 In 2020 at the dawn of the new decade, Dell introduced Apex, its pay-per-use offering that gives customers the option to consume infrastructure as a service. Shannon Champion is Dell's VP of Product Marketing and we're here to talk about the future of multi-cloud and what's new in Dell's Apex portfolio. Shannon, great to see you. Nice to see you. So before we get into it, how would you describe Apex multi-cloud? So our Apex multi-cloud strategy as you mentioned has evolved, right? We started from a subscription as a service perspective and over the past several years have been doing a lot of listening to our customers and what we know is that customers are telling us that they're in various stages of their spectrum. Some customers are in the public cloud, often multiple public cloud, some customers are on-prem with a hybrid cloud but increasingly looking for that bridge between the public cloud experience to come on-prem and other customers are looking to define or redefine what their multi-cloud strategy is. So that's where Apex comes in. Apex is really designed to solve for both modern consumption and modern cloud experiences and to meet customers where they are. So whether they are in the public clouds, we're looking for options to enrich that public cloud experience. If they need a bridge from the public cloud to on-prem, we have options there and if they're looking for cloud experiences, regardless of where their IT landscape is, with subscription or as a service offers, we have that too. So our Apex strategy is very comprehensive and intended to respond to what we're hearing from our customers. And there's no question the rush to cloud has caused and multi-cloud has caused complexities. We're definitely seeing sort of an equilibrium now in terms of customers trying to balance out sort of where they place workloads. So how can Dell technologies help? Where does Apex fit in and addressing some of these challenges? Yeah, so we hear from our customers a range of challenges with implementing a multi-cloud strategy. So security is an imperative, but when you have disparate landscape of multi-cloud, limited visibility results and not having confidence that you have that secure posture that you're looking for. Unpredictable cost is something we've been talking about for years as it relates to multi-cloud and cost management is super important. People need to know where their spend is going to go. Also lack of the right skill sets, making sure that you're able to attract and retain the right talent to meet your business needs and also workload mobility. As your business needs change, our customers are telling us they need the flexibility to put those applications and data wherever they need them. And in order to do that, they need data mobility. So of course we were at Dell Tech World in May and you announced the Apex Cloud platforms as part of your overall Apex strategy. Can you just for the audience summarize what was announced and what's new, any updates? Sure, yeah, so like I said, customers are looking for kind of a range of spectrum as it relates to multi-cloud and Dell Technologies World was a whirlwind. We delivered the broadest payload of Apex portfolio options across that full spectrum of the Apex strategy that I laid out. We unveiled our Apex storage for public cloud offers which really solves the challenge of helping customers enrich their public cloud experience and go from ground to cloud. We unveiled new subscription and as a service options for customers. And we also unveiled our Apex Cloud platform, a brand new category, a new family in the Apex portfolio specifically to solve for that cloud to ground experience and helping extend the cloud operating environment that our customers choose and that experience and bring that on-prem. So what are Apex Cloud platforms and what exactly do you mean by cloud to ground? So Apex Cloud platforms are turnkey on-prem infrastructure platforms that are designed to deliver that multi-cloud by design approach, right? To extend the cloud ecosystem of our customer's choice to the data center or their edge locations and they're designed with simplicity in mind. They're built collaboratively with our ecosystem partners and currently that's Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware. And importantly, these platforms are leveraging Dell's unique proven IP in a range of areas. One is from our HCI portfolio, we built a best in class integration software and we're leveraging the IP from that combined with our proven enterprise class software to find storage together with our power edge next generation infrastructure platform altogether in what we're referring to as a new generation of infrastructure to solve for multi-cloud on-prem. Okay, new generation. Can you maybe double click on that? What do you mean by new generation? A lot of times people talk about next generation, you're calling it new generation. Add some color to that if you could. Sure, and I think an easy place to start is to think about something that people know, right? People know HCI, HCI is known for simplicity. Dell has been a leader in this space for years. We have delivered a differentiated experience with our software-driven innovation in that space. So higher levels of integration, automation, life cycle management, that's what people love about VxRail but that was designed specifically with one partner stock in mind, VMware's. And what the Apex Cloud platforms are about are designing for those same differentiated outcomes but with more consistency and control regardless of the partner stack that our customers are choosing. So we're giving them that commonality and consistency which gives them the flexibility, has a range of benefits in terms of operational savings and really drives consistency. To what extent are you working, Shannon, with in conjunction with partners? Is this product work? Does it include engineering? What does it entail? Yeah, so I mentioned Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware are current partnerships for Apex Cloud platforms. These are not new partners to Dell. We've been working with these partners for decades to deliver value for our customers but what's different here is the level of partnership required to pack in as much value as we are in these Apex Cloud platforms with those partners. Not just from a product and engineering perspective but all parts of go-to-market. So we're working with these partners to align in the field and how we show up together for our joint customers. We are working together with our channel partners to help them understand the value of our partnership and enable them to be a route to market for these. So it's across the board. But one example specifically on the product and engineering side, I mentioned the HCI integration software and for the Apex Cloud platforms we're calling that automated M&O software, the Apex Cloud platform foundation software, right? The software that connects the foundation of the infrastructure into the cloud operating stacks and based upon the continuous development and testing that we're doing specifically on that vertically integrated software stack, we're able to deliver new patches, updates, new releases of software versions that come directly from our partner in as quick as four hours. So I don't know if customers are going to be ready for it that quickly. You know, like these are, when we talk about time to value and how quickly we're going to enable you to be ready with the latest capabilities and feature sets, it's pretty unprecedented. Yeah, so you're creating this sort of cloud like, this cloud native, if I can call it that experience with Apex customers are using frameworks in different ways of thinking about which workloads go where. What are some of the use cases that you're seeing with Apex? Is it sort of the more mission critical stuff that we've always known on-prem? Is it actually seeping into some new innovation? What are the use cases that you're seeing? We're seeing customers really think about how they might use the Apex Cloud platforms in three different kind of bigger buckets. One is just simplifying multi-cloud operations. I say just, but like that's a big task, right? So we've been talking about that, you know, customers want to utilize multiple public clouds. They want their clouds to be on-prem, but they want those experiences to be common and simple and with data mobility and work everywhere. So that's one use case for customers. The second is really accelerating application delivery, right? So more and more organizations are looking to adopt that modern containerized application approach using Kubernetes, it's complex. So when you have something like the Apex Cloud platform that can bring together VMs and containers in a single platform support a range of Kubernetes distributions, whether it's Azure Kubernetes stack or it's Red Hat OpenShift and provide commonality that I talked about across these, there's a lot of value and helps our customers go faster to deliver the application. So that's the second kind of use case. And the third would be really generally optimizing workload placement, right? Like having a tool that's at their disposal when their business needs change and evolve based upon cost or performance or security or compliance requirements. As those ebb and flow, they have the ability to put their workloads in the right place. Well, you know we're big on the common experience across clouds, especially, you know, given the mandate for greater business resilience, people certainly during the pandemic, you know, were forced to rethink the way that they're able to respond to different market conditions. Well, thank you, Shannon, any sort of last words or thoughts you want to leave the audience with? Yeah, one of the things I didn't go into a ton of detail with that I just want to hit on is really the value of that common storage layer and really that software defined storage architecture that is the basis of these cloud platforms, highly scalable, resilient, high performance, software defined storage. And that being a common element across these platforms makes it easier for migrations and all of that, but it's also the same storage architecture that we're putting in the public cloud. So that's helping to enable that mobility. So it's a key element of this I just wanted to emphasize that. But overall for the Apex Cloud Platform family, we're ready. We are excited and starting today, we will be offering these to customers. So we're just really excited to see how this revolutionizes and multi-cloud for them in a new way. Well, it's exciting to see it come together. I remember, you know, Project Alpine and turns into the common storage layer, CSL, actually project turns into product. So congratulations on that execution and thanks for your time. Thank you very much. Okay, now it's time to hear more about the first offer to market, the Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure. So stay with us. Dean Perrone, who's partner director from Microsoft joins our Caitlin Gordon. She's the VP of Product Management at Dell. Dig in to all the new features and explain why this is the first offer in the new premier solutions from Microsoft Azure Stack, HCI, my colleague analyst, Rob Streche, hosts this next segment. Over to you, Rob. Hello and welcome to future of multi-cloud lands now, a discussion with Dell and Microsoft. We just heard from Dave Vellante and with Shannon Champion, VP of Product Marketing at Dell, where they were discussing the Apex Cloud Platform family. Now we're going to take it down another level here, really delve into that family, the Apex family, and we're going to go into the Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure. Let me welcome two guests who really know their stuff about this and are really going to help us unpack it a little bit more. We have Caitlin Gordon, who's the vice president of Product Management, multi-cloud and dev ops at Dell, and Dean Perrone, executive director of Product Management, Azure Edge at Microsoft. Let's jump in and really unpack this and understand the market and what's going on today. I understand that today's a really exciting day for both of you, that Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure has become available to customers to purchase today. So Caitlin, let's get an update and understand what are the customers saying about this? You know, we've been talking to a lot of different customers, all shapes and sizes all over the world for a long time. And there's a lot of key themes, right? They're struggling with being able to innovate fast enough, being able to really keep up with the pace of business, getting the visibility into things, keeping things as simple as possible so they have the resources to do what they need to. And what we've heard loud and clear from our customers, which is really exciting, is that they are so happy to hear that our continued partner with Microsoft is coming to the next level now with this new platform and that we're really coming together to simplify hybrid cloud operations with Microsoft Azure. No, I mean, you both have been very partnered up for a very long time. So I think that makes a lot of sense. Dean, you know, what are you hearing from the Microsoft side and your customers? Yeah, thanks. We're hearing really similar things. I mean, you know, they say that in this industry change is constant, but we live in really interesting unique times, whether it's changes that have been brought to the society writ large because of the pandemic or the emergence of new technologies like machine learning. What we're hearing from customers across different industries is they're really being asked to innovate more quickly than ever. And we're hearing they're really excited about this new platform because it gives them a simple, easy to use, easy to deploy platform and it helps them really unlock some new capabilities in the cloud and bring them out into the real world, into their edge locations, into their data centers and lets them unlock just enough power of the cloud to enable new capabilities for them. No, that's super interesting. I think from the customers we talk about, it's really about bringing it to the edge. And I think it's really super exciting that you guys have partnered up for this and I really want to delve a little bit further and deeper. Can you kind of give us an idea of what's new? What this new platform is about? Why is it different? And what have you been seeing from Dell and Microsoft in the past? Why is this different? Why is this different from what you've brought out before? Caitlin, why don't we start with you? Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's really exciting because this is a new on-premises appliance. It is jointly engineered and it's really all about bringing the best of what Microsoft has in their edge and data center technology with what now Dell has brought together with that, with kind of the Azure Stack HCI software. And the whole magic of this is that we have integrated the full stack from the firmware all the way up to the Microsoft software and that's fully automated. So that really the secret sauce from Dell is of course the combination of our compute, but it's really our automated management and orchestration really making that a seamless and simple experience from top to bottom. And though what's really exciting is that besides the fact that Dean and I talk all the time now as proof of our partnership, we've actually now are the first partner in Microsoft's new premier category for Azure Stack HCI. Being able to partner to a level where we can bring such meaningful innovation to customers and really being able to be the first one in this new category of Microsoft I think is really representative of the level of partnership here. I think we'll unpack that in a minute because I think that's super interesting. But Dean, what does it mean for this from a Microsoft perspective as well? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Microsoft and Dell have been partnering together on solutions for a long time. I started at Microsoft in the mid to late 90s and some of the first product lines I worked on were Windows NT and back office server. And those were collaborations between Microsoft and Dell. So we've got a long history over decades of working together to bring new products to market. What's different about this particular solution is really how far we've pushed the envelope on the integration, the things that Caitlin mentioned, and also that it's a hybrid product, right? We've really taken the best of Dell technologies on hardware, on storage, on operations and married it with the best of Microsoft cloud technologies from Azure. And Azure Arc enabled services like Azure Stack HCI, Azure machine learning, Azure data services and really brought that together into one real cohesive deeply integrated product that's really easy for customers to use. To get there just required a tremendous amount of collaboration between Microsoft and Dell. We had to do things like align our vision and our strategy and our roadmap and get the teams we joke internally that the teams have been working like one big joint engineering team to make that happen. And that's why I'm so excited to have Dell here as one of the first partners in this solution. Yeah, I think for the customers we talked to, I think you've nailed it, right? I think you have to be simple. It has to be that cloud experience. I think cloud used to mean somewhere else or somewhere but now it means all the way to the edge and everywhere and it has to be just simple. But let's kind of dig into what it means and go a little deeper what it means into being a premier solution for Azure Stack HCI. Dean, can you provide us some background on why Microsoft created this new category and what the benefits are to the customer? Yeah, so the Azure Stack HCI OEM partner ecosystem is categorized into tiers that each cater to a different segment of the market. And this new category that we're announcing today, the premier solutions tier, really represents our best and deepest integration with our top OEM partners like Dell. And just to give you some examples of what that means, when you get one of the Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Azure Systems and you plug it in and you turn it on, there's a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be set up between Dell stuff and Microsoft stuff, all of that happens through one deeply well-integrated end-to-end experience across the entire stack. Once it's up and running, you have to update the system. We have integrated updates that not only do the software on the box and the cloud services, but they go down into the box itself and they'll upgrade the drivers for the drivers and the firmware for the system as well. And then if you think about what customers are looking for, they're really looking about extending some of these concepts that we've gotten in the cloud where you've got this great reliability and you can just count on these resources to always be available. These systems, we have running in Dell Labs, we have running in Microsoft Labs, there's this huge integration between the teams and they're continuously validated so that we can get these systems to have a reliability profile that is as close as possible to what we've got in the cloud. It's really exciting to have Dell as the first partner in this tier of solutions. Yeah, no, I think that's pretty, it's a huge undertaking and I think again, the simplicity can't be overstated that how hard it is to get that to really happen. I think that the engineering effort that goes into it is pretty massive. So congratulations, Caitlin. I think that being the first to be able to bring this new, first one in this new category, I think that it must have taken just a ton to pull this off. What was that like? It did, it took a lot of work. In a lot of ways, it's decades in the making, right? Everything starts with our customers and we really needed to help our customers accelerate their application deployment, simplify operation, meet increasingly stringent security and governance requirements, but be able to do so in a way that actually offers simplicity that meets the reality of what their skills are in their data center today. And that's really what forced us and encouraged us to come together as two big companies to yes, take a partnership we already have, but really go to the next level with that. And how did the engineering teams work to ensure that Apex Cloud Platform was really aligned with premier solutions for Azure Stack HCI? It really comes down to what we call the Apex Cloud Platform Foundation Software. That's that magic automated management orchestration software in the platform. And it does incredibly powerful things that really make that time to value in an unprecedented way. Specifically, you can now reduce the steps required to deploy Azure Stack HCI down by 88%. Which I mean, it's like there's barely anything left, right? At that point. So you have that really great automated, really simple deployment compared to what you have before with previous kind of integrated systems when Dean was talking about the tiers of products. That's why we have a whole new level of offer. But that's day one, right? That happens once. So it's great that it gives you that value, but the day two operations benefits is even more important. Our engineering teams, as Dean said, really have been operating as one. It's been really amazing to see these companies come together and collaborate. And that doesn't stop when the product starts shipping. That continues. So we're continuously working together to validate that software stack we have in this product, what we call a continuously validated state, which ensures that whole software stack firmware up through the operating system is all validated to work together. But even better, when there's an update, when there's a patch, you don't have to go and search for it. You don't have to wait. We will have in as few as four hours that those patches are gonna show up natively in the UI and they're gonna be ready for you as soon as you're ready to apply them. That's huge because I think everybody knows and gets the CISA updates and things of that nature and security and we just heard what happened to major casino and things of that nature. This is super huge and it's a huge lift as well. And I think that's a big piece of it. So there was a piece in it that I wanted to dig into. You kind of included your software defined storage as part of the Apex Cloud platforms. Why did you go down that route? Well, it comes down to two things. One, what are our customers asking for? And two, how do we have a consistent experience? Now, Shannon talked about this as really a family, which is an exciting thing to introduce a family and one of the tenants of that family is consistency. So to have that consistency, we wanted to make sure that we had that same scale, linear scale, high performance software defined storage in our Microsoft offer, just as we do in the rest of the family. The reason for bringing that though is to give our customers choice. So we have storage spaces direct in the platform and then by adding our own software defined storage, which is built off of the PowerFlex technology, we can really support model these data intensive workloads, be able to scale the compute and storage separately and really give our customers a choice of using the native integrated Microsoft or leveraging this storage from Dell, that software defined storage from Dell that can give you that better linear scalability. And that really ultimately unlocks new workloads and even more transformation for our customers data centers. That's gotta be exciting for the customers at the edge to be able to have that opportunity to bring new use cases and new workloads. But Dean, Katelyn just discussed a number of the unique capabilities with Apex Cloud Platform. What do these unique capabilities mean for Microsoft customers? Yeah, I mean, when I look at this from the Microsoft customer perspective, this release is really all about extending the power of the cloud, the operational constructs of the cloud, the simplicity of the cloud and bringing those outside of our Azure regions out into the physical world, where customers are expecting and demanding, frankly, those same sorts of experiences. And so all the things that Katelyn mentioned plug right into that, right? So we're thinking about how easy it is to plug the box in, get it set up, the 88% reduction in the number of steps required to do that, the simplicity in things like updates and ongoing validation. Really, that's about just letting customers operate where they wanna operate, which is up the stack. They wanna worry as much about solving their business problems as they go forward, as you think back to what we heard from customers. And so the other part of that is really, how do you bring the power of cloud services to bear on solving some of these modern problems that customers are looking to solve? And through Azure and Azure Arc-enabled services like storage and data services and combining that with things like the Dell storage, customers are really enabled to just harness the power of all the data that they've got and really start to unlock just a new level of solution and value that they've got out in the real world. It's a really, really exciting collaboration. No, that's huge. I mean, time to value is everything for these organizations, especially, and I think also doing more with less people because we all know the budgets really have been tight in that personnel part. But everybody likes that really ease of cloud, ease of deployment. So what they also like is being able to get the product. And I think Dell recently announced that you're moving to more of a partner-led, go-to-market motion. What does that really mean for customers and for partners when you think about that with the Apex Cloud platform? Our partners are really excited about this. I was just with one of our partners yesterday talking about this new cloud platform, and it's very exciting now that we can talk about it as shipping. And, you know, they're really excited because it takes what they can already offer their customers to the next level. One of our joint partners, both strategic, both to Dell and to Microsoft is Kindrel. And actually with this announcement, they're expanding their solutions to support this new platform and this new family because they already see the demand from customers and they're excited to offer their services portfolio with this offer as well. No, I think I can understand that. And I think it totally makes sense where they're the front line for these customers, helping them with these new workloads and are both partners of both of you. So it totally makes sense. So, you know, as we get to the end of this, you know, where can people find out more information? Caitlin, why don't you kind of give us a little plug for where they can find it? Yeah, absolutely. So easiest thing to do is really to go to dell.com slash Azure or you can of course reach out to your Dell representative or partner representative for more information. And Dean, from the Microsoft side, where can people find out more information about this? Yeah, two places I'd ask folks to take a look. One is we've got a blog post up today on the azure.com blog that discusses the new Premier Solutions category. And then two, I'd ask folks to check out the new HCI catalog where you can learn more about the Dell Apex Cloud Platform Solutions for Azure. Now, that's great. And I want to thank you both, Caitlin and Dean, for sharing this exciting news. It sounds like it's going to be a huge opportunity for your customers and partners alike. Again, thanks for coming on with me to announce this. And, you know, we're really excited to hear more about it in the near future. And with that, I also want to remind you that those resources that you were talking about, there's a tab below called the Resources tab. Funny enough, we've actually updated it with all of that information so you can go right there and it'll take you right to where you need to from a Dell or a Microsoft perspective. We really thank you and look forward to helping you understand how this evolves and how this product set evolves in this market and bring simplicity to customers in the future. Thank you and join us again. Hello and welcome to this Analyst Brief where we're discussing Dell's Apex Cloud Platform and Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure announcements. I'm Dave Vellante and Rob Strecci and I will unpack the market for cloud computing and what the Dell Microsoft announcement means to customers. First, let's take a look at cloud usage and the movement between public and private cloud, which continues, but looking at the data, we're seeing the market is becoming much more balanced. This chart from ETR shows the percent of usage of public clouds relative to private clouds, specifically within the S&P 500. Now that portion of the market represents a very large sector of spending, well over half of IT spent. As generally considered to Bellwether, the data shows that about 43% usage of public cloud today in this sector growing to 55% by January 2026. Now note that that 2026 figure is down from just 10 months ago, implying that the market is reaching a more balanced state, i.e. many workloads are where they belong and the steep momentum to migrate off-prem has stabilized Rob. What do you make of this data? Yeah, I think it really makes a lot of sense and is really not even, would have been counterintuitive 10 months ago, but I think what we see today is that cloud is an operating model, it's not a place. And I think that companies and organizations that we talk to are really taking a hard look at where they place their applications going forward, not just going cloud first or cloud only, they've backed way off of that strategy and it's cloud went right and they're looking at Kolo and a lot of on-prem again, is becoming more in vogue for those cloud native apps. And they can get that agility on-prem that they're so used to in the cloud. Maybe if you need like massive scale and unlimited resources, then you maybe put those in the cloud, but it really is much more of a balanced picture. Absolutely. All right, let's take a look at another set of data. This time we isolated in the global 2000, which is another Bellwether. By 2026, as you can see in that dotted red area, only 11% of global 2000 customers expect to be all in in the public cloud. So nearly 90% of global 2000 customers think they're gonna remain hybrid by the 2026 timeframe. Now, Rob and I recently talked to Shannon Champion, Odell and discussed the Apex Cloud Platform family. Then you Rob spoke with Caitlin Gordon of Dell and Dean Perron of Microsoft about the Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure. Now, Dell recently announced the Apex Cloud Platform and Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure. So Rob, what are the relevant customer requirements that people need to know in this space? I think like we've been hearing from organizations, companies are not all in on cloud anymore. There isn't that cloud first. It's again, we're going to be balanced in where we develop especially. And a lot of that's being developed. All of these cloud native apps are being developed on premise. I think what they're looking at it is that they're not necessarily repatriating from cloud, but they're taking a balanced look at where they deploy, how they deploy. And it's more about, can I get the development environment that I really wanted? So if they're, for instance, using Azure, they're looking for the Azure tooling that they're so used to when using Azure. The requirements are again, how do I have that cloud native experience and cloud native build? So they want to be able to have those requirements of getting up to speed really quickly. So how fast can my developers really start developing? Instantly has to be there. So you have to have that native environment to keep the devs happy. Applications are going to be places that cloud native really hasn't been before. We're talking about edge. We're talking about smaller footprints. So it makes sense to be actually developing for those apps in those places or off the cloud. And then there's also a huge part of the puzzle is there's a lack of skills in how you run cloud native. So they're looking for automation and a lot of management and that day two type of operations to help them. And often it's also lack of skills and security. So they're looking for security to be built in from the start. And that's really the key requirements that they're looking at. So we saw from the previous data that the world is kind of reaching this state of equilibrium. It's clearly a hybrid world. How does this announcement address these changing customer requirements? Yeah, I think what Dell and Microsoft and Dell in general with the Apex announcements they've made, they also made announcement around Apex storage for public cloud. They're bringing consistency, a cloud experience across on-premise and across cloud deployed storage requirements. And that brings mobility and it helps them with multi-cloud deployments where you're using the same kit in both places. Second, Apex cloud platform family really helps with that consistency. And especially when you look at Microsoft, Apex cloud for Microsoft Azure, you're getting a consistency if you're using those Azure tooling. It helps you in given that Azure is one of the fastest growing hyperscalers that you've talked about before. I think that operating model and having that Azure operating model on-premise is really helping them. And we're also seeing it in Colo as well. Third, Microsoft has created the solution or their part of this is by bringing certifications and new tiers of certifications. This helps customers understand that these products are really in line with that Azure experience. And in fact, the Dell Apex provided solution is a Microsoft Premier solution for Azure Stack HCI and it's the first one out there. So they have the confidence, those customers have the confidence that this is all gonna work together. And I think that's the important because it gets that skill set, the security and keeps that momentum going. You know, the early instantiations, Rob, of Azure Stack had this vision, but it didn't quite have that sort of common experience that we're now seeing. Well, let's get into the announcements. What specifically did Dell and Microsoft announce and why should customers be interested? Yeah, I think, you know, when I broke this apart and took a look at it, I looked at it and said, okay, what's different? And it's not really a rehashed HCI announcement. It's not your typical HCI. It really is about the operating model. And HCI for the audience is hyper-converged infrastructure. Yes, yes. Software-led infrastructure. Right, and you know, Dell's been a leader in that market for quite some time now. I think when you start to see what they've learned over the years, along with what they've been partnered very deeply with Microsoft and brought to the cloud platform, the Apex Cloud Platform is really taking advantage of those Azure frameworks. So they're being able to integrate with Azure Arc, for instance. And that Arc experience or Azure Arc, which is a management system developed by Microsoft, it's heavily integrated with Dell's management stack. So you get a consistency of getting up and running really quickly, you know, within four hours and underneath that and some instances instantly for bringing up new applications, that really helps. And that Arc service also ties into other Azure services such as AKS, which is Azure Kubernetes service. And it ties in with Azure and Dell data services so you can get virtual machines or containers in the Kubernetes service up and running really quickly. And beyond that, and what's, you know, beyond the typical, it's not the same platform underneath. No matter what you're looking at, they bring a consistency of platform, Dell does, to all of their families. So as they roll out more, and this is the first one, you'll start to see that they have, for instance, their software defined storage layer underneath all of the platforms to give consistency of operations as well. So it starts to blur the lines between the public and private. And this is, we've been looking forward to this day, Rob, for a long time, haven't we? Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think also it helps when the companies are really, I would say well aligned with each other. And to the point where it's a powerful partnership where Dell, Apex, platform users are able to get within four hours actual Microsoft code that has been released. So if Microsoft, you know, on their patch days goes out and releases security patches, within four hours you're going to get those patches within that Apex platform. This is key to being able to be security aware and frontline with security. That's critical because it used to be, you know, patch Tuesday was just an alert to the hackers to go, you know, hacking on Wednesday. And now it's zero day, Tuesday. So the faster that you can compress that time, the shorter you can compress that time, the safer people will be. Rob, thanks so much for unpacking these analysis with me, I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching this Analyst Brief. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.