 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital experience in 2020. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni on theCUBE. Joining me is Gil Schnurrinson, the SVP of the Edge portfolio strategy at Execution for Dell Technologies. Gil, it's great to see you, even virtually. It's great to see you again, Lisa. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World if I didn't get a chance to talk to you. We didn't have you on theCUBE. So we appreciate, and you are very socially distant from me. I am in California. You are in Israel, so we're following guidelines. But one of the other things that's changed since I've last seen you is you're now in this new role with respect to Edge. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, a few months ago, the Dell Technologies Management asked me to look after our Edge strategy and execution. And they put me in this role to execute in a strategy that has been developed for a while. Look at the market, looking at the opportunity. And also, based on where I came from with VxRail, looking at similar concepts that could be implemented across the board. And so here I am today in the process of setting up a team that would help the company to capture that future opportunity. Well, congratulations on that. So we've been talking about the Edge for a while. It isn't anything new, but talk to us about what's going on from Dell Technologies perspective. What are some of the things that you're seeing with respect to the value that the Edge will provide to businesses in any industry? You're right, Edge is not new. We've been at the edge. All of us, the industry, definitely Dell Technologies forever. What's different is that for the last few years, a lot of the applications that are there to capture information and make real-time decisions have been in data centers or in the cloud. And we used to connect all sorts of sensors directly to those data centers or for clouds. Well, now we have too much information. That information is very costly to move. It takes time to move it. Sometimes you don't want to move it to a cloud or even your own data center. And so the industry is starting to move more and more compute storage networking towards the Edge. So it's nothing new, but there's use cases. Some of them are old use cases that need to migrate towards where the data is created to be a manufacturing plant or a retail store or a mine or a utility company. And there are new use cases that are just being enabled by technology better connectivity, computer vision. It used to be that in a store, there was a point of sale. Well, now there's a self-checkout sometimes with the front detection capability. So all of those present a fairly drastic change where some expectation as 75% of the world's data is created outside of the traditional data center or cloud by 2025. And that's why we need to be working towards being the best choice for our customers for their Edge applications. So yeah, you quoted Gartner saying that 75% of the enterprise data is going to be processed outside of formal data center or the cloud by 2025, as you said. That's in five short years, hopefully short years when we returned to normal. So tremendous amount of change going on that. You also talked about some new use cases. I'm just curious since the role has so dramatically changed since we last saw you in person, are any of those use cases driven by the pandemic and how many businesses have had to pivot so quickly and change their way of operating? Well, that's a very good example of how Edge applications are being leveraged. Obviously, computer vision, thermal imaging. In some places though, that's a very loaded term, some social distancing applications are being created around the world. The world is a new way to respond to this pandemic, but this pandemic will come, will hopefully go away soon when we get a vaccine. But even day to day has changed. We do more in a digital manner. We leverage more sensors and all sorts of electronic feelers out there. I talked to in an agriculture company recently that they have a robot that looks at their plants every day and decides which one are healthy and which one are sick and what to do about it. They have a robot that follows that one and takes action and I suggested that they should have another robot to just eat the fruits and none of us will be required anymore. But the point is a lot of new applications are being created because we can. And that requires real-time decision-making and that's why compute and storage and networking are moving towards where the data is created and hence the growth in Edge applications as we see them. That real-time implication is absolutely critical and that's something that businesses, whether it's agricultural or construction or retail, for example, or manufacturing that needs that real-time insight, we talk about that all the time. We also talk about the term, you know, businesses need to get actionable insights from data. And that's one of those terms like data-driven that can mean multiple different things. What, from Dell Technologies perspective, enabling a business to get actionable insights from data, what does that mean from Dell Tech's perspective and how is the edge of facilitator of that? Well, I think we need to look at, you know, our value at our focus, which is in the infrastructure layer. And so if somebody has information created at the edge, they would have their own way to analyze that data. Sometimes it's going to be people, data scientists with another application. Many times, more and more, it's going to be machines through machine learning that will analyze the situation and make recommendations. Either way, this environment needs to be up and running. It needs to be resilient. It needs to be outside of the data center which presents a lot of challenges. It's, you know, fragmented technology that is moving from different places to the edge in multiple physical and environmental constraints. Those environments are remote and distributed. It's not in your data center, which means that you need to make sure that you have reliable service and support. You also need to secure it better. Suddenly there is more entry points of things that people could touch and create problems for the organization. So our job, in my opinion, is to solve those problems, is to say, look, you know, you need to move towards the edge to analyze your data to make decisions. We are here to solve that problem and allow you to do this without making a significant trade-off versus doing it in your own data center or in the cloud. Yeah, I was talking to one of Delta Technologies' customers the other day who has tens of thousands of sensors and cameras all over the world. They do great work there. I'm thinking all of the challenges with respect to the environmental implications or physical implications. And I was thinking, you know, the businesses doing edge in California in the last month would have been very challenged with things like the smoke. How do you help organizations to enable that infrastructure to be reliable under different physical and environmental conditions? That's a great question. And I will just say before I answer specifically that while the physical constraints are something that we usually talk about when we talk about edge, I actually think that the bigger problem is management. But we are not unaware for the physical requirements. So we are busy delivering ruggedized short-depth servers. We just launched recently the extra two-platform highly ruggedized short-depth mil-spec server that can go from minus, you know, to 55 Celsius in temperature. Or, you know, the ability to connect those through, you know, software-defined networking. Or if I talk about a little bit of my heritage, taking the same extra two with the VMware vSAN, VX range stack and putting it out there as a ruggedized, but also remotely managed in full stack solution. So you will see us putting out and have been, you know, different form factors, front-end serviceability, different temperature ranges, a different kind of CPUs, all of those. But I will also tell you that we're gonna focus heavily on the way to manage those and secure them and update them, because I think that's where the simplification comes, not just from the form factors themselves. Yeah, that has been the heterogeneous and very widely distributed nature of the edge has been a barrier for businesses for quite a while. Can you unpack that a little bit more in terms of the simplification of the management? How is Dell Technologies going to enable a business to achieve that? Well, let's start with what we have out there in the market today. Somebody could have a cloud-native application developed, you know, maybe even all containerized, and they could run it on Tanzu, on TKG, on a VxRail, and they could run it in thousands of locations around the world, centrally managing all of those. And with the form factors being, you know, regular server or rugged A server, the ability to run your edge application as an extension of your cloud model is also very important, getting to consistent operations. So for example, somebody is using the VMware Cloud Foundation in their data center could leverage the recently large capability of multi-cluster manager. So now you have a central VMware Cloud Foundation managing multiple cluster out there. And so we bring together the physical attributes and the management attributes all at the same time. If you expand on that, I also think that Dell will have to meet customers where they are, where they know the ability to get simplified and automate solutions for their choice of applications, where they are today. And so that's what we're going to be working towards. So when you're talking with customers who are either looking to expand their edge operations, simplify them like you were just talking about, or even those businesses that are looking to explore and exploit the edge for operational improvement and maybe being able to deliver a better customer experience, I'd love to know how you approach those different customers for example, I know that Dell says don't consider the edge a separate problem. That's true, and I don't think customers look at the edge as a separate problem either. In other words, most conversations today would look at an architecture that has some cloud and some edge. That cloud could be in their own hybrid cloud solution in a data center or a hyperscaler solution that they're running on. If you think about the most generic problem at the edge, it's an analytics problem, right? So we know, so we know the data is created at the edge. It's got to be analyzed. By definition, if you're talking about machine learning, for example, parts would happen at the edge, part would happen in the data center or in the cloud. If you look at any other type of analytics, you'll make some real-time decisions but save some of the information back in the cloud. So it's not a separate decision anymore. It's got to be somehow connected to your infrastructure. And I think that also lends to more and more organizations are putting together the OT, what we call it operational technology in the IT, and they're trying to leverage IT best practices in the OT space. And I think that's how they're coming together. You have to transform. You need to do something with the data. You look at a new architecture and IT brings that cloud or hyper cloud or distributed compute architecture into those more traditional environments. Tell me a little bit about that. We've talked about the IT OT convergence and relationships in the past many times on the queue, but that's an essential component here so that not only can a business really face those barriers confront them and eliminate them, but it's also sometimes a bit culturally challenging. What do you see when you talk with customers and you recognize that's one of the things that they need to do with the line IT and OT? What's your recommendations there? First of all, Lisa, I always wonder if OT people know we're calling them OT people. I certainly know that IT people are identified as IT people. I think OT people are head of engineering, head of production, they run their businesses and they've been doing things they, you know, it's not like they haven't been doing even the analysis, even the nothing really is new here, but they would use the, you know, the machine manufacturer on-prem solution or a cloud solution to manage specific. So solutions were more bespoke or specific to specific machines, specific problems. The advent of edge computing and those environments moving closer to the edge and the architecture enabled to consolidate. By the way, one of the strength Intel technology has and so instead of just solving a machine maintenance schedule or improvement in a plant, we can have an environment that solve that and possibly the video surveillance and maybe the plant ERP. There is no need anymore to solve any problem specifically with a specific solution. That's where IT comes in because that's what IT has been doing for a long time. So that conversation, that bridge between solving specific problem and putting together an architecture that could consolidate multiple use cases and be part of an overall cloud data center to edge strategy. It's very helpful for both sides because it's very effective. I think more and more customers are realizing that and those conversations are happening and IT is being pulled into recommend a solution. So, and I think in fact, there's some research that shows that that is happening and that sets us up to have the right conversation with the right owners in those accounts. That's excellent, but that brings up another question. I had you mentioned the word bespoke a minute or so ago and I thought, you know, so many of the edge deployments there's complexity there. There might be unique requirements depending on business, depending on vertical. What's Dell technologies approach to tackling the edge consistently? Like the top three things that you go to with every opportunity, every deployment that you know these three things fundamentally must be part of the foundation. I think we touched on those. I think the recognition that it's part of a larger strategy is one. And so it's got to be playing along in that, you know, that strategy that data center to edge or cloud to edge strategy. The other one is the management that you put in place. And so by the way, even a few things that we are gap today, which is why we are investing in the edge like the ability to provision, you know, with zero touch simplifying that experience. Though we are very good at life cycle manager, for example, which is the next thing. So it's that consistent operation between core and edge, which is very important. It's the physical constraints that have to be addressed. And I think more important than anything is the ability to get support because you can't be everywhere that is considered for you as an edge. You need somebody to be there in Dell. You know, it has people almost everywhere around the world that can be there on a short notice to take care of programs. Moreover, many of our technologies dial home and so we know when things happen, even before they do. So I think sometimes people mentioned enterprise grade. You know, it's a very important consideration to look at those edge. Sometimes people think that edge is small and possibly not as requiring as a data center application, in my opinion, the workloads that are now going to the edge require enterprise grade treatment end to end. And so, you know, it's the management, it's the physical environment and the support that you may require that are very common. Excellent, thank you. So last question for you. Since we don't get to do a physical Dell technologies world this year, hopefully we will again one day soon. I want to know in this new role, what are you excited about with respect to edge when you're engaging with customers presumably over video conferencing? What are some of the things that you see that you're really excited about, say for the next like 12 months? Well, from a business perspective, clearly the pendulum is swinging our way in a sense of customer need what we have, which is very nice because you can solve customer problems with a lot of experience and an amazing portfolio, though it has some gaps that we're going to work on which is why, you know, why we're investing. From a personal standpoint, it's kind of a rare opportunity to touch real life things if that makes any sense. Every conversation is about tangible things that people do. They manufacture, they save lives, they are growing plants. It has a very physical element that makes it so much more interesting. Also the edge is, you know, it's the one area that we deal with that has a pun almost in every sentence. So you can go for in a conversation without anybody or anybody making a pun. Can you give us a pun now? Let's end it with a great pun off of the edge. So well, no, I'm just saying, maybe I'm leaving on the edge, who knows? Oh, nice, yeah, living on the edge. I think that's what we're all doing during this COVID-19. Well, Gil, it's been so great to have you back on theCUBE, thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you hopefully at the next event in person. I hope so too, Lisa. Good to see you. Likewise. For Gilesh Narnson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience.