 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE live in Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon 22. John, this is day two of our coverage, wall-to-wall three days of coverage on theCUBE. We've been talking a lot about the developer and how the world is starting to really revolve around developer and DevOps portfolios. Developers, startups, big companies, all transforming. This next segment we want to hear from how Dell technology is cloud-needives, big time strategy there and looking forward to it. It's going to be a great segment. Yes, please welcome back. One of our alumni to theCUBE, Brad Maltz is here, Senior Director of DevOps portfolio and DevRel for Dell Technologies. Good to see you. Thank you guys for having me. So Dell at KubeCon, what's going on? Yeah, that's like literally the most common question I'm getting. So for us, it's a lot about our customer base is making that transformation into a DevOps world, right, and they have a ton of Dell. And they're like, hey, from a Dell perspective, how do you help us make that transformation into a DevOps operating model? So we're here to explain that. We're here to talk about infrastructure as code, our container Kubernetes story, our multi-cloud story. We're talking about all of it. Tell us about those stories and what the value is in it for companies to work with Dell as they transition. So when we look at it from a DevOps perspective for us, it's all about the culture, the operating model shift they're trying to make, right? And what that means to them is they have to figure out how do they automate all of the stacks they have to deal with? Whether it's going to be server, storage, data protection, networking, all the way up through the hypervisor and Kubernetes, that means they need to work with an ecosystem of tools. Things like Ansible, things like Terraform, all that stuff. Our job is to make our portfolio more consumable in the infrastructure as code space. That's one part of the discussion. The second part of the conversation is Kubernetes won. Kubernetes won the abstraction in this multi-cloud world and we as Dell are helping our customers consume Kubernetes, whether it's by bringing solutions and more appliance-oriented mentality to the market or whether it's actually enabling them with our container storage modules and CSI drivers. So as super cloud as we call it, or multi-cloud, some people call it, you're starting to see the abstraction for interoperability, but it's essentially just distributed hybrid cloud. Edge is, you guys have a big press of sense. So Dell's supplying not just the data centers anymore, cloud models are moving to hybrid on premises. Edge is growing. We saw some great use cases where military applications are using Kubernetes and all kinds of new things. So this real example is happening right now. This is going to impact Dell's customers and Dell as a supplier of compute and servers and the gear that runs everything. Like at a telco, you can have a data center, add an edge spot, like a box could be a data center. And telco is a great example because we created the telco business unit and in the telco business unit, our goal was, hey, telco is a little different than enterprise edge, right? Enterprise edge, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, they have certain needs. Telco, much smaller group of customers that have a much different set of needs. And that's very similar is how do we scale at the edge? How do we control things programmatically? How do we do it in a secure way? And how do we do it so that our people internally don't have to deal with the underpinnings of all that infrastructure, just make it easier for them? That's our goal through the edge discussions through telco and all that. Yeah, we've been doing a big thing on why hardware matters. Hardware is back, we look at all the hyperscalers. The big competition is faster, faster, faster chips, faster, the physics. This is part of the supply chain, both hundred percent hardware and software. Okay, so developers want more power. At the end of the day, this community here wants invisible infrastructure and they want it fast. Yes, there's a lot to write. There's a lot of under the hubbers, there's still servers. Still got firmware, still got BIOS, still got a management operating system, still got to patch things, kernel, security issues, all of that from a server perspective. We haven't even talked about storage or networking or any of the other stuff. So there's a ton of buttons and dials under the hubbers. And that's totally going to be awesome. And the question comes in, okay, now take me to the cloud native because automation, infrastructure is code. These are now the hotspots, software supply chain, not hardware, software supply chain. So these are all things that are going to be intersecting. Yeah, so in the multi-cloud view of the world, what we really have are our customers are saying, okay, we started them one cloud, Amazon or Azure or Google. And they're like, you know what? We had to go to a second cloud for whatever reason, many reasons. Now we have to manage two clouds. And by the way, we never got fully off-prem, so now we have all of our on-premises stuff plus multiple clouds. How do we deal with the complexity there? And the complexity there is everything from data problems, of data mobility, right? Data protection, replication, all that stuff. How do we deal with the actual application lifecycle management across that? And that's where a lot of the tooling we're discussing comes in, that's where Kubernetes comes in. And they want to do it in an agnostic way, because if they can't begin to transition to do it in a standardized layer, then the end of the day, they're still going to be managing three totally different environments with three separate engineering teams. So is your target audience primarily existing Dell customers, legacy customers, or is it really wide open? It's actually been opening up. So we have kind of, the way I view it is we have three different segments that we're going to be going after. We have what I would say is the top 10% of the industry that's really able to scale up into this DevOps world very quickly. They're going to go after the GitOps. They're going to go after all those things. That's a combination of existing customers, but also the really, really large customers that can build their own clouds on premises. We then have the other end of the spectrum, people that aren't making the shift, people that are like, you know what, this DevOps transformation is not, it's not going to help us there, but we still need server and storage and whatnot. And then I like to call it the squishy middle. 60, 70% of the market, that's like, we can't scale up in time. We can't hire the people that are not available because about 10% just got them all, but we still have the same problems. And how do we operate in a world where we have that multi-cloud type of a problem, but we can't find the people? Now you got to figure out more of the no code, low code, packaged solutions, packaged automation coming from companies like Dell and others. So there's customers that are either at the beginning of their journey or not convinced yet. What are some of the barriers that they're seeing that Dell can help them overcome? Number one thing, education. Really? That's what we're hearing that consistently here, a KubeCon and just customer meetings all over the place. There is a segment of the industry that they're empowered to move into a DevOps model. They don't have the ability or resources. They're not able to say, I've been doing this forever in this way in storage. How do I do that in another thing? And they're scared. They want somebody to come in and kind of handhold them a little bit, but somebody they trust, somebody they've been working with for a very long time. That's Dell's role. Hands-on labs, training materials, how-to videos, but do it in the comfortable way that they feel like, okay, we got this. And the success of the customers has been well documented, the success of the company again continues to survive and thrive in all conditions. So Michael Dell knows what he's doing. Love following his strategy. Michael, if you're watching, I know you're watching the Kube video. Congratulations, but now the hard question for Dell is this, the applications used to run on PCs. Now they're running PCs under the covers and servers. The application space here at this community enabled by Kubernetes is kind of creating a new application runtime-like environment. I like compared to the old app server days when things were like just application-specific, development got easier. We're kind of in that renaissance now where the app runtime is being enabled by Kubernetes. You guys have been there, done that in the old school, now the new school, what's your view on this? With Kubernetes, what's Dell's view on? Yeah, so back to, Kubernetes is one in my head. It's just flat out one. And part of the reason, and it beat out a lot of things. You remember Cloud Foundry, which they're still a thing, but Cloud Foundry went a little too far up into the application stack and constrained the application developers a bit too much. Kubernetes success is two things. It's because they're not constraining the developer, but they're also figuring out how to enable that IT operations mindset. And they've kind of become that the happy medium that's out there. So now all of a sudden, application modernization conversations and cloud-native app development, there is a standard package. There's standard load balancing and security paradigm, standard registration mechanisms, all built in the Kubernetes layer, by the way, enabled by an ecosystem. And because they're actually going through that, what's happening now is we can finally move forward. We can take that next step and we can build around that ecosystem of Kubernetes. That is thematically something that we've been hearing, John, for the last day and a half, is the maturation of Kubernetes, people, what's next, we are ready for the next step. Talk about Dell as an enabler of that. Yeah, so another part of that paradigm is, Kubernetes does not equal virtualization. And this is a hard one in this industry right now. A lot of people say, well, yeah, we did the VMware pivot and then the KVM and everything else. And they're like, this is just another, one of those pivots. No, it's not. Virtualization was the pivot of physical hardware, became virtual hardware, but you still thought of it in CPU, memory, disk, and you managed it in the same way. Kubernetes, it's just such a different way of thinking about operationalization and kind of all that abstraction that what we're realizing is, people need to take baby steps into Kubernetes right now. The maturity of it is great because there is an ecosystem around it, but the majority of the industry isn't even aware of the basics of Kubernetes right now. So our job, we look at it as the education part, but also can we deliver the solutions together with the open ships of the world and the Tanzus of the world and the ranchers of the world? Can we deliver more of that full stack experience going into the next few years? That's where we believe we can help accelerate them, education and that delivery mechanism. And the community support is going to be there too. You got to have the 100%. The community, not just education, which you guys done before, but doing it with open source. That's where DevRel comes in. So the DevRel half of my world now is all about Dell in the community. And to be part of community isn't just to say, hey, I'm going to go sponsor something. That's not community to me. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt. We're going to do that. We're definitely going to help with that. Well, our notion is you got to participate, you got to contribute. You got to be there. You got to be part of the community. That's part of my developer relations team. You got to earn. You got to become part of it and belonging is earning. Yes. And that's the key. And the other thing we were talking about standards and you know, Dell has won a lot of business. And that's because the PC and the servers all had standard, standard components. Standards now in the community are being driven by developer consensus. So that is an interesting new paradigm. So if you make cloud native work where all the hardware and software that's powering the builders is invisible, the developers will tell you what they want. 100%. And that's why your Kubernetes cloud foundry example is so on point. It's a little bit nuanced, but what happened there is as explained, Kubernetes was loosely de facto enabled. They didn't try to take too much territory. They didn't over push. Exactly. They were very flexible, lightweight at first, but it was enabling. It was organic. Yeah, and we called it on theCUBE. I'm not going to lie. We called that early on. So you know, props to us. Good job. Pat on the back. Pat your own back. We get it right a lot. But now there's impact though, but the Dell I think speaks to the theme here. It's just, we talked to, there's, you got startups here. We had the, from Envoy, we hit some of the, the Donator there. He started his own company. Okay. You got Dell, which has large enterprises running massive workloads with a lot of legacy and modernization. So you got a combination of both coming together. This is going to be a collision of innovation. I look, that's exactly right. Part of what I've been getting is not just the end users, the infrastructure developers and whatnot around here. Startups come to Dell and they're like, why are you here? Like we build this and we don't talk to you. And we're like, why not? If we come to market and start delivering more of those Kubernetes oriented solutions and the Kubernetes stack experience, that's where you guys should be working with us. You're part of the ecosystem. Well your job, your job is to say to them, look at when you want to write your software for the edge and we have market share of the most hardware at the edge. Come here. Because we perform better on the edge. No one wants to write software on the slower platform. No? Name me one. I want to write software for the, that's just, this is something that people don't understand. That's why you're here. That's exactly. The game is about performance. Yeah. Cloud can do it, you can do it with a machine. So it kind of depends where in the distributed computing chain you're at. You bring up one topic that actually, isn't a core discussion topic around DevOps, but I am seeing more HPC and AIML conversations popping up in this kind of DevOps cloud native space. Because even the market of HPC, which is a very traditional market, commodity server driven in the past, they're starting to say, how do I take advantage of Kubernetes and all of the benefits that we've been talking about? What are some of the things that you've heard, like what in your sense is the kind of the key theme for the talk track of Kubernetes, its evolution with some of the developer's minds the last day and a half of this conference? Okay, that's a hard question, but a good one. So the way I look at it is probably, it's the robustness of the features within Kubernetes. Not the native features, but even partner included features. They just want to be able to handle security in a much more, I hate to say, zero trust for the secure cloud native way. There's tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem that are so integrated into Kubernetes. They don't have to think sometimes as much about how do they do it themselves. They can go find through open source or off the shelf startup and say, I need that. And I can spin it up in about five minutes and now I'm doing that without having to spend weeks or months and having to build that. And that's security is one example. You can go through the networking discussion. You can go through so many different areas. The fact is because of the community and the ecosystem, that is the winning formula for Kubernetes to enable the development. That's all I'm hearing here. Is there like, give me more. Give me more startups. Give me more of these technologies. And the ease of use has been a big topic here. We've been talking before we came on camera about VMware has done great since the use of the virtual machine example versus Kubernetes. That is millions of developers and operators on VMware. They have about 200,000 plus just in Vmug alone. So they are going to transform their careers. They're looking for a home. They're looking for a community for the next 10 years. I mean, VMware will still be around with Broadcom but I'm speculating that it will be much more in maintenance mode. But to get someone's career in fourth gear, fifth gear, you got to go and get that next skill set. And that's the question. Where do all these operators, IT operators, go to become enterprise operators? That's exactly right. It's a big topic. What's your reaction? And so I'm actually a living proof of that. I grew up in the VMware ecosystem, right? And for me, making that pivot, it took me many years. One of the ways I did that was I actually have run in Dell, our advanced development, Pivotal Dojos, if you remember Pivotal. And doing the paired programming, Lean Agile, it took me that mental shift to say, okay, we were doing it that way and now there's a new way to do it through code with developers and using all the new buzzwords. And that pivot is different for somebody that's just starting now. And they don't have access to a Dojo that they can go handle a whole bunch of paired programmers. How do they make that pivot? That's 100% what we have to do. Okay, so my question is this. This is a hard question for you. Maybe you can answer it or not. Or maybe you can. What's different now than the attempt in the past from Dell or EMC to do, we're co-aligning with the developers, I think it was five, six years ago. It was an effort. Was it timing? What's different now from then? So that temp was awesome. That team was great. I was very close to that team. And that was from the EMC side originally is where they had built that out, right? And the notion of that was that we just have to go start contributing knowledge and technology into the community and start really taking the brand and trying to expand the brand to be relevant in that community. Nothing wrong. That was actually an amazing way they did it. I think through the merger, there was definitely a little bit of, okay, well, maybe this isn't one of our top priorities right now and that's probably what happened through the actual merger. So a little bit of distraction. It was distraction. Timing wasn't as good now. You try merging a $67 billion merger, right? I mean, it's just really hard to do. What happened here is I think we finally got past a lot of that with the merger and now we're in steady-stage slash growth mode, which is a notion that now we can go in and do this again in the new world, taking our lessons learned from what we did before and try to actually go and kind of update that in these new power lines. And you could point to some specific timing issues like at that time, this community wasn't as advanced long. Kubernetes wasn't as clear visibility to that value proposition, although a lot of people were speculating when it happened that way. But now with multi-cloud, I think developers starting to see the reality that it ain't going to be one cloud. So multi-cloud is not one cloud. So 100%. I mean, there's multi-cloud today, but it's really not multi-cloud by the way it could be. People have multiple clouds. I think that gives developers comfort that existing enterprise players. Remember, Microsoft wasn't really in the cloud game six, seven years ago. Look where they are now. Significant progress, nipping at the heels of AWS. So all the enterprise players are back at the table. I mean, that's the timing issue. We're here. Talk about, you're here, your helping customers kind of get to the basics of Kubernetes. You talked a lot about the importance of the education. Yes. That screams to me that Dell can be a facilitator of cultural change within organizations, whether it's a bank or a hospital or a retailer or whatnot. Another thing that I'm curious about what you guys are doing, how you evolved, is Dell has a massive partner ecosystem. How is the partner ecosystem involved in helping customers build their DevOps portfolios and really start embracing understanding and learning about Kubernetes? So that's an ever-changing world right now. And that's part of why we're here at KUKON, is to help expand that. We have a very, very strong partner community, not even just channeled, but like technology partner community. And our goal is to understand, with our DevOps portfolio, what needs to be the next step of that partner community? Do we have to go partner up with like the, I'll use examples, the solo.io's, do we have to partner up right with all the mesh companies, the hashi corks, which we are? We have to understand where are the layers that make sense and where don't. There are some that don't make sense because they're so often to an app developer land or they're so far above even Kubernetes sometimes that maybe they don't make sense in our partner community. How influential are, I know we got to go soon, but how influential are your customers and helping to make some of those decisions? It's all about the customer at the end of the day. They're the only one that's deciding for us. They have to come to us. We have to see the need. We have to understand the discussion through our sales mechanisms, our other mechanisms. We're using that data every single day, every hour to make those decisions. Awesome, Brad, it's been great to have you. Sorry, we took more of your time than we planned, but it was so interesting. Dell at KubeCon, you've done a great job of explaining why that absolutely resonates the relevance and why customers should be looking at Dell as their partner for this. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. Thank you guys. All right, for John Furrier and our guest, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 22 from Detroit, Michigan. Stick around, our next guest will be here in just a minute.