 Welcome back everyone to Dell Technologies World 2021. The virtual version you're watching the cubes continuing coverage of the event. And we're going to talk about the edge, the transformation of telco and the future of our expanding tech universe. With me is Aaron Chason, who's the vice president edge and telecom marketing at Dell Technologies. Aaron, great to see you. I love this topic. Absolutely. It's pretty popular these days. Glad to be here with you. Thanks. It is popular. You know, cloud was kind of the shiny new toy last decade and it's still growing at double digits, but it's kind of mainstream and now the edge is all the rage. What's the best way to think about what is the edge? How do you define that? Yeah, you know, that's probably one of the most common questions I get as we start really doubling down on what we're doing in the edge world today. You know, I try to basically not over complicated too much. You know, last year, we really tried to talk about it as being where the physical world and the virtual world connect. But you know, I really, it's more about what customers are looking to do with that technology. And so what we're really thinking about it today is, you know, the edge is really where customers data is being used near point of generation to really define and build the essential value for that customer. And that essential value is going to be different in each vertical in each industry, right? So in manufacturing, that essential value is created in the factory and retail it's going to be, you know, that point of sale, whether that's in a store or on your device in a virtual interaction. In healthcare, it's going to be the point of care, right? So it's going to be the ambulance or the emergency room or the radiology lab. And of course in farming, that essential value is created in the field itself. So, you know, for many customers, it's really trying to figure out, you know, how did they take technology closer to the point of that value creation to be able to drive new capabilities for the business, whether it's for what they're trying to accomplish or what they're trying to do and helping their customers. So really that's how we're thinking about the edge today. It's where that value generation occurs for a company and how do we take technology to that point of generation to deliver value for them? Yeah, I like that. I mean, to me, the edge, I know what it's not. I know the edge is not a mega data center, but everything else could be the edge. I mean, it's the place that's the most logical, the most logical place to process the data. So as you say, it could be a factory, it could be a hospital, it could be a retail store, it could be a racetrack, it could be a farm, I mean, virtually anything. So the edge is, it's always been here, but it's changing. I mean, most of the edge data has historically been analog. Everything now is getting instrumented. What are the factors that you think will make this industry's vision of the edge real in your opinion? Yeah, you know, it's really bringing together a handful of technologies that have really started to mature after over the last decade or so. The ones that have been around for a little bit, things like IoT have been emerging in the last several years. Even AI and machine learning, many of those algorithms have been around for decades, but we've only recently been able to bring the compute power acquired to do that in edge environments in the last decade or so. So really the two key sort of killer technologies that have matured in the last couple of years is really the microtization of computing. So being able to put compute almost anywhere on the planet. And then the emergence of 5G networking, giving us the ability to provide very high performance, low latency and high bandwidth environments to connect all those things together and get the data to those analytics environments. From that compute perspective, I mean, I still like to talk about Moore's Law as an example of that ever March that's been going on for half a century or more now is continuing to push forward at a rate that just really hasn't slowed down for the most part. The example that I use with people is, you know, when I still remember when I got my first calculator watch as a kid, you know, that Casio calculator watch that so many of us had. And my dad told me the story when he gave it to me, he's like, hey, look, this has the same amount of compute power as the landing module on the moon. And I didn't know it at the time, but that was my first sort of entry in education around what Moore's Law provided. And it's not so much speed. I mean, people think about that as it doubles in speed every 18 months, but it's really more about the density of compute that happens that Moore's Law pushes along. So I can now squish more and more compute power into a much smaller location. And I can now take that performance out to the edge in a way that I haven't been able to do before. I mean, I think about, you know, my history, I joined EMC that was acquired by Dell Technologies a couple of years back. I joined that back in the late 90s when the biggest, baddest storage array on the planet was one whole terabyte in size. And now I can fit that in the palm of my hand. In fact, when I walk around, when I used to walk around with my laptop and go into offices, you know, if I had my laptop and my tablet and my smartwatch, I had 12 to 16 cores on me and a couple of terabytes of capacity all connected with the equivalent of tens of T1s, right? So what was once a small or a mid-sized data center just in the last decade or so, we now all walk around as small data centers. And the power that that compute now brings to the edge allows us to take analytics that was really once done in data centers. I may have captured it at the edge, but I had to move it into a data lake, I had to stage it, I had to analyze it. And it was more of a historical way of looking at data. Now I can put compute right next to the point of data generation and give insight instantaneously as data is being generated. And that's opening up whole new ways that industries can drive new value for them and for their customers. And that's really what's exciting about it is this combination of these technologies that are all sort of maturing and coming together at the same time. And there's just so much happening in that space. And devil is really, really excited to be part of bringing that into these environments for our customers. I'm going to give you a stat that a lot of people I don't think realize you talked about Moore's law and you're absolutely right. It's really, you know, technically Moore's law is about the density, right? But the outcome of being able to do that is performance. And if you do the math, you know, Moore's law doubling performance every two years, roughly. The math on that is that means 44% improvement per year in performance. Everybody talks about how Moore's law is dead. It's not, it's just changing. Here's the stat. If you take a system on a chip, take for instance, Apple's A14 and go back five years from 2015 to 2021. If you add up the performance of the CPU, the combinatorial factors of the CPU, the GPU and the NPU, the neural processing unit, just those three, the growth rate has been 118% a year versus 44%. So it's actually accelerating. And that doesn't include the accelerators and the DSPs and all the other alternative processors. And to your point, and by the way, that A14 chip cost Apple 50 bucks. So, and that fits in the palm of your hand to the point that you were just making. So imagine that processing power at the edge. Most of AI today is modeling, let's say in the cloud. The vast majority is going to be AI inferencing at the edge. So you are right on on that point. Yeah, there's no question about it. So to your point, I mean, Moore's law is just the core CPU itself, right? And it comes out to roughly on average, it's about 10X every five years, 100X every 10 years, 1,000X every 15 years. I mean, it's incredible how much power you can put in a small footprint today. And then if you factor in the accelerators and everything else, it's actually if anything that innovation is going faster and faster. And to your point, while the modeling is still going to typically happen in data centers, as you pull together lots of different data sets to be able to analyze and create new models. But those models are getting pushed right out to the edge on these compute devices, literally feed away at times from the point of data generation to be able to give us really, real-time analytics and inferencing. The other cool thing about this too, is we're going from sort of more looking backwards and making business analytics based on what has already happened in the past to being able to do that in the very near past. And of course, now with modern analytics and models that are being created for AI, we're able to do more predictive analytics so we can actually identify errors, identify challenges before they even occur based on pattern matching that they're saying. So it's really opening up new doors and new areas that we've never been able to see before. And that's really all powered by these capabilities. It's insane the amount of data that is coming. We think data is overwhelming today. You didn't see nothing yet. Now, Aaron, you cover the edge and the telecom business. I'm excited when I found that out because the telecom business is ripe for transformation. So how is Dell thinking about that? Why are you sort of putting those together? What are the synergies that you see and the commonalities in those two sectors? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's really all about serving the enterprise customers and the organizations of all kinds that the industry is trying to bring these edge technologies to and that's no different with the telecommunications industry, right? So when the 4G world changed about 10 years ago, the telecom industry was able to bring the plumbing, the network piping out to all the endpoints, but they really didn't capture the over-the-top revenue opportunities that 4G technologies opened up, right? That really went to the hyperscalers. It went to a lot of the companies that we all know and love, like Uber and Airbnb and Netflix and others. And that really, in the 4G era, that was really more about opening up consumer opportunities. As we move to 5G and as we move these ultra low latency and high bandwidth capabilities out to the enterprise edge, it's really the B2B opportunities that are opening up. And so on the telecom side, we're partnering with the telecommunication companies to modernize their network and roll 5G out quickly. But one of the more important things is that we're partnering with them to be able to build services over the top of that, that they can then sell into their customer base and their business customer base. So whether that's MEC, whether that's private mobility, delivering data services over the top of those networks, there's a tremendous opportunity for the telecoms to be able to go and capture edge revenue opportunities. And we're here to help them, partner with them to be able to do that. Now, if you put yourself in the shoes of the customer, the enterprise business, a manufacturer or retail who's looking to be able to leverage these technologies, there's a variety of ways in which they're going to be able to consume these technologies. In some cases, they'll be getting it direct from vendors, direct from Dell Technologies and others. They might be using solutions integrators to be able to combine these technologies together for a particular solution. They may get some of those technologies from their telecom provider, and even others, they might get it from their cloud provider. So Dell wants to make sure that we're being able to help our customers across a variety of ways in which they want to consume those technologies. And we have two businesses focused on that. We've got one business focused on edge solutions where we partner with OT vendors closely as well as cloud providers to be able to provide a technology and infrastructure base on which we can consolidate edge workloads to be able to allow customers that want to be able to run those services on-prem and buy those from a direct vendor. There's other customers that want to get those through the telecoms. And so we work closely with the telecommunication providers to provide them that modern cloud native disaggregated network that they're looking to build to support 5G and then help them build those services on the top that they can sell. Either way, whether the customer wants to get that from a vendor like Dell or from a service provider like an AT&T and a Verizon or others, Dell looks to partner with them and be a way to provide that underlying infrastructure that connects all of that together for them. Well, I mean, the beauty of the telco networks is they're hardened, but the problem for the telco networks is they're hardened. And so you've got the over the top vendors bow guarding their network. The cost per bit is coming down, data is going through the roof and the telcos can't, they can't participate in that over the top and get to those subscribers, but with 5G and the technologies that you're talking about bringing to the telecoms world, they're going to transform and many are going to start competing directly. And this is just a whole new world out there. I wonder, Aaron, if you could talk about what you're specifically talking about at Dell Tech World this year as it relates to Edge. Sure, so the both of the businesses, Edge and Telecom have a couple of announcements this year at Dell Tech World. Starting with Edge, as you may recall back in the fall of last year when we had our last Dev Technologies World, we announced our intent to launch an Edge business. So that was formulated and stood up over the last couple of months and we're really focusing on a couple of different areas. How do we look at our overall Dell Technologies portfolio and be able to bring particular products and solutions that exist already and be able to apply those to Edge use cases? We're looking at building a platform which would allow us to be able to consolidate a variety of workloads. And of course we're working on partnerships specifically in the OT space to be able to verticalize these offers to help particular industries. Right now we're focusing on manufacturing and retail but we'll expand that over time. So at Dell Tech World this year, we're launching our first set of solutions family which is going to be the Dell Technologies manufacturing Edge solutions. The first one that we'll be launching is a reference architecture with PTC thing works on top of what we're also proud to be announcing this week which is our Apex Private Cloud offering. So this is the first example of a partnership with an OT provider on top of Apex Private Cloud so that we can bring an as a service platform offering to the enterprise Edge for manufacturers and combine with one of the industries leading OT software vendors of thing works. So that's one of the solutions we're doing. We're also looking to launch a product which is we're taking our existing streaming data platform from our unified storage team and taking that which was once running in a data center out to Edge use cases as well. And that allows us to be able to capture clickstream data in manufacturing and other environments buffer and cash that in an appliance and then be able to move that off to a data lake for longer-term analytics. While it's in that buffered state though we open it and provide APIs so that you can actually do real-time inferencing against those clickstream data as it's flowing through the appliance on its way to the data lake for longer-term analytics. So those are two key areas that we're going to be focusing on from an Edge perspective. On the telecom side, we're really this is going to be a big year from us as we move towards creating a common end to end 5G platform from quarter ran and then also start focusing on partnerships and ecosystems on top of that platform. Last week at Red Hat Summit we actually announced a reference architecture for Red Hat OpenShift on top of Dell Technologies Infrastructure servers and networking. And here at Dell Technologies World this week we're announcing a reference architecture with VMware. So running VMware's telecom cloud platform also on top of Dell Technologies power edge servers and power switches. So this allows us to create that foundation that open cloud native, these are container and virtual layers on top of our hardware to give that cloud native disaggregated network plane to be able to now run and build core Edge and RAN solutions on top of. And you'll be hearing more about what we're doing in this space in the coming months. Nice, that's great. The open RAN stuff is really exciting. Now last question. So Mobile World Congress, biggest telco show is coming up in late June. Yeah, it's still on according to the GSMA. A lot of people have tapped out and send but the cube is planning to be there with a hybrid presence, both virtual and physical. We'll see. I wonder if there's anything you want to talk about just in terms of what's happening in telco, telco transformation, you guys got any events coming up? What can you tell us? Yeah, so we took a close look at Mobile World Congress and this has been a challenging year for everybody. Dell as well as many other vendors made the decision this year that we would actually not participate but we look forward to participating with full gusto next year when it's back in a physical environment. So what we've decided to do is we are going to be having our own virtual launch event on June 9th. And in that event, the theme of that is going to be the modern ecosystem and leveraging the power of open. So we'll be talking a little bit more about what we're doing from that open cloud native network infrastructure and then also talk a little bit more about what Dell technology is looking to do to bring a broad ecosystem of technology vendors together and deliver that ecosystem platform for the telecom industry. So registration actually opens this week at Dell Technologies World. So if you go to Dell Technologies.com you can register for the event. We're really excited to be talking to the telecom providers and also other hardware and software vendors that are in that space to see how we can work together to really drive this next generation of 5G. That's awesome. I'll be looking for that and look forward to collaborating with you on that bringing your thought leadership and the CUBE community. We'd really love to partner on that Aaron. Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE really exciting area and best of luck to you. Great, thank you. I appreciate the time. All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with continuous coverage of Dell Tech World 2021. The virtual version will be right back right after this short break.