 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, welcome to the CUBE's Palo Alto Studios. My name is Dave Vellante and digital transformation is the big buzzword today and everybody's trying to become a digital business. What does that mean? Well, digital business means that you're using data in new ways to drive business value but protecting that data has become increasingly important. It's not just about backing that data up anymore. It's really about managing that data through a full life cycle and finding new use cases for all those assets that you have. Rama Kalapan is here. He is vice president of product management at Dell EMC data protection division. Rama, great to see you, welcome to the CUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, good to see you again. So, relatively new to Dell EMC. Talk about your role as head of product management and what lured you to Dell EMC? Absolutely, it's been a few months here. I run the data protection division for appliances in product management, right? And one of the things, as you know, data protection is one of the hot areas and I've been in this space for a while and one of the things I was looking for is to continue to be in this space and there's a lot of innovation happening. You know, there's almost a billion dollar in private capital that was raised in this space and I was looking for a place where a company is doing a couple of things. One is a lot of investment in R&D and as you know, with a lot of announcements that's happening, we've been investing a lot and secondly, innovation, right? New technologies, new areas, both from the software and appliances point of view. So, I was saying upfront, you know, talking about digital business, people use the term data capital. We were joking a lot, we hear the term, phrase data is the new oil and we say no, data's actually more valuable than oil. You can put oil in your car, you can put it in your house, you can't put it in both data, you can use it in so many different ways. So data capital, people are becoming more aware of the value of data and then obviously we're going to talk about protecting it but you guys use that term data capital, what does it mean to you? We use it a lot and customers actually use it even more often, right? Essentially, a lot of the customers and most of the organization in general, they're actually considered themselves as technology companies and they differentiate among themselves in if it is a retail customer or if it is any other segment with the type of data that they have, right? And the kind of differentiation they offer is like what value can they derive out of it and how can they differentiate with that data? So the data capital is very important. I mean, it's not about backup anymore, right? Once you have your secondary data, customers expect that they want to use that for multiple use cases. So that's where the data capital plays a very important role in many, many areas. So ever since I've been in the business, customers have problems and your job is as technology suppliers to solve those problems. So talk about why data protection is so difficult from a customer standpoint. What are their challenges, specifically as it relates to data protection? See, when I've been talking to a customer for many years especially on the data protection context, right? As you know, the complexity of the customer environment is changing quite a bit and it's a very dynamic environment. What I mean by that is whether they want to actually manage the data or protect the data on-prem, in the cloud, hybrid, et cetera. The type of workloads has become pretty complex as well in the sense that it used to be traditional databases and of course the VMware workloads, et cetera. Now it is all the NoSQL, MySQL and different type of workloads, AIML workloads. So that has become quite complex as well. Secondly, it's also about the data growth and I've seen companies and customers basically with 50 to 80% data growth in one year, right? That's incredible, a lot of data. And finally, it's also about any major events, like for example ransomware attacks or any downtime that happens. So what customers are looking for is a solution that can actually help them with that, right? Like a very air gap solution for cyber recovery type solutions, et cetera. The impact of losing data is much higher. I mean, it just seems to get worse and worse every year, right? As data becomes more important to our business, having whether it's a breach or a loss of data or any outage really is just more costly than it's ever been. Totally agree, I mean, that's where the more customers, I mean, when we talk to customers, it's not about the backup admins anymore. That is the users were actually using that database admins. We actually talked to CISOs, the security officers, especially when we are dealing with some of the ransomware type use cases, et cetera, right? So that's getting very interesting as we move forward. Yeah, the old bromide backup is one thing. Recovery is everything. And now recovery has a much, much wider meaning. You're recovering from a lot of different places. There's a lot more complexity in sort of the data stores. The edge is starting to become more prominent. People are using the term data management more often. And data management can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. The database people have one view of what data management is. What is data management to Dell EMC? And what is the shift going on from the data protection to data management? It's, I'm glad you asked that because the market is already shifted in that direction, right? Used to be data protection is an insurance copy. You should be able to restore it and you should be good with that, right? But customers actually are looking for, they already are protecting the data. I mean, it's a secondary copy. They expect that they use that copy for multiple use cases. I've seen a lot of customers spinning up a copy for DevTest use cases, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. For DR use cases, they can actually reduce the infrastructure cost running analytics on it, search and providing insights within the data set if you will, right? So tons of use cases. So that is the shift that we're seeing and especially here at Dell EMC, we are investing quite a bit on the data management part of it and new technologies play a critical role in there with AI, ML use cases, IoT use cases, blockchain use cases and so on and so forth, right? So that shift has already happened. Yeah, to me, Remba, too, it's about leveraging that asset. I mean, you talked about analytics before. We, you know, you talk about ransomware. You can use analytics to identify anomalous behavior. I mean, even air gaps, people can get through them. So you're not, you're never safe and so you need to be vigilant and being able to apply these data management techniques becomes increasingly important for digital businesses. Absolutely, we actually look for, especially from enterprise customers, we look for a few attributes, right? For data management, which are primarily scale, performance, reliability and a whole bunch of use cases from a usability point of view, cloud use cases and so on and so forth. Well, let's dig into that a little bit. So what are the important aspects and attributes of a data management solution from Dell EMC's point of view? See, for example, if you look at performance, right? We have actually built in flash within our disk-based appliance for catering use cases to the use cases like instant access, instant recovery for databases. We also support random IO, you know, IOps of about 40K with a very minimal, almost like a 20 millisecond latency et cetera, right? So performance is key. Secondly, scale, right? Customers are looking for scale, for example, within the appliances portfolio. Customers can start small and they can actually replace the controller, grow from, you know, a six series data domain appliance to all the way to a nine series, scale up to a petabyte. And if you have a D-loop of say 50 to one, that's almost like a 50 petabyte of data in Active Tier. We actually support 2X in cloud, which means that's 150 petabyte of data. That's scale, right? And the third part is the reliability part, right? We use a very robust architecture, DIA-based data invulnerability architecture. That actually is very important for customers because this is the last resort for them. This is the last copy as part of data protection, right? And customers rely on Dell EMC for that. And finally, some of the capabilities, as I mentioned, right? Cloud use cases, we support multi-cloud and multi-cloud is very important for customers now. Multiple use cases and then usability. We track some of the metrics like from box to backup. That's important. We look at some of the manageability, upgradability and serviceability use cases very critical. So those are kind of the key attributes I would highlight in terms of what we do and what we focus on and pretty much aligned with what customers are looking for. So talk a little bit more about the product portfolio. Dell EMC has always been on a cadence of product. People buy product. I like that, you know, R&D turns into product and generates revenue, solves customer problems. How should we think about the portfolio? How it's evolving? So as I said earlier, right? What was intriguing and very interesting for me is the investment they're putting in R&D, right? And from a portfolio point of view, especially for appliances, we have the whole nine series and then the six series for the high-end data domain, right? As a target appliance, we have the, of course the three series for the low-end and we have the mid-market as well. So we segment it as your target appliance and then we have the integrated appliance and as you might have actually talked to a bunch of my colleagues last year, we announced the DB4400 primarily on the mid-market lower end of it, right? And then we also have the eight series and five series for the higher end. So overall we have, from a portfolio point of view, we have the integrated appliance, we have the target appliance in the PBBA market and we have the data protection suite from a software point of view where all of our multiple use cases that we cater to for customers. All right, so we've talked about some of the challenges the customers are facing, you know, kind of why it's so difficult. Some of the trends in data protection, the portfolio, what do customers view as success? How do they measure success? What are the outcomes that you're trying to achieve with customers? See, from customers, I mean, we are successful if customers are successful, right? And primarily what we are looking for and we've heard from customers is that we provide solution that will help with lowering the TCO, right, and what they do with that is essentially invest in new technologies like, you know, in data science, AI, ML, IoT, blockchain as I talked about, right? We've seen customers take that dollar and invest in their business and that's how they can actually be successful, right? And finally, customers are also looking for one solution that can actually cater to many needs. It's not just your data protection but be able to use the secondary data to, you know, solve many of these use cases whether it's your DR or DevTest and so on and so forth. I mean, that's to me really an important point that you're making is it's not just about, okay, I'm going to do a backup, you know, one myopic sort of use case, I can get more asset leverage. Again, if we talk about analytics before, I think that's a key part of it. Last question, Dell Technologies World is coming up into April, early May. This is our 10th year doing theCUBE. The first CUBE we ever did was at the predecessor of Dell Technologies World, the EMC World 2010. We're excited theCUBE will be there again with typically one of our biggest shows of the year. What can you tell us? What to expect? Some of you, some of the innovations you're talking about? Show a little leg or a DTW. I'll talk about this. It's going to be a lot of exciting news both from the appliances and software side. You just have to wait to hear it. It's just one month away and we are super excited to announce a lot of innovation here. Raman, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. You're very welcome. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE from our Palo Alto office. We'll see you next time.