multiple clouds is much more expensive. So we set out really to solve the problem of how do you do multi-cloud by design? Can I follow up on that on the cost? Cloud's more expensive generally because you're renting, or maybe it's because there's margins there that AWS charges, but you're now renting. But you're renting it at better economics or sort of like we think on-prem economics or is it something else? Well, so the easiest way to think about it is the, how do you control the blend of on-prem versus rented infrastructure so that you achieve your best cost? If you don't have the ability to move data back and forth or applications back and forth, then you're stuck. So it's like a lot of our customers, they find themselves, they sort of dug themselves into big holes in these clouds because they've just landed there and they have no way to get things out flexibly. And that's what Project Alpine or Apex Cloud Storage for Public Clouds gives them. Easy for you to say. Exactly. So dear, expand a little bit on, we talked a lot, as you mentioned last year, and it was mentioned a number of times this morning in the keynote, last year, multi-cloud by default. Dell really doubling down on multi-cloud by strategy, by design. Talk to us about some of the feedback you're hearing from customers. How are you helping them go from multi-cloud by default and by default there's probably some chaos in there to really shifting and transforming that to a strategic direction that enables the business to not only perform well, but be competitive, new products and services. What's that pathway like? So I think that's what customers want. Multi-cloud by design really is about three things. Customers want, first of all, choice. They don't want to be locked into any one specific solution. To do that, they need consistency. So you could try to do a multi-cloud by sort of balancing and working with each cloud separately, but at that, your cost of operations is going to be much higher, versus if you had a consistent way of operating across all the clouds. And the third is control. They want to be able to control the rate at which they're consuming any of these services. So that's what the Apex Cloud platforms brings to the table, is that right? On the cloud stack side, the cloud platforms bring your choice of cloud, whether it's Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, or VMware. And then on the data side, we bring that choice by having a Dell software-defined storage, which is available both on the platforms, but as well as in the cloud. And that gives them the control, all done with a zero-test security framework, so you get the security part as well. So okay, let's double-click on that, because it sounds good, it's good marketing, choice. Have it your way, Burger King. So what does that mean for Dell's customers, specifically, what are you hearing in the field? Everybody seems to have one of everything, although customers like you guys, they'll make bets. We're going to bet on VMware, we're going to bet on Red Hat, or we're going mostly Azure, not all in necessarily, but so maybe you could take us through what this means to you and your customers. I mean, choice for us is it's an open ecosystem, right? Our customers ultimately, they have on-prem providers that they're making bets on, and they have public cloud providers that they're making bets on. And to date, we haven't all necessarily worked together a lot to simplify what that feels like for a customer. That's what we're changing. It's to be able to still have that choice, be able to choose who are your hyperscaler, most chances hyperscalers that you're working with, who are your on-prem software vendors, infrastructure vendors, but the flip on the script is, we're actually all now working together. Obviously we've always worked well with VMware, but now working with Microsoft, working with Red Hat, working with VMware says, Mr. Customer, you don't have to choose your vendor to get that simplification. You choose your vendor for your workloads, for your transformation, and we'll give you that simplification no matter what. And that really comes down to Microsoft, right? If you are standardized on Azure as your public cloud, you want to enable and provide some of those Arc-enabled services in a data center of your choice. We call it a data center, Microsoft calls it an edge, ultimately means it's not the public cloud, but you still want to have a consistent control plane for that. You still want to have a consistent environment for that, being able to support that, transforming your operations, but do that in a simple way, and from our perspective, do that with the same infrastructure and the same operating model that you could also do if you have some Red Hat, some VMware in the environment, maybe some combination, maybe one or two of the others. Red Hat, obviously the leader in on-prem Kubernetes, being able to really accelerate the developer productivity, something that OpenShift has always brought. Now you combine that with these new Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat, you can accelerate the time to that value for the overall business. One other follow-up, if I may. So talking earlier about the portfolio, my takeaway was it sort of went from the box mentality to more of a cloud service mentality. How has your relationship changed with these partners as a result of that? Because in the past, your goal was to, we can run your software faster. Now I'm sure that's still important, but is that it? Is it that simple just as a service or is there more to it than that? There's a lot more to it. A lot of what we're hearing from customers is just because they could can do something or maybe they even did it in the past, they don't want to anymore. They need to get out of the business of more things. So ultimately that comes down to simplification. And really what we're seeing, and even over the last six months, as we've been working with each one of these partners, our partnership has really evolved in what we can bring, what they can bring, how do we collaborate together? These are truly jointly engineered offers. This is not just Dell or just Microsoft. These are shared roadmaps. How do we come together to bring our customers what they're asking for? Whether it's Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and they all have kind of different flavors of what they're focused on, but ultimately each we each see what each can bring to that partnership. And it's not all necessarily even known today. We're exploring that and figuring that out together, listening to our customers together. And it's a very new and exciting space to be because we see our customers struggling with where they are today. And we think together we can solve that a lot better than we could apart. Severe, talk a little bit about some of the challenges that customers have and how the Apex portfolio was really going to help them dial down some of the challenges with skills gap or compliance or security. But I'm particularly interested in IT resources having to do a lot more with a lot less. So that skills gap, how will this help dial that down for businesses? I think the best example, if I may, you actually heard it at the keynote this morning with the customer CVS, right? So he talked about, Roshan talked about how they went in. They had a cloud strategy 1.0 and then they quickly realized that they have to feign everybody on all these different stacks including the stuff that they had on-prem from Dell. And then they realized that having the same stacks on both sides allows them to have that same operational consistency. That saves tremendous amount of cost over time in the operational. So there's the cost of the infrastructure itself we talked about earlier about being able to adjust the mix of rented versus owned. But then the bigger element is that operational consistency and the savings that that brings. And that's true both for the data side or the storage side that we talked about through the Apex storage for public clouds that we offer. But also at the application stack side and that's where the Apex cloud platforms come in is because now whether you're a Red Hat user or a Microsoft user or a VMware user you can get the same operational experience. So we're covering it through the entire stack. That would say that's the biggest element. So, Kailin, I want to get your perspective on something that you and I have talked about this notion of equilibrium. And as you know, I've written a lot about repatriation kind of been a skeptic. But as we were talking earlier the cloud repatriation index which is kind of a tongue in cheek index from this guy Charles Fitzgerald. But it's true. What it is is it's digital realty and equinex revenue divided by AWS. So what you're seeing is those two colos their growth rates are now in the mid teens as AWS so they're converging. I don't know if it's something that's permanent or not which is something that we're watching. It's like hot water gets together with cold water the world reaches an equilibrium. Do you think that's what's happening? Do you not know yet? What are customers telling you? I don't think we know yet. I think you and I agree that it's not necessarily a broad repatriation but it's certainly a broad optimization. I think customers have moved out of cloud first. I haven't heard that phrase from a customer in a long time and I've really moved into more of what I consider cloud smart. How do I really think about what belongs where? In some cases yes, things are moving back on but in more cases it's the public cloud has informed what IT needs even just for their own efficiency but what they need to be able to deliver deliver for productivity to be able to meet their security requirements. There's a different expectation. Ultimately the public cloud has shifted what we need to be able to provide our customers what they need to be able to provide theirs. Equinex is a great partner of ours. Part of the reason is that customers got out of the data center business and a lot of times that literally just means the building, right? And then Equinex has an important role to play but everything else is the same. They're still managing it, they're still buying it but they needed to get that one step further. You can go all the way the other way which is you don't want to manage it, you want it to be OpEx, you want it out of your data center and that's ultimately what we're trying to support is there's a little bit of a shift in how customers are looking at anything they buy and really reconsidering where do my workloads belong and how do I make sure that the infrastructure and investments I'm making, all of the investments I'm making move me towards getting towards my own equilibrium, whatever that may be, and I think customers have taken a step back to think about what that right balance really is going to be. I'm glad you brought up cloud first versus cloud smart. I've been hearing that a lot in customer conversations. It's definitely a trend, it's a transition that we're seeing but how is Dell going to help customers in the multicloud by default, going to multicloud by design, reducing the complexity and the chaos and actually become cloud smart which I imagine is going to be fine tuned differently for each individual business. Yeah, it's going to really evolve over time. A lot of it comes into these sides we've been talking about is really the trifecta we talked about in the keynote this morning which is helping our customers unlock their workload flexibility, having that ground to cloud so you can have that standard storage infrastructure on-prem and into the public cloud. You have that flexibility, you don't have to compromise the storage service capabilities in the public cloud. It's also transforming what they can do in their data center, that cloud to ground side of things. But also, I like the air traffic control we started talking about this morning and we've been making these products for a while, I hadn't heard that, it was a good analogy but it's really not just the products themselves but then the experience that we've built to go with that. Can I add to that if you don't mind? Yeah, I was just thinking about what we talked about just now and it reminded me, we're actually starting to see with what we are doing here at Dell something you predicted which is the super cloud concept. That's really what's going on here. Yeah, there's a need for it, right? Technically, that's your strategy to me. But I want to come back to this idea of the equilibrium. You guys both lived the VMware ascendancy and there was a lot of skepticism that it could run any workload, anywhere. We looked closely at it and felt like, okay, well the mainframes figured it out maybe eventually Meritz was right and he was right. I mean, pretty much, yeah, you still need bare metal sometimes but generally speaking, broad swath of workloads can run on VMware. Is the cloud different because of latency and other factors? It seems like the cloud is at a really hard time moving those mission critical or quasi mission critical workloads into the cloud. Is it like VMware where they'll eventually get there or technically because of latency and cost? It's not likely that you have an advantage. What do you think about that? Do you want a story or do you want me to? I can start. I think what's been missing quite honestly in the cloud is storage. Is enterprise-grade storage? That's what's prevented. I mean, look at the SLAs you get in the cloud today. It'd be lucky if you get more than three nines, right? You can't run an enterprise workload on that. So I think what we're doing here is for the first time bringing that enterprise-grade storage into the cloud. That's what will start to create that flex. The other thing is, I think customers today would be cautious of doing that because they move something into the cloud, can they move it back? So it's a combination of both of those that I think will be enabling. Normally a storage stack over time would mature. That the new kid in the block has, you know, the snapshots aren't as good, the virtualization isn't as good, et cetera, et cetera, but after 10 years, it gets pretty good. It seems like the cloud says, ah, get put. We're good. Even the EBS stuff, it's like, okay. That's nice. And then if you want to actually do recovery, there's a piece over here or some partner thing here, and it just doesn't seem like the emphasis there on the stack. And that's maybe a great thing for you. It is, right? Especially if you look at both block and file. So you want to, I don't know if you want... Well, I was going to go a similar place, which is I think it's very different from VMware in the sense that VMware was a technology-driven innovation transformation. Yes, the benefits were operational, but it was fundamentally a technology-driven. Public cloud is business-driven, right? It's OPEX, it's agility, it's developer productivity, but it wasn't technology-driven. I think that's... Operational model. Yeah, and it wasn't really deeply rooted in the tech itself, which is why I think now we're seeing the point where the public cloud storage stacks, yes, they don't meet what our customers are asking for, but also that's not fundamentally the core capabilities of what these hyperscalers can provide, which is why we're partnering with them, right? Is that they see that, especially when you talk about block and certainly file, they've tried, and they know that building that enterprise-grade file system is a very hard thing to do, and we've already done it, so why don't we partner together and let us invest in those dollars and they can invest in what they do? And I think that's a difference, I think, that we see versus the two. That customers win. Yeah, yeah, ultimately we all agree on that. Absolutely, take us out, Caitlin, our last 30 seconds or so here, some of the feedback that you've gotten today on some of the big APEX announcements from the customers and the prospects that are here. Customers are very excited. I think we may have overwhelmed people, we made a lot of announcements. So I think there's a ton of to unpack, and honestly, we're in uncharted waters. We're in a unique position as Dell Technologies to be able to go into new spaces, but largely we're defining the playbook as we go. So a lot of the conversations we're having are just about, what are we doing here? Why are we doing this? How is this different than anything else? It's very exciting. It's certainly exciting to have a whole portfolio to talk about, and we have no shortage of more conversations to come. And you're defining it with customers. Caitlin, Tudor, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program tonight. All right, inaugural guests for theCUBE at Dell Technologies World 2023. We have our next guest coming up, Andrea Booker joins us, and Steve Graham. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guests, live from Las Vegas.