 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Good evening, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World. Live from the show floor in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, we've been here two and a half days, we've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple of days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. It's Iqraig, the VP of the technologists, ISG at Dell, and Maggie Kapoor, Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. Thank you for having us. So, great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. Yeah. But Iqraig, we want to start with you, VP of the technologists. That sounds like you need to wear a cape or something. Right, yeah, which I do, sometimes. Talk about that role. Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we're going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences, or customer calls, or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine Dell, a very large company, not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we're doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we're going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy, which I started a couple of years ago, which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. Yeah, that's... Got a side gig, my goodness. That's right. Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days, great attendance here, seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue in FY22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers, storage, bringing it to the hyperscalers? Yeah, no, lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face-to-face meetings, and see the customers have presentations in person. I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been an incredible... Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones. So just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of PAN-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so we're at this cusp where there are customers that are on this journey of developers coming up to speed with multi-cloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about a multi-cloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multi-cloud by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years, developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi-clouds and develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating Havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And Project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together, really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and edge and everything that we've talked about. So Project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announcements, and Chuck bought that up on Monday, was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.del.com, which we announced and launched in January of this year, right? It's, think of that as our one-stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having an API first approach to everything we're doing, be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one-stop shop, but standardizing our APIs, which is really key. We just spoke to Shannon Champion and a gentleman from Salesforce, and we talked about how we entered last decade provisioning LUNs, and now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy, how did it start? How is it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? Where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in. 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon, their city went on stage and they explained to their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12-factor way, designed to fail. Storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data, especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually at the time work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business, but Google took over some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI, which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for Container Storage Interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors, in order to ensure that our standards are part of the CSI standard. And we start to provide in CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us, I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes, similar in a way to the OpenStack days, is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So CSI itself is not just the end of it. Many customers won't stay to be working with VMware, with Visfu, with Tanzu, or with Reddit OpenShift, or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today, but also in the future as well. Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was pretty immature. They were focused on simplicity. You had Masos doing more sophisticated things, Cluster HQ obviously, and now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm, tackling a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resiliency equation? Yeah, so I think storage is a key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications, whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do they take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in and they love and they breed? I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide. Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance. They want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itsik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides, but yet take advantage of cloudifying if I can say the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that, we also have what we call our CSI modules, which is the container storage modules, which is so, you know, going back again, we CSI industry specs standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was this is great, but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions, but what we've realized is that the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules, which is an extension of CSI modules, but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency, these are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSI modules, just like CSI, are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source, waiting and wanting them to contribute to the code. So it's not just us doing and writing what we want, but we also want the community to contribute. You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source. Okay, that's the contribution. And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board, not just for Dell customers. Is that a project? Is that your ideal? Is that to become a project within CNCF? That's our goal, yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. Just keep throwing committers at it. That's right. Even our support these days is done via Slack channel. So we've been changing the way that we are interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via Slack channel. You don't need to call 800 Dell to get a support case. So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine. And it was very interesting to me to see that. You guys talk about multi-cloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud. And that's the subtraction layer. Some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multi-vendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, it's Yamaktagani, kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a de facto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? I think it is. So for example, Caitlyn Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly part of its rationale, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the Apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. Yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. Dell, meeting the developers where they are. Guys, thank you so much for joining David, me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. Yeah, speaking of unpacking, Lisa, we're unpacking the Dell Tech World. They're packing up around us. Exactly, we better go. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies World. David's been great to go host with you, be back in person. Thank you, Lisa. Of course. This is really a pleasure. My pleasure too. Let's do more of this. Let's do it. I want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on ReplayOnTheCube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time.