 Welcome back to DTW 2021, theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante. And for years we've been looking forward to the day that the on-premises experience was substantially similar to that offered in the public cloud. And one of the biggest gaps has been subscription-based experiences, pricing and simplicity and transparency with agility and scalability. Not buying and installing a box, but rather consuming an outcome-based service to support my IT infrastructure needs. And with me to talk about how Dell is delivering on this vision is Akanshka Murotra, Vice President Marketing for Apex at Dell Technologies. Welcome, Akanshka, great to see you. Thank you, thanks for having me. It's our pleasure. So we're going to dig into Apex. We know that Dell has been delivering cloud-based solutions for a long time now, but it seems like there's a convergence happening in all these areas. And it's generating a lot of talk in the industry. What are your customers asking you to deliver and how is Dell responding? Yeah, Dave, there's a few trends that we're seeing and they've been in place for a while, but they have accelerated certainly over the past year. The first one is organizations all over the world want to become more digital in order to modernize their operation and foster innovation on behalf of their customers. And they've been driving for years digital transformation to do so. That in and of itself isn't necessarily new, but the relative complexity of driving digital transformation, for example, when they're bringing on a predominantly or all of a remote workforce, as well as the relative pace of change. For example, if they see a remarkable spike in the consumption of digital content have both dilapidated over the past year. And because of that, the need for agility has gone up. The other trend that we see is that there's a clear preference for a hybrid cloud approach. Customers tell us that they need on-prem cloud resources to help mitigate risk for applications that need dedicated fast performance as well as in order to contain costs. But then they also tell us that public cloud is here to stay for the increased agility that it provides the simplified operations as well as the faster access to innovation. And so what's really clear is that both private cloud and public cloud have their strengths and picking one you're inevitably trading off the benefits of the other. And so an organization want the flexibility to be able to choose the right path to best meet their business objectives. And IT as a service delivered at the location of your choice is one way to do that. As you know, we talk a lot to analysts like yourselves and they tend to agree with us. IDC predicts that by 2024, over half of the data center infrastructure is going to be consumed as a service. At Dell Technologies, we're beginning to see the shift happen already. As you said, we've been providing flexible consumption and as a service solutions for well over a decade. However, what's different now is that we're radically simplifying that entire technology experience to deliver this at scale to our entire install base. And that's what ADEX is all about. Great, thank you. So I know Dell is very proud of its high, I think I got this ratio right, high due to say ratio, right? Numerator is bigger than the denominator. And you got a good track record in this regard. You can announce project Apex in October and you've provided a preview of what was coming then and today you're fully unveiling Apex, no more project, just Apex. What's Apex all about and what customer benefits specifically does Apex deliver? Yeah, yeah, so you're right. We announced this as a vision back in October and now we're kind of taking away the project and it's generally available. So you can kind of refer to it as Apex going forward. Apex represents our portfolio as a service offerings. These help simplify digital transformation for our customers by increasing their IT's agility and their control. We believe it's a solution that helps bridge this divide between public and private cloud by delivering as a service where it's needed to help organizations meet the needs of their digital transformation agenda. Talking to our customers in terms of customer benefits, we've centered around three areas and they are a simplicity, agility and control that the key benefits that Apex is going to provide to our customers. So let me unpack these one by one and kind of demonstrate how to deliver on these promises. Let's start with simplicity. Apex represents a fundamental shift in the way that we deliver our technology portfolio. And obviously we do this to simplify IT for our customers. Our goal is to remove complexity from every stage of the customer journey. So for example, Apex with Apex and Apex offers that I'll just get into in a bit. We take away the complexity, the pain and frankly the undifferentiated work of managing infrastructure so that organizations can focus on what they do best, right? Adding value to their organizations. Another way in which we simplify is streamlining the procurement process. So we allow customers to just simplify a simple set of outcomes that they're looking for and subscribe to a service using an easy web-based console and then we'll take it from there. We will pick the technology and the services that best meets the need, best delivers on those set of outcomes and then we'll deliver it for them. So as a result, organizations can kind of take advantage of the technology that best meets their needs but without all the complexity of life cycle management whether it's at the beginning or at the end and the decommissioning part of life cycle. Next let's talk about agility. This is an area that's been top of mind for customers as I said certainly over the past year and frankly it's been one of the main driving factors over the as a service revolution. Again, with Apex we aim to deliver agility to every stage of the customer journey. So for example, with Apex our goal is to get customers started on projects faster than they ever have before within their data center. We target a 14-day time value from order to activation or from subscription to activation within the location of their choice. Another driver for agility is having access to technology when you need it without costly over provisioning. So with Apex you can dynamically scale your resources up and down based on changing business requirements. And then a third barrier of agility and this is a serious one, it's just forecasting costs and containing them. And with Apex our promise is that you're paying for technology only as it's used using a clear consistent and a transparent rate. So you're never guessing what you're gonna pay there's no overage charges and you're not paying to access your own data. And then finally, from a controlled standpoint often business and IT leaders are forced to make difficult trade-offs between the simplicity and the flexibility they want and the control, the performance and the data locality that perhaps they need. Apex will help bridge this divide and so we're not gonna make them make this kind of false trade-off between them. It'll enable organizations to take control of their operations from where real-use sources are located to how they are run to who can access them. So for example, by dictating where they want to run their resources in a colo or at the edge or within their data center, IT teams can take charge of their compliance obligations and simplify them. By using role-based permissions to limit access IT organizations can choose who can access certain functionality for configuring Apex services and thereby kind of reduce risk and simplify those security obligations. So those are some examples of how we deliver simplicity, agility and control to our customers with Apex. You know, I'll give you a little aside here if I may. You know, you said the trade-offs and I've been working on this scenario of how we're gonna come back from the pandemic and you're seeing this hybrid approach where organizations are having to fund their digital transformation, they're having to support a hybrid workforce and their headquarters investments, their traditional data center investments have been neglected. And the other thing is there's very clearly a skills gap, a shortage of talent. So to the extent that you have something like Apex where I'd rather be provisioning loans and spending all this time both waiting and provisioning and tuning, that allows me to free up talent and really deliver on some of those problematic areas that are forcing me today to do a trade-off. So I think that really resonates with me, Akashka. You're exactly right. No more kind of refactoring applications, learning new skillset, hiring new people. You can, if the part that resonates with you is that, you know, agility and simplicity, you know, why not have it where it makes sense. So Apex is a new way of thinking. I mean, certainly Ferdell in terms of how you deliver for a way customers consume. Can you be specific on some of the offerings that we can expect from DTW this year? Yes, we've got a variety of announcements. Let me talk about those. Let's start with the Apex console. This is a unified experience for the entire Apex journey. It provides self-service access to our catalog of Apex services. As I mentioned, customers simply select the outcomes that they're looking for and it's described to the technology services, the best meets their needs, and then we'll take it from there. From a day to operation standpoint, the console will also give customers insight and oversight into other aspects of the Apex experience. For example, they can limit access to the functionality by role. They can modify, view their subscriptions, then modify it. They can engage in kind of provisioning type tasks. They can see cost transparency, view billing and payment information each month and use it for things like showback or charge back to various business units within their organization. Over time, we will also be integrating the console with common procurement and provisioning systems so that they can further streamline approval workflows as well as publish APIs for further integration from developers at the customer side. So, NetMet console will be the single place for us to procure, operate and monitor Apex services and we think it's gonna become an important way for us to interact with our customers as well as our partners to interact with their technologies going forward. Yes. The next. Please. Sorry. No, carry on, please. The next announcement is Apex data storage services. This one is a first in a series of outcome-based turnkey services in the Apex portfolio. At the end, this essentially delivers storage resources at the customers, at the location that they would prefer. When subscribing to this, there's just four parameters that the customers need to think about. What type of data services they're looking for, file, block, and soon it'll be object. What performance tier, the application that the customer is gonna run on these resources needs. They can pick between three levels. What base capacity they want, where they can start at 50 terabytes and then the term length that they're looking for is description length. We also announced a partnership with Equinix. So if a customer wants, they can deploy these resources at Equinix's data centers all around the world and still get a unified build from us. And that's it. Once they make those four selections, they subscribe to the service, we take it from there. There's no selecting what product do you want, what configuration of that product, et cetera, et cetera. We take care of all of that, include the right services, and then kind of deliver it to them. So it's really an outcome-based way of procuring technology as easily as you would provision resources in a public cloud. Awesome. Console, data storage, cloud services, which are key. Yeah, let's talk about cloud services. Yeah, and then the partner piece with Equinix for latency and proximity, speed of light type stuff. Okay, cool. Exactly, cloud services very quickly are integrated solutions to help simplify that adoption. And they support both cloud native as well as traditional workloads. Customers can subscribe either to a private cloud offer or a hybrid cloud offer, depending on the level of control that they're looking for and the operational consistency that they need. And again, similar to storage services, they pick from kind of four simple steps and we'll deliver it to them within 14 days. And then finally, we've got something called custom solutions. These are for customers who are looking for a more flexible as a service environment. They're available right now in over 30 countries, also available to our partner network, comes in two flavors, Apex FlexOn Demand, which takes anything within our broad infrastructure, portfolio, server storage, data protection, you name it. And we can turn that into a paper use environment. You can also select what services you'd like to include. So if a customer wants it managed, we can manage it for them, but they don't want it managed. They can include it without those services and essentially they can configure their own as a service experience. And then data center utility takes it to the next level and offers even more customization in terms of custom telemetry options, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of a quick summary of the announcements in the Apex portfolio. Okay, I think I got it. Five buckets, the console, which gives you that full life cycle, that self service, the storage piece, the cloud services, the Equinix partnership and the partners, that's a whole another conversation. And then the custom piece, if you really want to customize it for your specific... And storage services, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, good. Okay, you guys have been busy. So you announced project Apex last fall. And so I presume you've been out talking to customers about this, prototyping it, testing it out. Maybe you could share some examples of customers who've tried it out and what the feedback has been and the use cases. Yeah, let me give you a couple of examples. We'll start with Apex data storage services. As I said, this one's going generally available now. At Dell, we believe in drinking our own champagne. So our own IT team has been engaged in a private data of this service for the past several months and their feedback has helped shape the offer. The feedback that they've given us is that they really like that, like simple life cycle management. They tell us that it speeds up their folks to do a lot of other things. That are kind of higher level order tasks, if you will, versus managing the infrastructure. They're seeing greater efficiencies in capacity and performance management. They like not having to worry about building a capacity pipeline. And they like being able to kind of build on a charge back process that will allow them to build internal views based on what's being used. And so they think it's gonna be a game changer for them. And that's the feedback that they, and of course they've given us lots of feedback that we've also put into building the product itself. But in short, they really like the flexibility of it. Let me give you maybe a customer example and then a partner example as well. Apex Cloud Services. This is one where more and more customers are realizing that for compliance, regulatory, or performance reasons, maybe public cloud doesn't really work for them. And so they've been looking for ways to get that experience within their data center. Apex Hybrid Cloud enables this. Using this as a foundation, customers are quickly able to extend workloads like BDI into these different environments. A global technology consulting firm wanted to focus on their business of providing consulting service versus managing our infrastructure. And so what they also really liked was the paper use model and the ability to scale up without having to engage in kind of re-negotiating terms. They also appreciated and liked the cost transparency that we provided and their feedback to us that it was sort of unmatched with other solutions that they'd seen and they liked the sort of cost containment benefits because they'd give them much more control over their budget. And then from a partner standpoint, Apex Custom Solutions, as I said, is available in over 30 countries today. It's available through our BAS partner network. We've got a series of lucrative partner options for them. A recent win that we saw in the space was with a healthcare provider. This particular healthcare provider was constantly challenging their IT team to improve service delivery. They wanted to onboard customers faster, drive services deployment while ensuring the compliance of their healthcare data as you ensure and know there are some strict requirements in the space. With FlexOnDemand, they were able to dramatically cut that onboarding time from months to days. They were able to be just as agile while simplifying their compliance with industry regulations for data privacy and sovereignty. And so their feedback with us is they were able to be just as agile and just as cost effective as a cloud solution but without the concerns over data residency. So those are a few use cases and then real customer examples of customers that have tried out these services. Awesome, thanks for that. I mean, real transformation for the partners as well. I think actually if partners lean in, they can make a lot of money doing this. Yeah, it's different and profitability. Yeah, well, that's what the, hey, that's what the channel cares about, right? I mean, it's different from the past of selling boxes. That was sort of, okay, I know you got my margin there but this I think actually had huge opportunities to get deeper into the customer at value in so many other different ways. The channel is undergoing tremendous transformation. I have to ask you, so I think the first time I saw, so you have flexible consumption, you've had that for a number of years. I think the first time I saw it was like late 90s or early 2000s when I saw these types of models emerge. So can you explain how APEX differs from your past as a service offerings? And I got another sort of second part of the question after that. Yeah, you're right. We've offered these solutions for a while and very successfully, so I should add, right? Certainly it were the past year, our business has seen tremendous momentum. And if you listen to our earnings, you've probably heard that. What's different here is that we're taking, think of this as APEX is the 2.0 of that. So we've been doing that. We're gonna continue doing that, but what I talked about in APEX Custom Solutions is what we've been delivering for a while. And of course, we continue to improve it as we get customer feedback on it. What we're doing here on the turnkey side is that we're taking out a product-based, not a service-based, but really an outcome-based approach. And what's different there, and what I mean by that is we're truly looking to bypass complexity throughout the entire technology lifecycle. We're truly kind of looking to figure out where can we remove a significant amount of time and effort from IT teams by delivering them an offer that's simple from the get-go. Each of these offers have been designed from the ground up to provide not just the innovative technology that our customers have known us forever, but to do so with greater simplicity, to deliver greater agility while still retaining the control that we know our customers want. That is what is different. And by doing that, by making this consistently available in a very kind of simple way, we believe we can scale that experience. That along with backed up with our services, our scale, our supply chain leadership that we've had for a while, built on our industry-leading portfolio that brought us in the industry and delivering that with unmatched time to value at whatever location the customer is looking for. By doing these three things, we believe we're combining not just the agility that our customers want and as well as the control that they need and putting it all together in the simplest way possible and delivering it with our partners. So I think that's what's different with what we're doing now. And frankly, that's also our commitment going forward. So you can imagine, today I talked to you about our cloud solutions, our infrastructure solutions, but imagine going forward, all of our solutions, servers, storage, data protection, workload, and user devices, telecom solutions, edge solutions, gaming devices, all of them kind of delivered in this way and only the way that Dell Technologies and our partner community can. When I hear you say outcome-based, a lot of people may think, well, what's that? I'll tell you what I think it is. The outcome I want is I want my IT to be fast. I want it to be reliable. I want it to be at a fair price. I don't want to run out of storage, for example. And if I need more, I want it fast. And I want it simple. I mean, that's the outcome that I want. Is that what you mean by outcome-based? Absolutely. Those are exactly the types of, it's a combination, like you said, of business, as well as technology outcomes that we're targeting. But those are exactly it. Availability, uptime, performance, time to value, those are exactly the types of outcomes that we're targeting with these offers. And that's what our services are designed from the ground up to do. Okay, last question. Second part of my other question is, I mean, essentially you've got the cloud model. You're bringing that to on-prem. You've got other on-prem competitors. What's different with Dell from the competition? From a competitive standpoint, as you said, we certainly have a series of competitors in the on-prem space. And then we've got another set of competitors in the cloud space. And what we are truly trying to do is bring the best of that experience to wherever our customers want to deploy these resources. From an on-prem standpoint, I think our differentiation always has and will continue to be the breadth of our portfolio, the technology that we provide and bringing this Apex experience in a very simple and consistent way across that entire breadth of products. The other differentiation that I believe we have is frankly our pricing model, right? You mentioned it a few times. I talked a little bit about it earlier as well. With, if I use storage as an example, we are not gonna have, we're not gonna charge you a penalty if you need to scale up and down. We understand and realize that businesses need to have that flexibility to be able to go up and down and having a simple, clear, consistent rate that they understand very clearly upfront that they have visibility to that charges them in kind of a fair way is another kind of point of differentiation to not having that kind of surge pricing, if you will. And then finally, the third differences are services, our scale, our supply chain leadership, and then just say, do ratio, right? When we say something, we're gonna do it and we're gonna deliver it. From a cloud clear standpoint, it's really interesting. I talked about this trade-off that our customers often have to make. You have to give up control to get this simplicity and agility, and we're not gonna make you do that, right? As an ITDN, you manage, you've got full control of that infrastructure while still getting the benefits of the agility and the simplicity that today you often have to go to public cloud for. Again, from a pricing standpoint, the other differentiation that we have is you're not gonna be paying to access your own data, right? You pay a clear rate, and it stays consistent, but you're not access it. There's no egress, ingress charges. There's no retraining of your sales boards. There's no refactoring of the application to move it there. There's all these kinds of unspoken costs that go into moving an application into public cloud that you're not gonna see with us. And then finally, from a performance standpoint, we do believe that the performance that we have with APEC solution is significantly better. Just the fact that you've got dedicated infrastructure, like you're not running into issues with noisy neighbors, for example, as well as just the underlying quality of the technology that we deliver, I mean, the experience that we've had and not just in the space, but then delivering it to hundreds and thousands of customers at hundreds and thousands of locations. Cloud fairs are very good at optimizing for a few locations for hundreds of thousands of customers, but we've been for years delivering this experience across the world, across hundreds and thousands of data centers, and the expertise that our services, our supply chain, and in fact, their product teams have built up, I think will serve as well. Great, a lot of depth there, Akanshka. Thanks so much. Congratulations for giving birth formally to APEX, and best of luck. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing. Thank you for having me. It was really our pleasure, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage, ongoing coverage of Dell Tech World 2021. We'll be right back.