 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program. First we have a first time guest, Akanksha Mehrotra. She's a vice president of marketing with Dell Technologies. Joining us, one of our CUBE alumni, Taitlin Gordon, she's the vice president of product marketing. Also with Dell Technologies, Taitlin, welcome back Akanksha. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Stu. All right, so one of the big models we've been talking about for the last few years is a change in how customers acquire things. Big thing we've talked about for many years is shift from capex to opex, how cloud is impacting everything. Jeff Clark in the keynote was talking about it's the Dell Technologies on demand. DTOD I guess is the four letter acronym we use. Akanksha, help us understand a little bit from your standpoint. What is it, why is it important to your customers? Yeah, yeah, so Stu, as you heard as part of the keynote from Jeff and others earlier today, we've been working really hard to bring the benefits of on demand IT to our customers in private cloud, public cloud and Edge. And certainly this year especially, we've seen a lot of interest in this. COVID catalyzed customer interest in flexible consumption and as a service. As we talk with our customers and partners, we hear this almost daily. It's required a level of agility that candidly traditional capex based model simply haven't been able to provide. I mean, imagine taking your workforce remote over the weekend and the stress that puts on your infrastructure. And so I think that's kind of forced IT to consider some of these alternatives. Another factor has also been companies have been wanting to preserve capital and avoid large cash outlays and having this type of flexibility and being able to pay for infrastructure as you go as you're using it sort of gives them a way to do that. So I mean, those are some of the customer drivers that we've seen. Last year at Dell Tech Summit around this time last year actually in November timeframe, we introduced Dell Technologies On Demand as our umbrella program for our flexible consumption and as a service solutions. And really what it seeks to do is make it easier for customers to get the simplicity and flexibility of cloud along with the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure. So it's giving them a range of consumption models that include both payment option as well as services that they can apply on any one of the products in our portfolio from end user devices to core data and center infrastructure to hybrid cloud solutions. And we've been out that last year one of the things that you heard about today and that we're announcing over this event is that we're continually looking to make it easier and simpler for our customers with various term key offerings and simpler offerings for them given the interest that we've seen. Yeah, I want a key off of you mentioned the impact of COVID-19 and for your customers. It's something we've definitely seen that the promise of cloud always has been to be highly flexible. We can scale up, we can scale down. We know that some services out there aren't always as flexible as we might hope. There's certain SaaS solutions where you're signing up for a multi-year offering and even for the cloud I might lock in some savings by buying something in bulk. So help us understand what are the benefits that your customer sees the savings that they get and is this truly cloud flexible which means I can burst up and scale as I need and if it reached the point, oh, hey, I need half the capacity for the next six months, can I do that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, sister, we actually commissioned IDC to talk to a few of our customers. So let me maybe share some of the benefits that they saw in broad terms and then I can maybe share a specific example of what a particular customer saw. So we had IDC talk to several of the customers using Dell Technologies on-demand models, various Geos and various sizes. And what they found was that on average they saw about a 23% lower cost of storage operations per year, which is great, right? Lower cost of operations is always great. IT is always looking for those efficiencies, especially in the current environment, but that's not all. I think that's just sort of part of the story. What they also shared with us is that these types of models were able to help them become much more agile in how they work and change how they work. And what they found was that they saw 54% fewer incidents of downtime and they were 92% faster in their ability to deploy storage capacity because they had that capacity in their data center available, ready for that spike when their business saw it. So those are just the broad examples of what our customers have seen. Another specific example that I would share with you is a large multinational institution, financial services company. We've been working with them for years to service their enterprise scale private cloud. And then more recently, they had us also manage their storage as a service managed utility and they've seen phenomenal results. They've been able to get 50% more compute power at 8% lower cost and 90% faster or reduced time of provisioning data. It's all about the, yes, it's about the cost savings, but really it's about the agility that the business gets, right? And as you started out with COVID, they've really needed that agility and that flexibility and having these models available, ready to spike, ready to go down, right? Have been able to provide that. Yeah, and I think another thing we've seen is people rush to cloud because it promised that agility, right? And we've had those conversations before as there's a reality of what that means which it might not be the resiliency you're looking for. It also might not actually be as simple as they thought it might be. And we're seeing some of that come back on-prem whether you need resiliency or performance or security or you don't want to be really locked into a specific public cloud but you still want to have that agility and the benefits of really running your data center in a service oriented model. And that trend has been picking up over the past couple of years and as we've already said a couple of times today, we've seen that accelerate but also we're starting to see more customers ask for it. It's not just the big and more strategic and the aggressive customers that are looking for this, more and more customers are kind of seeing that this is the end game and that's kind of leans into where we're going which is how do we make this more accessible to others? Yeah, well, Caitlin you're using one of my punchlines that I've used for a number of years now was remember when we thought that cloud was inexpensive and easy to use, it's not. And if we look at what customers are doing it's a hybrid model, they're deploying in multiple environments, we're seeing the public cloud look more like the enterprise and the enterprise look more like the public cloud. So these offerings of Op-Ax, flexibility and the like make a whole lot of sense. So you've said that you've seen a lot of growth especially this year, any metrics you can give us on adoption, love the one customer example in the financial space, anything else to kind of paint the picture as to how prevalent this is becoming? Yeah, maybe I'll get us started. So we've seen nearly 50% year and year growth in the customer base over our most recent quarter and it's growing. We've seen over 500% increase year and year in signed contracts, customer demand and these types of models has caused us to expand our offerings into countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India and China. I mean, we already offered about 50 plus countries and along with our partner network and even more. So I mean, those are just some of the data points around business traction in the models that we have another proof point that I could point you to is that in April, we announced a payment flexibility program which gave our customers a number of promotions and options to extend this flexibility across our portfolio and into other parts of our businesses. And just recently, about a month ago, we extended that and we've seen really good traction in that as well. So I think overall, like you said, there's aspects about public cloud that customers really like and they tell us, hey, I want to be able to pay as I go. I want to be able to extend and contract the infrastructure as I'm using it. I want a simple management experience. But then as Kaplan said, they realized that, oh, but I don't want to pay for the refactoring and then the egress and the ingress charges. And some of my workloads are better off on-premises for performance, locality, security, compliance reasons, right? And therein lies the promise of as a service for on-prem infrastructure because really IT is looking for the best of both worlds. And this gives you that, right? You can use the consumption models to grow and shrink as you need it. You can use the payment models to only pay for what you're using. And along with our partner network, you can have it in the location that you want, right? So you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. Yeah, and I would just add on to that is that more and more of the conversation is both about how can I consume that more as a service and pay for just what I'm using, but also how can I spend less time, maybe zero time, and energy actually managing that infrastructure and how can I then allocate the time energy resources into running my business and investing in more strategic things. So it becomes both an important financial conversation, but even more so a conversation about how IT can empower the business, which really just changes what we're able to do for customers. So it's an exciting kind of transition to see this really evolve into really not talking about products anymore and helping our customers evolve their business. Well, Caitlin, that's a really interesting point. I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Dell Tech storage as a service. How does that fit? We were just talking about, don't want to talk about products, we want to talk about really moving to that full OPEX model. So help connect the dots for us. Yeah, and so we're really excited about this. This will be coming in the first half of next year, as you probably heard earlier today. And what we're doing here is we've really taken what we already have had in market and we've really upped that to the next level. We've accelerated the simplicity of what we offer here. And think of the experience as all starting in a single console where you just pick four things. What's the type of storage you want, what's the performance you want, how much and for how long, that's it. And then now we're counting the time from then to when it's in your data center in days, not months, not weeks, but in days. And we're able to get you up and going and it's your data center of your choice, whether that's on-prem in your own data center or let a Colo facility, we bring that equipment in, we get that deployed, we manage it for you, you operate it and you simply pay for what you use. So you're really in a quick time to value, you're in a very simple model and you're not really responsible for managing infrastructure, that's really on us. And that moves you into being in a true OPEX model and it also enables you to accelerate what you're able to leverage that, whether it's block storage, file storage, you can get up and running quickly and let us worry about how to manage the infrastructure and we give you the ability to operate what you need to. Caitlin, maybe if you could give us a little bit of color as to what happens behind the scenes to make that work because it sounds wonderful, you've had the program around for a year. These aren't trivial things that you're talking about, all the logistics, the management, the gear, making sure that the physical and the power and everything is all set. So help us understand the engineering, the development and what this means from kind of services and go to market to make a solution like this work. Yeah, and a lot of ways we're having to change our entire business to help our customers change theirs. It goes from top to bottom and you'll get to hear a lot more about it when we're actually available next year. But when you think about it, we have a lot of the DNA, we have a lot of the experience, we have the technology, but we almost have to completely flip the script on ourselves of how we deliver it, who our customer is, what our then end user customer needs from us and what the role of things like our global services organization is, what the role of our global sales organization is and how do we accelerate providing outcomes to our customers and get the rest out of their way. And the fact that I haven't mentioned a product name, but by the way, we actually have industry leading products in pretty much every category. So of course in the backend, all of this is going to be powered by our industry leading storage solutions like PowerStore will be in your data center, but at the same time, we will actually have worked to really mask that. You don't even need to know that nor do you need to really operate much beyond what you need to really run your business. And that's really, it's been an interesting work for us to just flip how we think about everything. And you'll hear a whole lot more about it next year as we really bring this out into market, but it's been really fun and a big learning for everyone. Excellent. Well, yeah, something, something power is underneath there, right, Caitlin? All right. Want to let you both give us the final takeaway for the Dell Tech On Demand, Akankra, start with you and just give us the final takeaway. Yeah. So I think, look, you know, back to kind of what we were talking about, we've actually been offering these types of solutions to our customers for a really long time, you know, through Dell financial services, we've been offering payment flexibility for over 23 years, over 15 years in managed utilities. So the customer example that I gave you is a customer whose running storage is a service and has been for many years. I think building all that experience, listening to our customers, you know, feedback over that time period and over, you know, of course, this past year, we're looking to apply all of that to make it even more simpler for them to consume our infrastructure, you know, in the near future. And so storage as a service is going to be a really exciting proof point of that. You know, the momentum stats and some of the other things that I shared with you today and that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days are another proof point of it. But, you know, we're excited about this and looking forward to continuing the dialogue, you know, with our customers, with our partners and with you. Yeah, and I would kind of play off of one of your words there, which is all about simplicity for us, is how do we take what we've been able to do for a lot of our customers, accelerate that, simplify it to a point where we can offer that for all of our customers. And we're really looking to accelerate this first with storage and then get all of our offerings really into this model because it's really about getting our customers out of managing infrastructure, get them the time, energy resources to manage their business and simplicity is paramount to making sure that happens. Caitlin and Konksha, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations to all the progress and definitely looking forward to hearing more beginning of next year. Thanks for joining. Thanks, Stu. Thank you, Stu. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. This is Dell Technology World Digital Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.