 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here, day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. We have had a ton of great conversations. I believe this is our 24th segment that we filmed since Monday night. We have a couple of alumni joining us once again, which is great. We've got Drew Schulke Hughes here as well, VP Product Management, Primary Storage and Connectivity at Dell Technologies. Hey Drew. Hey there. Sheena Champion is once again with us, VP Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Guys, it's so great to have you back on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. You guys. Let's talk about some hot topics. What's hot and driving storage today? Sheena, we'll start with you and then Drew will get your feedback. Yeah. I mean, there's tons of innovation happening here at the show. Hot topics for storage, really in three main categories, multi-cloud, cyber resiliency and efficiency. So, just a ton. You saw multi-cloud announcements happening in force at the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about storage announcement that really leaned into cyber resiliency and efficiency and customers are talking in multi-cloud about complexity, about their skills gaps and about managing unpredictable costs. So, those are the hot topics. Big topics. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think tying it back, kind of all comes back to innovation, right? And like, to what extent can we as Dell Technologies address these areas of complexity of multi-cloud, cyber resiliency and efficiency to allow our customers to innovate and differentiate their products instead of having to focus on those things which, to be honest, we should be taking care of for them. Yeah, it's interesting. Years ago, I asked an executive, what do you care about in storage? He's like, look, all I want it to be is rock solid, lightning fast and dirt cheap. Now, to do that, it was like you get inside talking about what kind of disks are there, what kind of flashing. You know, you mentioned those three areas. It's a whole different ball game now, isn't it? We're talking about cross-cloud, cyber resiliency. I mean, up until, you know, I don't know, whatever, five, 10 years ago, nobody really even talked about that. They certainly talked about it after the pandemic. I guess efficiency always, but the way you get efficiency is different now. So, what are those sort of barriers to achieving these areas of innovation? Yeah, I mean, like you said a couple years ago at a show like this, we'd be talking about speeds and feeds of our storage products. And I was kidding with some of the folks in the booth earlier that we don't really even load the data sheets up in the booth anymore because it's not what the conversation is. People are trying to get innovation and drive those innovation projects and yeah, they want to do it through efficiency and optimizing operations, but more and more they're talking about power savings. That's critical to them. We know that 80% of customers or more are making sustainability and energy efficiency a key buying decision. So those are some of the conversations that we're having in the booth. Yeah, I'd say, you talk about the rock solid, cheap and secure it, or I forget what the acronyms used, Dave, but that's the price of admission stuff now, right? They're assuming that's all there. And the cyber resiliency and cybersecurity topic, boy, it's rare that I go buy a customer conversation where that doesn't come up as a conversation point unsolicited. We don't even have to put up a slide. It's top of everybody's minds for so many reasons, but we've done some pretty exciting things in terms of what we announced a couple of weeks back on that front. Talk a little bit about that. First of all, define cyber resiliency and how is Dell enabling organizations to achieve it? It was when we see the threat landscape, especially with Edge and Cloud and everything being so amorphous, the threat landscape is only getting bigger. The threat actors are only getting more sophisticated. So what are you doing from a storage perspective to help customers achieve cyber resiliency? It's really broad. And so you've got to go all the way back to actually like how it is we develop our products, right? So we have a NIST compliant development process, hardware root of trust that we design into our hardware products, software supply chain verification, hardware supply chain verification, data arrest encryption. Like it's so fundamental. And all of that stuff was foundational, by the way, ahead of, well ahead of anything that we announced here in the past couple of weeks. Specifically what we focused on just recently here is our power store product is now what we call Stig compliant. So it meets the highest levels of security standards for the Department of Defense, which allows us to open into opportunities for the federal government. But beyond that opportunity for the federal government, you know what we're increasingly hearing is a number of our customers have been deemed quote unquote critical industries by the executive branch of the government today. And what we mean by that are utility companies, transportation company, financial institutions. They're beginning to be held to that same bar that was previously reserved for Department of Defense agencies. And so the kind of investment that we make in supporting DOD helps there. But beyond that we've done a bunch of other efforts furthering the cause of zero trust with native multi-factor authentication integration, secure and immutable snapshots. So if something bad does happen, we're giving you a very fine-grained recovery window that you can go do that and not having to worry about that becoming corrupted. So there's a broad set of things and it begins all the way back from design, all the way to how, if something bad does happen, how we're going to help you recover. We're talking about all these sort of up the storage stack anyway innovations. And then at the end of the year ago after Dell Tech World, you and I sat down. We had our does hardware matter discussion. You were super helpful in taking us inside. And it's funny because as much as we talk about the upper level value, there's still all kinds of interesting things going on in the hardware with the alternative processors, the NICs, the CPUs, the GPUs, the NPUs. And so that hasn't gone away. In fact, actually in many ways, the innovation is accelerating, but then you have to do all this other stuff on top of it. What's the symbiotic nature between that hardware and these upper stack levels? Yeah, so what you're hitting on is the importance of software really in integrating that full stack. And you may have heard in the plethora of innovations at the keynote, Jeff Clark threw out lots of numbers, but one of them was that over the last year, since the last time we sat down with you, we've delivered over 2000 software driven storage features across our entire portfolio from high-end, mid-range, entry, HCI data protection. Software is really the key to all of that. A little-known fact within our engineering staff in our infrastructure solutions group, 85% are software engineers. And their job is really to take that hardware and make it easier to use integrated into the full stack. And that's really the nature of the cloud announcements that we had. It's the nature of how PowerStore is originally architected. So over the next couple months, you'll see innovations that are all software-based across our whole portfolio, but we really are focusing in first, in leading the charge with PowerStore. The cyber resiliency updates that Drew talked about are part of that software release, as well as efficiency updates. Why starting with PowerStore? Just give us kind of a little backstory there. Yeah, I mean like across our entire portfolio, we're all on different release cadence. For PowerStore in particular, we're making a lot of noise about that because it has the most in terms of cyber resiliency and efficiency right now. So Drew hit on the cyber resiliency effort. As a foundation, we've always had sort of operational efficiency, but I talked about how important power is. So PowerStore with this new release is our most power efficient storage system, 60% more energy efficient, more IOPS per watt with several energy certified models. So we're listening to our customers, we're building in the things that matter and releasing them as quickly as we can. You were talking about the federal government certifications earlier, it's interesting. You know the overall, when we came into 2023, CIOs and IT decision makers expected to spend almost 6% more this year in their budget than they did last year and as you well know, that's consistently come down. I think they're projecting maybe 2% growth this quarter. So it's still growing, which is good news and they maybe hope to, you know, overall this year maybe it's 3%. Okay, but one area, there's actually two areas that are significantly above that, six, seven, eight percent and that's small business and then US government. And so how does this certification enable you to do more with the US government? What are those conversations like? Maybe you could give us a sense of that. Yeah, well so that certification allows us to be submit for what they call the APL, the approved product list, which roughly the total storage market associated with the US federal government is about a billion dollars. So it's kind of worth doing at that point in time. So that's certainly a huge opportunity for us. But like I said, it sends a clear signal to the rest of the industry, to the rest of the world, to government agencies outside the US as well, right? Look, if we're holding the bar high enough that we can power the US federal government, even the most secure agencies within that, I think it sends a very strong message on that front. I think as you pertain to the SMB thing, it probably dovetails more into the efficiency conversation where we've done some pretty exciting stuff over there as well. Well, so maybe you're talking about that. So Snowflake just reported lower guidance, as expected actually, because it's easy to dial down cloud. You saw that with Amazon's results. You saw that with Alibaba, which is not US, but so companies want to be more efficient. It's not as easy to just dial down what you've already purchased, CAPEX, but with new purchases, if they could be more efficient, do more with less. So how are customers taking advantage of that? What are you specifically doing there? Yeah, so from an operations perspective, PowerStore was always sort of built with that in mind. Intelligent automation, self-optimizing architecture, so making sure that the users can take advantage of and optimize their resources and do more with less. So it's been a core sort of principle from the start. Where security is concerned, and even for PowerStore, we talk about security being a board-level discussion, and it is across every industry. How have you, you were talking, Shannon, about some of the things that you don't need in the booth anymore, because the conversation has changed. Has the level of conversation within a customer organization changed as well? Yeah, I mean, I think that goes back to the innovation concept that Drew was talking about. You know, when customers are looking at the challenges that they have, it's less about what the infrastructure can do. It's about, I need a multi-cloud world, but it's complex, and how do I overcome that? I need to protect myself from cyber attacks. That's top of mind for me. And at the same time, I need to go faster because I need to optimize for my skills, my skills gaps and resource and everything. So those are things holding people back from being able to innovate, and that's the nature of the conversation. Like, help me with these things so that I can spend time on the projects that are going to drive more revenue, help me attract new talent, and really drive more customer value. And I don't know if you've heard about it yet, I'm sure you have, but there's a new Dell Technologies Innovation Index, and it's set out to sort of do exactly that, validate across, I think, 6,000 IT decision makers, and say, what does innovation mean to you? And those that are intentional and investing and able to overcome some of these objections to spend time on innovation and be a leader in their industry and innovating are seeing those outcomes and are leading the charge within their industry. So that's the level of conversation we're having. Yeah, I was looking at the Dell Innovation Index benchmark survey and innovation leaders, as you described, are twice as likely to experience big things, high revenue growth, obviously talent attraction, as you mentioned, but growing customer value, which is critical for businesses across any industry. Yeah, and I'd say the other thing that, especially at an event like this where we've got the broad portfolio and our discussion with all of our customers is, don't just tell me how you can make things efficient within that one product, like, look at, you've got the broadest portfolio in the industry, what can you do to bring those things together and make life easier? And really, we look at that as a huge opportunity to drive a ton of automation, and I'll maybe just highlight two areas that came out, one in the announcement last week, another one that we've kind of been discussing this week is, in that same power store released, we provided native integration of something called storage directs, so we can actually integrate our power protect data to main products and set them up through the power store manager, so the storage admin now has the ability to pull in that entire data protection process into a single unified storage process, no need for a dedicated backup server, we can use either a cloud or a physical endpoint, set it up in 90 seconds, a really truly compelling, better together story, but that one that drives a lot of value for our customers. The other one that I think is a personal favorite of Shannon and I is something we call dynamic apps on, and a lot of it came up out of actually the event that we had a year ago, where a ton of our partners were pointing out this idea that, hey, VxRail is like the hyper-converged leader, and we really love the operational model that comes with it, but look at, we also love power store, and we have a need for power store level storage capabilities and features like that, but it's a different operational model, how can we bring those things together? And this whole idea of dynamic apps on is, using what we call a VxRail dynamic node, so a storage less VxRail node, as that host in front end for power store, and what we've announced here at this particular show is we've actually pulled in the life cycle management of power store. So we, and customers absolutely love this, and I just finished a conversation with one of them, which is it allows them to ground their entire process on a single operational model, but gives them incredible flexibility in terms of the kind of workloads and storage demands that they want to go drive, and I love that we're at a company where we can, we're one of the few that can pull that off, and it's a nice place to be. Do you have a favorite customer example of a store that really just shines the light on the value of what you guys are articulating and you're delivering through power store? I'm sure there's many to choose from. Yeah, I know, there are a ton to choose from. I don't know what comes to mind. Well, I was just talking to a German customer and they had already been starting to use that dynamic note as a front end on their power store and they had set up six as a host and they had no idea that this integrated life cycle management thing was coming and I finished a briefing with them, and they were practically doing cartwheels out of the briefing room when we told them that this was now available with the next software release, so that was personally rewarding. I love being able to share the news on something that somebody hadn't vocally asked for it, but we anticipated that late indeed, those are the best. I'm glad you brought up the notion that in cyber resiliency, just optimizing for one product doesn't cut it, you have to have that in a full house and you guys obviously haven't advantage that. My question is how do you and can you be both best of breed at the product level but also have that full integration? And if so, what's the trick to getting there? Other than saying yes, we're best of breed, which everybody says, you know? I think we can and we've shown that we can with some of the announcements here at the show because really the nature of the multi-cloud announcements is doing exactly that. It's taking our best of breed software driven storage innovation that customers know and love on-prem and taking it to the public cloud and also at the same time, creating that operational experience on-prem and you can only do that if you have the product level specific differentiation in PowerFlex and PowerScale and others for example. And creating that common storage layer that Jeff talked about is the integration horizontally that drive consistency and flexibility across all of those but then also taking that software driven innovation to create that lifecycle management experience that's a tightly integrated vertical stack. So there's integration that we do horizontally and vertically to connect all these products but in each their own right, they are best of breed. So I think we are pulling this off successfully and it's exciting. I didn't realize this, that we learned from Jeff today on theCUBE that that common storage layer actually stretches to native edge, that it's the same sort of underlying substrate which is obviously that's really, really important. But I thought they were sort of separate stovepipes for now but they're clearly not. That was my misunderstanding so that's huge. Absolutely. Another proof point. And how have you seen final thoughts here just thinking about multi-cloud and last year when we sat down with Chuck Whitten and we sat down with him again yesterday, last year was multi-cloud as by default in so many organizations and it needs to be by design. How is PowerStore, PowerFlex and those tools, do you see I'm sure you do as a facilitator of customers going from by default to by design? Yeah, so our multi-cloud strategy from last year that was set out, what's most exciting to me about this show is that it comes to life in so many products and so much innovation. The strategy was really, the foundation of the strategy was as a service and modern consumption. It has grown from ground to cloud which is what we delivered with Project Alpine which is really all based upon our best of breed storage software and then also bringing that cloud to ground but down with our Apex Cloud platforms and as Dave alluded to, having that common storage layer across not just multi-cloud but to the edge, that is creating a lot more simplicity, flexibility, agility, control for our customers so I think we're delivering on the promise we set. I think we've heard that the last couple of days. Drew, last question for you. Little sneak peek into the roadmap. We talked about PowerStore. We know there's more things coming. Any little nuggets you can drop that the folks with me, audience would love to know. Oh man, you're going to get me in trouble. I don't think so. More is coming. Show a little leg, Drew, come on. More is definitely coming and I'm going to go back to like right, how many of our development resources are in software, right, so expect to see a software release from us each and every quarter across our entire primary storage portfolio, be it PowerMax or Mission Critical, be it PowerStore for the enterprise, be it PowerFlex for software defined. We've got a very compelling roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months. Stay tuned, I would just say that. I don't want to get in too much trouble here but the same themes though, I'll give you a sneak peek. Multi-cloud, cyber resiliency, efficiency, expect to see a pretty consistent landing zone across those three and everything that we do. We'll be watching. Drew, Shannon, thank you so much for joining JVME on theCUBE today. Thank you. I look forward to watching this space. We want to thank you for watching for our guests and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. Our next session kind of up, David Hardy and Brandon Peterson join us. We're going to be talking about efficient, cool IT systems. We've been talking a lot about generative AI power, et cetera. You're going to want to hear this conversation and how it's going to affect efficiency in your organization coming right up.