 The Cube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Welcome back to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian Convention Center. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, John Furrier. You're watching The Cube's live coverage of Dell Tech World 2022, great crowd, I would say 7,000, maybe even 8,000 people when you add in all the peripheral attendees. Jeff Clark is here. He's the vice chairman and co-chief operating officer of Dell Technologies. Great to see you face-to-face, man. Hi guys, good to see you again. Awesome. So really enjoyed your keynote this morning. You were pumped up. I thought the presentations and the demos were crisp. So congratulations. Thank you. How are you feeling? How am I feeling? Well, one relieved, if you know me well enough, I'm an engineer by heart, so trade. The anxiety to do that is, and build up is quite draining, but having it done, I feel pretty good now. But I feel good about what we discussed. It was a fun day to be able to talk to real customers and partners face-to-face like we're doing here and showcasing what we've been doing. I must admit that was a little bit of fun. Yeah, well, we're chilling on The Cube. We're laid back, as you know. What was your favorite moment? Cause you got a lot of highlights. The snowflake deal we love, been talking about it all show. The IP of Dell with software defined was pretty cool. A lot of great stuff. Some cool laptop stuff too. That was interesting. You know, I was like, where's the share button? By the way, we're at Discord server now, and all 18,000 people want to know. You're asking me to pick amongst my children, which I like the most. How big is your monitor on your desk? I have a 49 on one side and a 42 on the other side. That's what both of you guys need. Productivity, DAT, for your answer. In the world of Zoom, it was incredibly productive to have that surface area in front of you. So which of my announcements was my favorite? I think from a raw technology point of view, showcasing Dell innovation, thinking about what we've done in a very differentiated way, it's hard not to say the power flex announcement. Look at that. Look what I just wrote down, power flex. Yep. Right? Okay, think about it. Software defined, we're the leader in software defined. Infrastructure that can be, think of it as independently, independent ability to scale compute from storage so we can linear scale, knows no bounds, unlimited IO performance, the ability to put file, block, support hyper visors and bare metal all on a single platform. And then we made a bunch of other improvements around it. It's truly an area where we're a leader. We're differentiated in our core IP matters. And that's Dell IP, Dell technologies. Talk the bottom. Cool. So from a pure technical point of view, it's probably my favorite. What's not liked about PowerMax? The most mission critical, the most secure high-end storage system in the world. And we made it better. We made it more secure. We put an isolated vault in it. We added some multi-factor authentication. We improved the architecture for twice the performance, 50% better response time, blah, blah, blah, blah. Pretty cool. And then you got to put a notebook in front of everybody where you think about in this modern workplace and what we've learned as hybrid users, what software that we've embedded into that latitude 9330 was pretty interesting, I thought. And then if I pull day one into the conversation, sort of the direction of where we're going of multi-cloud, the role of multi-cloud and our ability to be sort of at the center of our customer's multi-cloud world. I loved how Chuck described moving from multi-cloud by default to multi-cloud by design and then the subsequent architecture that we put behind it. And then probably Cherry on the Old Cake was the snowflake announcement that got a lot of people excited about bringing a really differentiated view of cloud-based analytics down on our object storage. I know that was more than one, but I can't help myself. I like the cherry on top. You've said a number of times, I think the numbers, 85% of your engineers are software engineers. You talked about, is that the right number, roughly? Yes, sir. Yeah, and so you talked also about 500 new features today and every time you're talking about those features, I inferred anyway it was part of the OS, a lot of it anyway, a lot of software. Does hardware still matter? And if so, why? Of course hardware is still mad. Explain why. Well, last time I checked, doesn't the software stuff work on the hardware? Exactly. Doesn't the software things make hardware calls to exploit the capability we built into the software? Of course it does. It says it absolutely does matter. But I think what we're trying to describe or to get across today is we're moving up the stack. We're adding more value, basically our customers are dragging us into a broader set of problems and software is increasingly the answer to that. Running on the best hardware, the best infrastructure, being able to build the right software abstraction to hook into either data frameworks like a snowflake, being able to present our storage assets of software in the public cloud, ultimately the ability to pull them and think of it as a pool of storage for developers to make developers' lives easier. Yeah, that's where we're going. And is accurate in your view, you're going up the stack, more software content, and there's value that's also flowing into silicon, whether it's accelerators or NICs and things like that. Is that a right way to think about what's happening in hardware and software? You and I have had a number of conversations, Dave, of the evolution of the architecture where we're going from a general-purpose CPU-based thing to now specialty processors, whether that be a SmartNIC, purpose-built accelerators. If we leaped all the way out to quantum, really purpose-built accelerators for a specific algorithm, there's certainly specialization going on and as that happens, more software and software to find is necessary to knit it together and we have to be the person that does that. Talk about how the software-defined piece makes the innovation happen on the hardware. Is it the relationship that it's decoupled or you guys are just building design and silicon to make the software better? Because that interplay is a design, is designed in, right? I think it's a little bit above. Clearly being able to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities in your software in a differentiated way is important, something we've excelled at for many, many years, but then the ability to abstract. If you think about some of the things that we talk about as a data fabric or a data plane and a data plane working across different architectures, that's an abstracted piece of software that ultimately leads to a very different solution and that's what we're driving towards. What's different now and what's similar now from the past? I was just on a panel, I was talking about space, Cal Poly in California, Space Symposium and it's hardware in space and software's driving everything. You can't do break, fix, and space. Talk about the edge. You can't do break, hard to do break, fix, and space. So you had to rely on software in the supply chain, big part of the design as software becomes more prevalent with open source, et cetera. That innovation equation is designed in. What's your thoughts on that? Help me understand, John, what more of this specific of what you're looking for, what do you want to dive into? As silicon becomes more efficient, what does that do for the software in things like edge, for instance? As the boxes move out and the devices move to the home, they got to be faster, more intelligent, more secure. Michael says it's a compute tower now, 5G, for instance. Yeah, maybe another way to look at it. We've been in the industry a little while. For the longest time, hardware capabilities were always ahead of software. We built great hardware, we let software catch up. What's changed, certainly, in this time and as we look going forward, is the software capabilities are now ahead of those very hardware capabilities in bringing it. And to me, that's a very fundamental change, certainly in my 35 years of doing this, that's very different. And if you believe that continues, which I do, particularly as we face increasingly more difficult challenges to continue with Moore's law, how do we continue to build out the transistor density we've all benefited from for four, five decades now? Software innovation is going to lead, which is what we tried to hint at today. And I think that's the future. That's where you're going to see us continue to drive. And think about how we talk about technology today. I know Dave and I had this conversation not too long ago, whether it's infrastructure as code, who would have thought of that idea a decade ago? If we think about data as code, we were talking about before we got on air, what data on code? Data's little bits, ones and zeros stored in silicon. You store it. You move it around now. So it opens the door, the door to, I think, innovation done differently, and perhaps even done it more scale as if we abstract it correctly. And Michael had a good point on it when he was on about all the good benefits that come from that in the customer and in society. And I guess the next question with the customer side, if the script is flipping, which I believe it is, I agree with you, how does the customers deal with the innovation strategy? Because now they want to take advantage of the new innovation. But what problems and opportunities are they facing that's different now than, say, a decade ago, if you're in IT or you're trying to create a great group within your CISO organization? I mean, there are problems now that we didn't see before. How do you see that? I think the biggest change would be, again, if you look and reflect on our careers, IT was sort of in the business. It played a role. It was often put off to the corner, just make the place sort of work. And today, and I think the pandemic and global health crisis accelerated this, technology is now part of people's business and you can't compete without technology. And in fact, we saw it during the early days of the pandemic, those customers that were further along on their digital transformation generally weathered the storm in their sector better than those who were behind. What does that tell us? Technology was an enabler. Technology helped them weather the storm, prepared them, made them more competitive. So now I think I don't meet many CIOs and CEOs who don't have the conversation about their business model or technology being semi-biotic, that they're integrated, that they can't do one without the other. That's a very different mindset than when we grew up in this industry, where this stuff was. So now you take that as a basis. We got data everywhere. Most of the data is going to come out of the data, not in the data center, it's going to be created outside of the data center. The attack surface has grown disproportionately. People sharing data too, their data with other data. Very much so. It's not just generating data. In places sometimes they don't know where it is and hope to get it back. So the role to be able to protect that estate, if you will, to be able to protect the information which increasingly data is companies fuel, but makes them go, how do you protect it? How do you ultimately analyze it? How do you provide them the insights to ultimately run and drive their business? That's the opportunity. So we were in the same wavelength with PowerFlex and I'm a little concerned about confirmation bias, but I want to say this, I really like the way your Dell's language and yours specifically has evolved. You talk about abstraction layers, hiding that underlying complexity, building value on top of the hyperscalers, on prem connecting. So we call it SuperCloud, you guys call it multi-cloud. We saw two examples of that today, Project Alpine and the Snowflake. It's early examples. I'm trying to gauge how real this is, we think it's real. We talked to customers who clearly say this is what they want. I wonder if you could add a little detail to that, some color on your thoughts, on how real this is, how it will evolve over time. Well, from Marcy and the way that I see it in driving our underlying product development roadmaps, people want to drag into conversation about public and private and this and what have you and that's not how customers work today. Customers really have got to this point where they want to use the best capabilities regardless of where they lie. And if that's keeping mission critical data on premise, taking advantage of analytic tools in the cloud, doing some test dev in the public cloud, moving out to the edge, they want to be able to do that reasonably quickly. And we were talking about this before we got on the air in an easy fashion, it can't be complex. So how do you actually knit this together in a way that is not complex and enables customers? That's what I think customers want. So you think about our multi-cloud vision, it's about building an ecosystem across all of the public clouds, which we've made announcement and announcement to do that. Well, you said earlier, default versus by design was referencing to the multi-cloud, but I think the design is the key word here. The design is a system architecture. You're talking about, you said also technology and business models are tied together and enable her. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. Well, that's exactly right. If I take that in what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. Tell us we got a wrap, which is bumping me out because we got so much we haven't covered. We haven't talked about 5G, we really haven't hit on Apex. What else is exciting you? You know, let's, in the last minute or so, let's do a rapid fire. We just got started. I know, we just got started. Clear the schedule. Aren't you guys the boss? Yeah. This is great. We want to go to the next. Not when it comes to the schedule, we're not the boss. Just laid out the checkmate move right there. You know? Look, what I get excited about, edge to me is a domain that we're going to see in this part of our careers have the same level of innovation and discovery that we just saw in the early part of our careers and probably times 10 or times 100. And I think about the world we live in and matching up what's happening in this digitization of our world and everything having a sensor in it collecting data everywhere on everything and then being able to synthesize it in a way that we can derive reasonable insight from to be able to make real-time decisions from whether that be in healthcare, a smart city, a factory, the transportation area, our own website of how the traffic comes in and how we present our offers more effectively to what you want, which are then different than what Dave wants. The possibilities are unlimited and we're in the top half of the first inning if you like baseball analogies and a long way to go and a tremendous amount of innovation that will happen here. I get excited about that place. Now it's not going to happen overnight, everyone's like, oh, what's both the edge, what's in that IoT? Stop putting a timeframe on it. The foundation is built to be able to develop and evolve and innovate from here like I've never seen. And the playbook to get back to your game over comment is whoever can simplify and reduce the complexity and make things simpler and easier. That's kind of the formula for success. I mean, it sounds kind of easy, right? Spot on. Just do it, but what? But that's hard. I remember. It's hard. And being able to build data centers in millions of places. So for example, we'll leave you in a little 5G. You think about all of the public cloud data centers today, I think there's roughly 600 locations. You've got seven million cell towers. Seven million cell towers are going to be like. How are they right there? Data center at the edge of the network. As we disaggregate the telecom infrastructure from a monolithic big black box into a disaggregated standards-based architecture with virtualization and containerization in it. I mean, I have a computer. I love the whole metro operating model there. Like having that data center at that edge. All that wireless coming in. I agree. Pretty impressive. Powering all the Teslas and all the cars out there. Sending telematics to people's phones. Let's wait till next day. I'm going to say next Dell technology, we'll just have some fun. Jeff Clark, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. You're an awesome guest and congratulations on all the success and really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the kind words. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. Dell Tech World 2022 live. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE. That was great. You're a great riff.