 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. We're not going to... Hi everybody, welcome back to the theater in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Dave Four of MWC 23. I mean, it's still really busy. You walk on the floors, you got to stop and start, people are cheering, they must be winding down, giving out the awards. Really excited. I'm here, Luca Ciudelius here, he's the Vice President of Engineering Technology for EDGE, Computing Offers, Strategy and Execution at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Dan Cummins, who's a fellow and vice president in the EDGE Business Unit at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome. Thank you. I love when I see the term fellow. You know, they don't just give those away. What do you got to do to be a fellow at Dell? You know, fellows are senior technical leaders within Dell, and they're usually tasked to help Dell solve, you know, a very large business challenge, right, to get to a fellow. There's only, I think, 17 of them inside of Dell, so it is a small crowd. You know, previously, really what got me to fellow is my continued contribution to transform Dell's mid-range business, you know, VNX-2 and then Unity and then Power Store, you know, and then before and then after that, you know, they asked me to come and help, you know, drive the technology vision for how Dell wins at the EDGE. Nice, congratulations. Now, Pier Luca, I'm looking at this kind of cool chart here, which is EDGE platform by Dell Technologies, kind of this cube, like cubes, of course, you know. AK project from here. Yeah, so tell us about the EDGE platform. What's your point of view on all that at Dell? Yeah, absolutely. So basically, when we create the EDGE and before even then was bringing it on board to create this vision of the platform and now building the platform when we announced project from here was to create solution for the EDGE, right? Dell has been at the EDGE for 30 years. We sold a lot of compute, but the reality was people want outcome. And so in the EDGE is a new market, very exciting, but very silent. And so people at the EDGE are different personas. So quickly realize that we need to bring in Dell people with expertise. Quickly realize as well that doing only solution was not enough. There was a lot of problem to solve because the EDGE is outside of the data center. So you are outside of the wall of the data center and what is going to happen is obviously you are in the land of no one. And so you have million of device, thousand of million of device, all of us at home, we have all connected thing. And so we understand that the capability of Dell was to bring in technology to secure, manage, deploy with zero touch, zero trust, the EDGE and all the EDGE that we're speaking about right now we are focused on everything that is outside of the normal data center. So how we married the computer that we have for many years, the new gateways that we create. So having the best portfolio, number one, having the best solution, but now transforming the way that people deploy the EDGE and secure the EDGE through a software platform that we create. You mentioned Project Frontier. I like that Dell started to do these sort of project Alpine or sort of the multi-cloud storage, I call it the super cloud, Project Frontier. It's almost like you develop, it's like mission based, okay, that's our North Star. People here, Project Frontier, they know internally what you're talking about, maybe use it for external communications too, but what have you learned since launching Project Frontier? What's different about the EDGE? I mean, you're talking about harsh environments, you're talking about new models of connectivity. So what have you learned from Project Frontier? I'd love to hear the fellow perspective as well and what you guys are learning so far. Yeah, I mean, started and then I led to them, but we learn a lot. The first thing we learn that we are on the right path. So that's good because every conversation we have, there is nobody say to us, you know, you are crazy, this is not needed. Any conversation we have this week, start with the telco thing, but after five minutes it goes to, okay, how I can solve the EDGE, how I can bring the compute near where the data are created and how I can do that secure at scale and with the right price. And then can speak about how we're doing that. Yeah, yeah, but before that, we have to really back up on understanding what Dell is doing Project Frontier, which is an EDGE operations platform to simplify your EDGE use cases. Pierluca and his team have a number of verticalized applications, right? You want to be able to securely deploy those, you know, at the edge, but you need a software platform that's going to simplify both the lifecycle management and the security at the edge with the ability to be able to construct and deploy distributed applications. Customers are looking to derive value near the point of generation of data. We see a massive explosion of data, but in particular, what's different about the EDGE is the different computing locations and the constraints that are on those locations. You know, for example, you know, in a far edge environment, the people that service that equipment are not trained in the IT or trained in IT. And they're also trained in the safety and security protocols of that environment. So you necessarily can't apply the same IT techniques when you're managing infrastructure and deploying applications or servicing in those locations. So Frontier was designed to solve for those constraints. You know, often we see competitors that are doing similar things that are starting from an IT mindset and trying to shift down to cover EDGE use cases. What we've done with Frontier is actually first understood the constraints that they have at the edge, both the operational constraints, technology constraints, the service constraints, and then came up with an architecture and technology platform that allows them to start from the edge and bleed into the other. I saw him laughing because you guys made the same mistake. And I think you learned from that mistake, right? You used to take X86 boxes and throw them over the fence. Now you're building purpose-built systems, right? Project Frontier, I think, is an example of the learnings. You know, you guys an IT company, right? Come on. But you're learning fast and that's what I'm impressed about. And of course, we're here at MWC, so it's all telecom, telecom, telecom. But really, that's a subset of EDGE, fair to say. Can you give us an example of something that is orthogonal to telecom? You know, maybe off to the side that maybe overlaps a little bit, but give us an example of EDGE that isn't specifically telecom focused. Well, you got the EDGE verticals, and Peer Luke could probably speak very well to this. You know, you got manufacturing, you got retail, you got automotive, you got oil and gas. Every single one of them are gonna make different choices in the software that they're gonna use, the hyperscalar investments that they're going to use, right? And then write some sort of automation to deploy that, right? And the EDGE is highly fragmented across all of these. So we certainly could deploy a private wireless 5G solution, orchestrate that deployment through Frontier. We can also orchestrate other use cases like Connected Worker or overall equipment effectiveness in manufacturing. But Peer Luke, you have a number. Well, but from your, so just to be clear, from your perspective, the whole idea of, for example, private 5G, it's a feature that might be included. It's a network topology and network function that might be a feature of an EDGE environment, but it's not the center of the discussion for you. It enables the outcome. Yeah, okay. So this week is a clear example where we confirm and establish this. The use case, as I said, right? Dave, you say correctly, we learn very fast, right? We brought people in that they came from industry that was not IT industry. We brought people in with their fans. And we are Dell, so we have the luxury to be able to interview answers of customers that just now they try to connect the OT with the IT together. And so what we learn is really at the EDGE is different personas. The person that decide what to do at the EDGE is not the normal IT administrator, is not the normal telco. Who is it? Is it an engineer or is it a... It's, for example, the store manager. It's, for example, the person that is responsible for the manufacturing process. Those people are not technology people by any means, but they have a business goal in mind. Their goal is, I want to raise my productivity by 30%. Hence, I need to have a preventive maintenance solution. How we prescribe this preventive maintenance solution? He doesn't prescribe the preventive maintenance solution. He goes out, he has to a consultant or himself to deploy that solution and he choose different field. Now, the example that I was doing from the houses, all of us, we have connected device. The fact that in my house, I have a solar system that produce energy. The only things I care that I can read how much energy I produce on my phone and how much energy I send to get paid back. That's the only thing. The fact that inside there is a compute that is called Dell or other things is not important to me. Same persona. Now, if I can solve the security challenge that the SI or the user need to implement this technology because it goes everywhere and I can manage this and extensively and I can put the supply chain of Dell on top of that and I can go every part in the world no matter if I have in Papua, New Guinea or I have an oil ring in Texas, that's the winning strategy. That's why people that are very interesting to the, including Telco, the B2B business in Telco is looking very, very hard to how they recoup the investment in 5G. One of the way is to reach out with solution and if they can control and deploy things more than just SD-WAN or other things or private mobility, that's the key. So you have, so you said manufacturing, retail, automotive, oil and gas. You have solutions for each of those or you're building those. Right now we have a solution for manufacturing with for example, PTC, that is the biggest company it's actually based in Boston. Yeah, there's a company that the markets just coming right to you. We have a very interesting another solution with Litmus that is a startup that also does manufacturing aggregation. We have retail with Deep North so we can do detecting in the store how many people they pass, how many people they doing all of that and all the solution that will be when we will have frontier in the market will be also on frontier. We are also expanding to energy and we going vertical by vertical but what is the really learn, right? You said, you are an IT company. To me, the edge is a pre-virtualization area. It's like when we had, I've been in the company for 24 years, coming from EMC. The reality was before there was virtualization, everybody was starting in silent. Nobody thought about okay, I can run this thing together with security and everything but I need to do it because otherwise in a manufacturing or in a shop I can end up with thousand of devices just because someone tell to me I'm a store manager. I don't know better. I take this video surveillance application. I take these things. I take a smart building solution. Suddenly I have five, six, seven different infrastructure to run this thing because someone says so. So we are here to democratize the edge, to secure the edge and to expand. That's the view. The frontier platform is really the horizontal platform and you build specific solutions for verticals on top of that, then the beauty is ISVs come in because it's open and the developers we create new value. We have a cell certification program already for our solution as well for the current solution but also for frontier. What does that involve? Cell certification, you go through some. It's basically a ISV can come. We have access to a lab. They can test the thing. If they pass the first screen, then they can become part of our ecosystem very easily. So they don't need to spend days or months with us to try to architect the thing. So they get the premature of being certified. They get the Dell brand associated with it. Maybe there's some go to market benefits as well. Cool. What else do we need to know? One thing I just wanted to stress, when we say horizontal platform, the edge is really a distributed edge computing problem. And you need to almost create a mesh of different computing locations. So for example, even though Dell has edge optimized infrastructure that we're going to deploy and lifecycle manage, customers may also have compute solution, existing compute solutions in their data center or at a co-location facility that are compute destinations. Project Frontier will connect to those private cloud stacks. They'll also connect to multiple public cloud stacks. And then what they can do is the solutions that we talked about, they construct that using an open-based protocol template that describes that distributed application that produces that outcome. And then through orchestration, we can then orchestrate across all of these locations to produce that outcome. That's what the platform's doing. So it's a compute mesh, is what you just described? It's a software orchestration mesh. Okay. And allows customers to take advantage of their existing investments. Also allows them to construct solutions based on the ISV of their choice. We're offering solutions like Pierluca had talked about in manufacturing with Litmus and PTC, but they could put another use cases together based on another ISV. Is there a data mesh analog here? The data mesh analog would run on top of that. We don't offer that as part of Frontier today, but we do have teams working inside of Dell that are working on this technology. But again, if there's other data mesh technology or packages that they wanted to play as a solution, if you will, on top of Frontier, Frontier is extensible in that way. So the open nature of Frontier is it doesn't care. It's just a note on the mesh. Yeah. Right now, of course, you'd rather ideally want it to be Dell technology. And you'll make the business case as to why it shouldn't even. They get additional benefits if it's Dell. Pierluca talked a lot about deploying infrastructure outside the walls of an IT data center. This stuff can be tampered with. Somebody could move it to another room so we can open up. In the supply chain with resellers that are adding additional people can open these devices up. We're actually deploying using an edge technology called Secure Device Onboarding. And it solves a number of things for us. We, as a manufacturer, can initialize the roots of trust in the Dell hardware such that we can validate tamper detection throughout the supply chain and securely transfer ownership. And that's different. That is not an IT technique. That's an edge technique. That's just one example. That's interesting. I've talked to other people in IT about how they're using that technique. Okay. It's trickling over to that side of the business. I'm always curious about the friction that you encounter because you paint a picture of a brave new world, a brave new future. Ideally, in a healthy organization, there's a CTO or at least maybe a CIO with a CTO mindset. They're seeking to leverage technology in the service of whatever the mission of the organization is. But they've got responsibilities to keep the lights on as well as innovate. In that mix, what are you seeing as the inhibitors? What's the pushback against the frontier that you're seeing in most cases? Is it, what is it inside of Dell? No, I'm seeing with market friction. Market friction, what is the pushback? I think, you know, as I explained, do yourself is one of the things that probably is the most inhibitor because some people, they think that they are better already, they invest a lot in this and they have the concept, but those are against silo solution. So if you're going to some of the huge things that they already established, thousand-off store and stuff like that, there is an opportunity there because also they want to have a refreshed cycle. So when we speak about software, software, software, when you are at the edge, the software needs to run on something that is there. So the combination that we offer about controlling the security of the hardware plus the operating system and provide an end-to-end platform allow them to solve a lot of problems that today they do by themselves. Now, I met a lot of customers, some of them, one actually here in Spain, I will not make the name, but it's a large automotive. They have the same challenge. They try to build, but the problem is this is just for them and they want to use something that is a backup and provide with the Dell service, Dell capability of supply chain in all the world and the diversity of the portfolio we have. These guys right now, they need to go out and find different types of compute or try to adjust things or they need to have 20 people there to just prepare the device. We will take out all of this. So I think the majority of the pushback is about people that they already establish infrastructure and they want to use that. But really, there is an opportunity here because as I said, the ITOT came together now is a reality. Three years ago when we had our initiative, they pointed out sarcastically, we... Just trying to be honest. We... I can't let you get away with that. And we failed because it was too early and we were too focused on the fact to go and push ourselves to the boundary of the ITOT. This platform is open. You want to run EdgeX, you run EdgeX. You want OpenVINO, you want Microsoft IoT, you run Microsoft IoT. We not prescribe the top. We are locking down the bottom. What you described is the inertia of sunk dollars or sunk euro into an infrastructure and now they're hanging on to that. But I mean, when we say horizontal, we think scale, we think low cost, at volume. That will win every time. There is a simplicity of scale, right? There is all the things. And the economics just overwhelm that siloed solution. That's inevitable. You know, if you want to apply security across the entire thing, if you don't have the best practice and the click that you can do that or bring down an application that you need, you need to touch each one of these silos. So they don't know yet, but we're going to be there helping them. So there is no pushback. Actually, this particular example I did, this guy said, you know, there are a lot of people that come here. Nobody really described the things we went through. So we are on the right track. Guys, great conversation. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Pleasure to have you both. Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at the theater. We're winding up day four. Keep it right there. Go to siliconango.com. John Furrier's got all the news on thecube.net. We'll be right back right after this break. theCUBE at MWC 23.